Once you go Mac, you never go back(unless you use VMWare).

The Back Story

About a year and a half ago, I decided to sell my 17″ widescreen, 400kg Dell laptop for a nice lightweight 13″ macbook. I didn’t really want a mac. I just wanted a small laptop. I debated between a macbook and a Dell 12″ XPS. The Dell was more expensive at the time, but the macbook was… well.. a mac.

Then Apple released the bootcamp beta. You mean, I can run Windows on my macbook? Done! I bought the macbook and immediately partitioned 100 of the 160 gig drive for Vista and installed it. I only ever booted into the mac side to check out the odd application that looked interested but that was about it.

Then I realized the battery life while booted in OSX is almost double that of Vista. Again. Done!

Today

Fast forward a year and half and I my drive is now partitioned 100 gigs OSX and 60 for Vista(not that tough of a process). I have VMWare Fusion booting my bootcamp partition whenever I want to use Quicken and Office, and I never use Vista for anything else.

I must say. I love my mac. Not in a fanboy-macs-are-the-best kind of way. I just love the fact that I have a lightweight laptop that lasts over four hours on a charge. The fact that you never have to reboot OSX is simply amazing! Done with the laptop? Shut the lid. Want to use it. Open the lid and within 2 seconds you’re up and running. Holy crap! That was a Utopian dream for me when I had a windows laptop. Hibernate..pfft!

The downside of having a macbook? I can’t use it in public without feeling like a fanboy. That giant white logo on the back of my black macbook kills me. I need a little “Not a fanboy” sticker to go right under it.

Its taken me this long though to finally have a good set of applications that cover all the functionality I want. I figured I would list the apps I use. It might help someone else and hopefully if you’re using an app that’s better than the one I’m using, you’ll let me know.

Software List

Office Applications: MS Office in Vista through VMWare. I try hard to use iWork, but its painful. Numbers is okay for home use, but for work related spreadsheets, its terrible.
Firefox for web browsing. Obviously;
Adium as an IM client;
Thwirl for a Twitter client;
Google hosted apps and gmail for email. Web based email is the way to go!;
TextWrangler for basic text editing and javascript coding;
DiffMerge is a decent free file comparison tool. Its no Beyond Compare, but it gets the job done.
GIMP for photo editing. For a photoshop user, it kind of painful but I’ll give it a shot.;
VLC player for media playback;
Flip4Mac for wmv file support;
Handbrake for ripping DVDs;
Quicksilver is an amazing app launcher and then some;
Stacks in Da Place lets you customize stacks icons in the dock. I have one for downloads and one for documents.;
Carbon Copy Cloner for backing OSX. Backups to USB devices are fully bootable. Great in an emergency when you need to keep working and your hard drive or main install is broken. I’ve had to do this once already.;
Winclone for backing up my Vista partition;
Growl is a notification app used by various other programs like Adium and tweetr.;
MacFusion and NTFS-3G for making my windows partition writable from within OSX.;
Battery Health Monitor for well.. monitoring the health of my battery.;
IPhoto for photo management. Its no Picasa, but its alright. Please google. Release Picasa for the mac.;
Music Player/Management: I have all my music on a home server(Win XP). iTunes is terrible!! Any suggestions?

Ironically enough, I wrote this page while booted into Vista because I’ve been getting kernel panics in OSX about five times a day.  Just like when I’m trying to use iTunes, I am left to express my anger for the mac not being as invincible as its made out to be the only way I know how. “Stupid mac”.