Dual Booting Hackintosh - What "Must Have" Mac Apps?

scottspfd82

scottspfd82

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Dec 29, 2006
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Always been a PC guy.

Recently found out that one of my workstations (Dell XPS 8300) is compatible with Mac software out of the box with a few easy tweaks. Spent an hour last night popping in an extra hard drive, downloaded Mountain Lion and installed it, no problems.

So now I have a dual booting Mac/PC, which is pretty sweet so far.

Both OS's boot up in no time and zip along nicely. So if you want a cheap and ready to go Hackintosh setup that's one way to go.

My question is what's so great about Mac? I like the OS, I bought IWork but I'm not liking it much more than Office. Probably because I've used Office for years.

So what can I do on Mac that I can't on PC? I do a lot of writing. I do a lot of instructional video production, usually with Camtasia on PC. I do some minor coding/design stuff. I spend a lot of time emailing/talking to people on Skype, etc.

The one app that got me interested in installing OSX is Text Expander (pretty sweet). What apps are "must have" and Mac exclusive? Any good stuff for productivity?
 


Snag a copy of Office 2011 for mac, its basically like the PC version.

Be sure to customize your Mac, play with everything. Check the preferences for every app, even Finder has some sweet ass features that no one enables by default. Look at the view settings there too.

Learn the hotkeys. To me this is the biggest advantage to running a Mac. Hotkeys are nothing short of incredible when you learn them. I rarely have to touch my mouse. If you have a multi-touch touchpad the gestures are a huge time saver as well.

You're a writer, MacUpdate posted a sweet article last year for Mac writers:

30 Truly Useful Mac Apps for Professional Writers | Mac.AppStorm

Might be helpful.

Things I can't live without are TotalFinder, HyperDock, Dropbox, Espresso, Transmit, Textmate, and iTerm2,.

If you do any sort of AM you likely have repetitive tasks, use the built in Automator App to create U-bot-esque work flows. Although not as robust and web-centric as U-Bot.

Basically use use your Mac with a few tweaks and you'll wonder why you stuck with Windows after a while. It just makes shit waaaay simpler.
 
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It just makes shit waaaay simpler.
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Good stuff.

I already stumbled across HyperDock because I missed the "snapping" of Windows. A lot of cool looking Apps in the article you posted.

There's two I've seen but can't remember the names.

1. It's a voice recorder that stays docked up top, you click it, record, and then the files pop down below. You can then drag to dropbox, etc, right from the desktop. I could see this as being awesome for quickly getting info/instructions out to VA's. Anyone know what it's called?

2. An app that "locks" a certain app for a certain amount of time. So if you want to spend 30 minutes writing, you just set it up and you can't use any apps besides the writing app for 30 minutes. I think this is a popular one, sound familiar?

I appreciate the recommendations.
 
cheshire said:
Maybe extra voice recorder is what you're looking for:

Download eXtra Voice Recorder Free Trial

Don't know about the other one. Check Macupdate and Softpedia for lots o' software.
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Already repped you once, but that's exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks!

EDIT: Sweet. I think I may be sold now. I do a lot of voice recording and then uploading it to MTurk for transcribing. I like to do 5 minute sections on MTurk because it's cheaper/multiple people can be transcribing at the same time. So it looks like I can use that to quickly record on the fly, then use magic cutter to automatically cut it up into 5 minute segments, export to dropbox folder and have it ready for transcription automatically. That's the kind of productivity boosts I'm looking for. Much appreciated.
 
I just recently got a 17" macbook pro after using Windows for years. It's taking some getting used to, but I like it a lot. Just makes me feel like an idiot when I can't find something or figure out how to do something that should be easy to do. I've got Windows 7 installed via VMWare to do stuff that I can't figure out how to do on a mac yet, but I have a feeling I'm not going to be using it much after I get used to the mac os

Anyone recommend a good FTP client for mac? I'm using Fetch, but I don't care for the interface. I'm used to using WinSCP on windows and love it. Is there something comparable?
 
@scottspfd82, for your second option - you can create a new profile and name it "Write" - and enable it to access only the apps you use for writing. Once you login via this profile, you will only be able to access the Writing app and all other apps will be locked out.

There is an app called incarcerapp that does this for the iPhone, I am not too sure about it being available for Mac.

medicalhumor said:
I just recently got a 17" macbook pro after using Windows for years. It's taking some getting used to, but I like it a lot. Just makes me feel like an idiot when I can't find something or figure out how to do something that should be easy to do. I've got Windows 7 installed via VMWare to do stuff that I can't figure out how to do on a mac yet, but I have a feeling I'm not going to be using it much after I get used to the mac os

Anyone recommend a good FTP client for mac? I'm using Fetch, but I don't care for the interface. I'm used to using WinSCP on windows and love it. Is there something comparable?
Click to expand...

Filezilla for Mac is my favorite. Almost identical UI and works really well.
 
medicalhumor said:
Anyone recommend a good FTP client for mac? I'm using Fetch, but I don't care for the interface. I'm used to using WinSCP on windows and love it. Is there something comparable?
Click to expand...
Haven't installed it yet but Transmit (Cheshire linked above) looks like it could be pretty good.
 
sparrow is the best email app for mac, the devs recently got acqui-hired by google though. I still use it, it kicks Mail.app's ass.

Servus is sweet, nice for sharing files with dropbox. Grabbox is god damn awesome, I can screenshot shit so easily with it:

mkpe-fihf1s_.png


That's really all I can recommend...I don't use many Mac specific apps. I prefer Macs because as a web developer, it's really the only option for writing web apps in Ruby/Rails while also having Photoshop opened up. There are hacky ways to do that in Linux, and technically you can do it all in Windows, but..lol no thank you.
 
No one uses Coda? It's the main reason I built my Hackintosh. Great code editor, built in FTP (built on Transmit) and MySQL editor.
 
I used to use Coda but I switched to Espresso. Transmit is the best FTP client out there IMO on any platform.
 
Well...

One day in working with it and I'm sold.

Took a little getting used to but it feels a lot faster/more intuitive than Windows.

Keeping the dual boot setup just because I don't want to abandon windows completely, I'll ge upgrading to Windows 8 soon (whether I use it or not I'm not sure).

I fell in love with pages, knocked out a bunch of work and really dig how it blacks out everything else in full screen. Syncing with Icloud/dropbox is really nice.

Really liking the voice recording app posted above.

Bought Omnifocus and felt ripped off for the price, but meh, it is what it is. Found a bunch of apps I like...

Text Expander as mentioned above, for customer support, email sigs, etc is proving to be worth it.

Love Sparrow (thanks DChuck).

Bought Screen Flow but it's kind of glitching on me (probably a Hackintosh prob) so I'll stick with Camtasia until I can fix it.

I like my usual Windows apps, Skype, Evernote, etc a lot more on the Mac. I bought Day One (like a daily journal app) which seems pretty cool. Having some hardware issues with Logitech drivers crashing my webcam, and the computer making notification sounds without me knowing WTF it's talking about, but all issues are minor.

Haven't bothered trying to transfer my Adobe CS6 collection over yet, I'll probably keep it on the Windows and look into alternatives for Mac.

I'm not a fanboy either way. Have an Iphone, Samsung Tab, a few windows computers and now the Mac install, I gotta say, I think I'm sticking with Mac from now on. It just feels faster for the most part.

Any other app recommendations?

/Cool Starry Bra.

/Welcome to 2001.
 
scottspfd82 said:
Well...

One day in working with it and I'm sold.

Took a little getting used to but it feels a lot faster/more intuitive than Windows.
Click to expand...

I bought a rentina mbp a few weeks ago and I've been using it daily since then. I just can't see the productivity increase above and beyond windows that everybody claims..

I'm roughly the same productivity wise, maybe a bit better since now I can use the computer in bed (kinda hard with a desktop) but that's not unique to OS X.

I love the laptop, don't get me wrong.. the hardware is awesome but OS X.. Windows.. they're all the same and I don't see the point of installing it on a hackintosh..
 
Go to app store and check the top rated applications for all categories, you'll find a lot of usefull apps.
 
Apps you need:


Sublime Text 2
TeamViewer
Photoshop
Microsoft suite {excel, word, etc} - if not, get OpenOffice
Flux
FileZilla (for ftp)

for webmaster work:

Get to learn how to use Terminal very well. Its like the Command/CMD prompt on Windows except a shitload more useful and powerful.
Simple queries you will use for everyday webmaster tasks :
whois
dig
ping
traceroute
 
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