Do You Use A Mac?

[Ed Walters33]

Hi guys,

I am receiving more and more emails from people concerned that if they buy a downloadable product it may not be compatible with Mac software?

What are some good Mac tools out there?

[David Schwartz]

What kinds of tools are you wondering about?

PDFs can certainly be viewed.

Flash videos can be viewed in your browser with the requisite plugin.

WMF videos can be viewed with a 3rd-party plugin.

Windows apps can be run in a virtual environment. Parallels and VMWare's Fusion are popular commercial products; and even WINE, an open source emulator, will work for very generic apps. There's also BootCamp, which is Apple's own solution to running Windows on their hardware, although it requires you to reboot to switch between OSs.

I use something called MAMP, which is analogous to WAMP for Windows, that lets me run Apache, MySQL, and PHP very easily, so I can run various kinds of scripts locally. (WAMP and other similar packages let you do the same on Windows, but not many folks bother.)

OpenOffice is an open source tool from Sun / Oracle that lets you open and manipulate a variety of common file types, including .doc, .docx, .xls, .ppt, etc.

Of course, there's also Apple's own tools like iWork that lets you open and create apps that interact just fine with MS Office, although I think they're far more powerful than MS Office tools.

GarageBand is an audio editor that ships with OS X that lets you create and edit sound files of all types.

iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb are included with their iLife application suite. These are also included with each system, but they're not included with OS X updates. Again, they're far more powerful and easy to use than any of the comparable programs that are shipped with Windows.

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I think the biggest bone of contention you'll see is the necessity to run Windows apps in a virtual environment.

Other than that, I think people are deluding themselves if they believe there are any shortcomings of Macs vs. Windows. I've known lots of professional Windows software developers, and the vast majority of us use Macs at home for our own stuff.

This is not intended as a political announcement. Rather, just saying that there's not much to fear about OS X vs. Windows.

I don't think Silverlight runs in a Mac. Heck, it won't even run fully under Windows XP!

Other than that, I really can't think of anything that I'd be concerned about, other than ignorance on the part of the user in terms of dealing with plugins they might not have.

-David

[angela99]

Hi, first post, but had to respond. :-)

Just about everything that is downloadable works on a Mac. The only things which don't are Windows EXE files -- Windows programs. But you can run those in a virtual Windows machine on a Mac, with BootCamp (free, but requires a reboot into Windows), or a program like Parallels, which is a virtual Windows machine on a Mac.

PDFs are platform independent, and most video formats work on a Mac.

If you're selling web software scripts, they only need a browser, so the platform doesn't matter.

Ditto for images, etc.

Offhand, I can't think of anything downloadable that Mac users wouldn't be able to use, aside from Windows programs -- what are you promoting?

[Ed Walters33]

Some great information there guys - thanks for such a thorough response.

My products use flash, videos, pdf's, audios etc - nothing too unusual in general.

As i suspected the main issues are probably just user paranoia mainly - seems there shouldn't be many if any problems if people have Mac software.

[Megan McCormick]

Yay for Macs. My first computer was an Apple 2e circa 1986! I've used Apples/Macs ever since. Having to use the HP PC with Windows XP at my school everyday is driving me into retirement, and into Internet Marketing! Ha! I currently work at home on my new sweet Mac Book with the Leopard OS. I never have any trouble with downloads and use Flip for Mac (for some video) and Open Office when I need to.

[Chris Douthit]

I have a Mac and a PC, I know I am probably the only one in the world but I prefer my PC to Mac any day. One of the main reasons is because I know when I am looking to buy software its going to work on my PC. No need to contact the vendor and as them if they have a Mac version.

[Brittany Lynch]

Any tools? or are you looking for something in specific? One of my favourite IM mac tools is market samurai... I love when IM products work on macs. One of my favourite productivity tools is ever note..that has a mac desktop version too. Most standard desktop tools come with a mac version now a days but in the IM niche I find that most products aren't launched with Mac version initially....but as another member mentioned you can use bootcamp to handle that issue.

[Bill Ross]

I have seen a lot more programs (especially for the IM world) written in Adobe Air.

This will run on both Mac's and PC's. I think its a smart move by the developers. In my business we generally writer server based software but if we do something on the desktop it will be with Air!

Just a thought!

Bill

[NYC]

I used to own a mac. I couldn't run exe files. Now what I did was I got boot camp which logs both XP and OSX at startup and you have the ability to choose which you would rather login with. This is sometimes a headache but works very well. I hear that windows actually runs faster on a mac

Anyways, I prefer windows 7

[Michael McMillan]

I'm a Mac man and proud of it. Got my first MacSE (yeah, the Mac-In-The-Box) probably around '85, but don't hold me to the date. Since then I've had 5-6 updated versions and now use my MacBook which I love.

I use iShowU for screen capture stuff and dump those files into iMovieHD and add sound and edit that in Garage Band. Smooth as a whistle. Now they've got Camtasia for the Mac--don't have it yet.

The only frustrating thing is that there are a lot of keyword tools and "Google scraping" utilities that I'd like but won't run on a Mac.