42 MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2005
THE MAC SWITCH
Getting into the Nitty Gritty
THE APPLE-PROVIDED APPS IN THE ILIFE SUITE ARE SURPRISINGLY POWERFUL, AND THE OTHER
BUNDLED APPS AREN’T BAD EITHERSAFARI VS. FIREFOX
Which web browser shall I use? Mozilla’s kick-ass Firefox or
Apple’s homegrown Safari? The answer is a little of both. I really
didn’t want to give up the cross-platform support and handy
extensions that I use every day with Firefox. However, when
Apple released Tiger, it added an incredible RSS feed reader to
Safari. So, after a few days of experimentation, I ended up using
Safari as my RSS reader and Firefox as my actual browser.
What makes Safari’s RSS reader so neat? When you place
a bunch of bookmarks for different RSS feeds in a folder, Safari
will put all the news stories from all of your sites on one page.
Instead of visiting Slashdot, Shacknews, and Maximum PC
every morning, I just visit my RSS page and click only the stories
that interest me.USING UNIX APPS
One of the fi rst things I did with OS X was install
fi nk, an application-management utility for Unix
apps on OS X. Then I installed X Windows and a
couple of other apps. Beyond that, I never really
needed to use the Unix side. Any time I wanted
to use a Unix app, a quick Google search found
a native OS X application that would work just as
well, without the hassle of mucking with the Unix
underpinnings of the OS.Safari doesn’t really swirl my spaghetti for browsing,
but its integrated RSS reader can’t be beat.ILIFE APPS
Apple spent a lot of time touting its suite of iLife apps, and quite frankly,
I’m not entirely sure why. Sure, the music player and the video editor
are powerful and easy to use—in fact, I managed to hack together a
reasonably entertaining video in just 15 minutes including rendering
time—but let’s face it, the iLife bundle won’t in and of itself convince a
PC user to switch.
iMovie is roughly equivalent to Windows MovieMaker (although
iMovie actually exports industry-standard formats in addition to Apple’s
proprietary formats, unlike MovieMaker). iTunes is a great music player
and manager, but it’s readily available for Windows. iDVD is a fairly
basic DVD mastering app, similar to MyDVD for the PC. It lets
you create DVD movies with menus and chapter breaks, and it’s
almost completely idiot-proof. iPhoto is a decent image-manage-
ment application that lets you do rudimentary photo touch-ups,
makes it easy to label and tag all your images, and lets you create
web-based photo galleries. It’s remarkably similar to Picasa or
Adobe’s Album program.
Garageband, on the other hand, is an exceptional addition. It’s an
eight-track audio recording application that lets you either import your
audio tracks, create new ones with MIDI instruments, or create (and
use) loops in your song. I’m not aware of an analog on the PC, at least
one that doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars.The iLife apps don’t add a ton features that are unavailable to
PC users, but they do provide a lot of useful end-user functionality
to every Mac that Apple sells.Apple’s integrated video editor iMovie is easy to use, and will
export to industry-standard MPEG-based formats.GAMING ON OS X
Enter catch number-one. Aside from a few developers that release games on Mac
and PC, notably Blizzard, Maxis, and id, there aren’t many games available for OS
X. Unlike Microsoft, Apple hasn’t actively sought out game developers, there’s no
“designed for game developers” analog to DirectX on OS X. Instead game develop-
ers need to use the same programming interfaces for 3D rendering and game audio
as other Mac applications. That can make ports more diffi cult; instead of just porting
from Windows to OS X, the developer also has to rewrite the graphics renderer using
OpenGL. Maybe when Apple makes the shift to Intel processors in 2006, it’ll integrate
a DirectX clone?