It’s should come as no surprise to most of you that I fully embrace OS X. I run it at home and I love it. Of course, I make my living supporting Windows systems, so my work environment is all Windows.
One of my major annoyances is that there are a TON of great utilities and tools that run on OS X that would make my life at work INCREDIBLY easier, however, I cannot use them, since my work environment (my laptop) runs Windows. If I had Quicksilver at work, there are many, MANY awesome things I could do. But, of course, I cannot. Additionally, having Automator available to me at work would help.
Yes, there are similar tools – for example, instead of Quicksilver, I use Dash Command (don’t talk to me about Launchy; I have used it, but Dash has a bit more use for what I do). And instead of Applescript/Automator I can write VB scripts (I know Powershell is the bomb, but I haven’t done ANYTHING with it yet).
The worst offender is multi-protocol IM clients. On my Mac I run Adium, which is probably one of the best applications I’ve ever used. There are three options I’ve explored on Windows, and none of them hold a candle to Adium. Here are the products I’ve tried to use on Windows:
- Trillian Pro
- Pidgin/GAIM
- Meebo
The functionality that I am missing from Adium (that none of these clients can handle) is as follows:
- Displaying only online contacts NO SORTED INTO GROUPS
- Integration into Address Book (with Adium, it talks to my Address Book and syncs up what is entered as an IM address and then displays that person’s name in the buddy list instead of me having to manually set an “alias”, etc, and it even uses the picture from the Address Book)
- Actually working with Google Talk (granted, Meebo and Pidgin do this, but Trillian’s GTalk integration seems to be busted)
Are there any products I am missing? Meebo is definitely been a good way for me to go, but it requires me to have Firefox open in order to get IM’s and it needs the Meebo extension in order for me to get notification of new IM’s (which is not terrible). My resistance to Meebo is the lack of logging, mostly.