Because I might know some soon-to-be switchers out there I thought I wanted to make a list of all the essential apps you needed on a Mac to be able to do everything you’d expect to be able to do on a PC. It turns out there really aren’t any special things. I thought about it a lot and I wanted to make a big cool list in this blog-post with images and fancy things. But as it turns out, there’s basically only 5 apps which I feel could be mentioned or get a short explanation.
- VLC – The video player. This app exists for PC as well (it’s actually kind of targeted to PC) but it should be mentioned that the Mac version is just as good. It plays every imaginable video format and you need to install this to be able to watch all your vacation videos.
- Pages – The Apple version of Word. It opens and even saves to .doc or .docx format, or you can export to PDF or it’s own format. It lacks some features that Word has like Math-formula input, but in return it has much better typography and other nice things. It’s an allround nice text editor for your normal stuff.
- Keynote – Apples version of PowerPoint. I have to admit it was a few years since I used PowerPoint, but at the time I compared the two side-by-side, Keynote was way more powerful and produces much, much better result. Much due to the fact that they have really good basic themes, classy “animations” instead of the normal PowerPoint crap and again, very good typography. It opens both it’s own format and PowerPoint files and can export to either it’s own format, PowerPoint or PDF.
- Numbers – Apples version of Excel. This time Apple didn’t hit a home-run. For business purposes as well as “programming” purposes, that is; if you want to do advanced cell-formula stuff, Excel is better. For making a home-budget or making your own Invoice or something like that, Numbers is better. Numbers is easier to use and in my opinion intended for more home-use rather than office-use. Though it does of course still open and save to regular Excel files as well as all other formats.
I went through all of my Application and those were the only ones worth mentioning that weren’t related to programming and development.
There is Microsoft Office for Mac as well to replace 3 of the 4 apps above, but in my experience Office for Mac is badly updated and often kind of buggy and tends to crash a lot. In my personal experience it’s actually never crashed, but I don’t do much work in those kinds of apps so I take my experience from people writing 100+ page documents.
If you have any questions about what to use for something, please leave them in the comments! I’ve been using Mac for everything I do for the past 5+ years and I’ve never thought about using something else.
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