Okay, a real quick article on the tools I’ve installed on the Hackintosh. All of which work very well.
Productivity:
MS Office 2004 for Mac – Since I dropped a ton of money on software and hardware lately, I think I’ll give myself a small break and not purchase 2008 just yet. 2004 seems to do everything I want and from my reading of reviews of 2008, some of the features I liked to use have been removed.
Adobe CS 3 – Are you kidding me? Get a Mac and not install the premiere image, film, print processing tools? I’ve already help create a couple of websites and newsletters. I can’t help but feel productive with this new machine.
VMWare Fusion – for those times I need a different OS and I don’t want to reboot. Awesome tool and it’s maybe a step and half ahead of Parellels.
Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection:mac (BETA) – I use this to control the various Windows-based machines I have in the house. Although this is beta, it’s only crashed on me a couple of times – I highly recommend it over the RDC client that comes with Office 2004.
MS Live Writer – had to install this! I love this program. One of the few great programs that Microsoft has ever release – I put this up there with Excel 4.0. It’s that good. How am I getting it to run on a Mac? VMWare Fusion using the Unity feature. I have Fusion setup to show up in my 3 workspace when I work in full screen mode. But generally I use the Unity feature so that running Window applications almost look like they are running on OSX.
Firefox 2.x – yeah.. I have the latest version of Safari, but I’m a cross platform kind of guy. I’d like to have at least one tool that is consistent among all the the OSes I use.
Communications:
MS Office 2004 for Mac / Entourage – I use the Entourage package from MS instead of the Apple tools here. For the most part, the email client is better and it integrates well with the Office applications. With the latest patches installed, I can synchronize all the data from within MS Office 2004 with the Apple products and to my iPhone.
Adium – the de facto multiple protocol IM client for the Mac. I use Pidgin on all my other OSes, but in most ways I prefer to use Adium.
Utility:
Little Snitch – a shareware utility that will notify and/or block outbound network traffic.
iStat – a free widget that shows all sorts of activity on your menu bar. Very useful when you want to watch the temperature, or to make sure that there is activity when your system seems unresponsive (good to have on a hackintosh…)
Quicksilver — I finally get to use this!!! I’m soo happy.
Evernote – new web/rich client tool to capture snippets of information. Just started using it, so I don’t have an opinion on it yet. But I like the concept.
Google Earth – just for fun
iTunes – Yeah, who doesn’t use this on a Mac? I just wanted to point out an excellent site called Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Some great scripts here that I can’t believe isn’t already part of iTunes.
Hardware:
Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 – My old MS desktop combo just didn’t have the appropriate software drivers for both Mac and Windows. After a little investigative work, I pick this keyboard/mouse combo out for $60 at Staples. It’s a little older than the latest and greatest – but it has all the dedicated function buttons I need (widget, zoom, email, itunes, etc.) Plus had drivers for both Vista and Leopard. No brainer.
iPhone – Everything is working so well together with the Mac, I decided to change my phone over to an iPhone as well. Although it doesn’t do everything that my old WM5/6 phone did, Apple has release the SDK recently and we can expect to see some applications coming out by June. I can wait till then b/c the phone does 80% of what I need it to do. The only major fault is no IM client – but I’m using Meebo as a crutch.
-JT