Switching from Windows to Mac OS – The Software

With my change in OS comes a change in desktop software, at least to a certain extent. There are plenty of apps with native Mac counterparts and in some cases, they’re better than the original. A standard set of software would be – an Office suite, video editor, screen capture tool, chat client, password manager, note taker and web editor. I now have a native Mac app for each one.

For example, Microsoft Office was easily replaced with LibreOffice.

Outlook was replaced by the built in Apple Mail.

And OneNote was replaced with Outline.

While Write replaced Word, I will be using Scrivener that I got a few years ago.

Here is a short list of how it’s worked out so far.

Word -> Scrivener

Microsoft Office -> LibreOffice

OneNote -> Outline

Outlook -> Apple Mail

Irfanview -> Pixelmator.

MediaMonkey -> iTunes

Notepad++ -> TextWrangler

O&O DiskImage -> Time Machine

This is the short list of the apps with native Mac equivalents.

Atom

SnagIt

Camtasia

Scrivener

Scapple

Notebooks

Wordweb

Dropbox, Google Drive

Trillian

Paprika

Virtualbox

WordPress

Roboform

Slack

Github

And of course, Firefox and Chrome.

I also brought in some welcome additions. I have the desktop version of Appigo ToDo to sync with the iPad and TypeIt4Me, a fantastic text expander that’s extremely beneficial for writing, creating templates and filling in forms for some of the testing I do.

One loose end is a replacement for Corel Paintshop Pro. I know there is Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and even Affinity Photo, but I’d like a native Mac version. Maybe one day.