Thursday, June 19, 2008

Microsoft beats Apple

Having made the switch after more than 20 years of PCs to Apple, with the purchase of a MacBook Pro at Heathrow Airport's tax-free shopping, I've slowly been shutting down activities on my recalcitrant LG laptop. I've already got the Mac versions of Microsoft Office, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS3; however, one thing that OS X is really missing is a decent blog client. By far, the best blog client going is Windows Live Writer. It's probably one of the best pieces of software to come out of Redmond in the past decade.

Until OS X can come up with something equivalent, I'm going to be using either Fusion or Parallels to let me run it in a virtual machine, along with the handful of other Windows-only applications that I use for which there are definitely no equivalents. Either that, or blog from work, where I've co-opted my Windows Server 2003 desktop to run it. During my lunch break, of course.

3 comments:

Sanson Lowe said...

Great tip. I've been blogging the old fashioned way. In regards to virtualisation, I've been using VMWare Fusion. Can't give you a side by side rundown with Parallels but I went with VMWare because they have numerous vmdks readily available to use. Not sure if Parallels have that kind of offering yet.

David Keaveny said...

Yes, VMWare's prebuilt virtual applicances are a nice idea - gets you up-and-running very quickly with all sorts of devices, such as firewalls, web servers and databases.

Damana Madden said...

Use the mac for everything meaningful and Parallels for everything else.

The only PC apps I continue to use are my .NET dev env. Instead of LiveWriter, I use TextMate. In place of Picassa for Windows, I'm getting Lightroom.

What else are you going to keep using on Windows? I would be interested in what you convert to on your mac as replacements for win apps.