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I want to switch from my Dell Inpirion 1525 with Vista to a MacBook Pro 13 in. I mainly use the computer for school work (writing documents...), web design (I use Gimp and notepad++ and firefox with several addons...) and my photography. Are there any great free alternatives to the above programs? (I know Gimp comes for Mac.)

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For a nice alternative to Notepad++, take a look at TextWrangler.

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  • I'll check it out.
    – codedude
    Nov 2, 2009 at 15:49
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You can install Firefox on your mac and port the whole user folder with all the plugins if you like. For web-code editing, I recommend Smultron in combination with Cyberduck for FTP. With this combination you can double-click files on the server, and they are edited in Smultron directly. Smultron offers code highlighting and is easy to use with multiple documents too. CSSEdit is shareware and great for the CSS editing. Gimp, as you said is available for Mac. Maybe you can use iPhoto with it too for the management of your pictures. Graphic Converter is great for image management and conversion too. For Office, just go with OpenOffice 3. It's perfect. Not as bloody fast as the MS version, but it works very well. And cut and paste is better.

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OpenOffice.org is nice, although I really prefer Microsoft Office. I have a few friends that use OpenOffice and they like it just fine. I've personally tried it in a pinch when I didn't have my office CDs and it worked, but not well enough for me to switch. Gimp is free and as is firefox ;). Office for Mac might be a good option if you are willing to spend some money and you can get an incredible deal on it through student programs (check you school's IT department). I'm not sure what programs you use for photography but there are a huge selection of them on Mac just as there are on the PC (gimp is one of them I believe). With regards to notepad++, oddly enough eclipse is a pretty good alternative, it might be a little bit bulky for what you want, but the J2EE version has some really nice web development tools as well as plugins for JSP, Servlets, PHP, Javascript, etc. It also has a built in browser.

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  • OpenOffice.org is OK if you're only using OpenOffice.org to manage your documents. If you need to import Office docs with any hint of complexity - styling, object layout, etc. - then forget it. Nov 1, 2009 at 23:13
  • I prefer to use a lightweight text editor. (That's why I use notepadd++ :-) instead of something like Aptana.) Thanks for the tips though!
    – codedude
    Nov 2, 2009 at 15:48

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