Since I bought my 12″ PowerBook G4 a couple months ago, I’ve been experimenting with various software on Mac OS X. There are some pieces of software, such as Finder, that don’t provide the quickest or friendliest transition from a Windows background, but then there are other programs that are simply stellar.
Great Mac OS X Applications
- Safari, based off of the kHTML rendering engine, is a very nicely built web browser. There are, however, a few areas where it is lacking, but it is still in its early stages of development.
- Rich Text Editing - There is currently no engine such as Midas for Mozilla or IE’s contentEditable feature. The browser heavyweights really need to standardize a nice RTE interface.
- Proper
labelFunction - Currently when one clicks on a label in Safari, nothing happens. It should give focus to whatever form element it is a label for (as is the behavior in IE, Mozilla, etc.). - Bookmarks Menu - Currently the only way to access bookmarks in Safari is through the full-window interface, which, although nice for editing and organizing, is a bit overkill if you just want to select a bookmark. I would like to see a simple hierarchical menu of bookmarks in addition to the current setup much like Mozilla’s/IE’s.
- TextMate is also one of these programs. It is a very well-written programming text editor much akin to Ultra-Edit for Windows, along with syntax highlighting, code folding, complete control over file encoding, etc. ad infinitum.
- QuickSilver is another such application. When I start to use the Mac more for everyday usage, building up documents, history, and other media on it, this application will be invaluable. Basically it lets you search for pretty much anything on your computer and immediately take any number of actions with the item you’re searching for. A simple example that I have used frequently thus far: type in “stu” to see a result for “studentlink.ucsd.edu” in my Safari history, hit TAB and Enter to navigate to the page. Of course I could have emailed the link to someone, IMed it to someone, or any number of other limitless actions that can be custom defined.
Firefox is always going to be superior to Safari. Mark my words.
Safari is much faster in OS X and the UI is a bit less buggy, as it’s a native OS X app.