Despite MacOS X being a very new platform, there are actually several applications available already. For starters, I have a choice of 3 different web browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer, OmniWeb and Mozilla. Next I have Quicktime, Preview, and iTunes which together can open any media file I want. MacOS X also has native versions of AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. And lastly, there is the BSD layer which is accessible through the Terminal application, essentially an XTerm for OS X. With these applications I have all my bases covered, but there are so many more than I have hardly even touched.

The choice of browsers on MacOS X is refreshing. Internet Explorer for the Mac is one of the most standards compliant browsers around, just ask The Web Standards Project. The Mac team over at Microsoft is doing a great job. If you have used Internet Explorer 5 on the Mac you will understand. But the team over at OmniGroup is also doing an amazing job. The OmniWeb browser is very complete. It came out of nowhere and has the potential to be the only browser you will ever need. The developers just need to complete a few things, but from what I have seen so far, I will be happy to use OmniWeb once it is fully completed. It is a very MacOS oriented application. As for Mozilla, it is slow and crashes and does not have a native look. It is essentially a browser only it's mother could love. Perhaps someday it will be an acceptable browser, but with OmniWeb as the Microsoft alternative, MacOS X has two great web browsers.

The multimedia features of MacOS X are the best reasons to use MacOS X over other BSD desktop systems. The music player is iTunes and it is generally an mp3 application, but can also play other formats. It also plays streaming music over the internet and create your own music collections on disk. Next to iTunes you have Quicktime for playing movie files. It is also capable of viewing flash media. And lastly you have the Preview application, which can display several image formats. Each of these applications is produced by Apple and comes with MacOS X, but there are other non-Apple alternatives.

If you like to chat while at your computer, you can use AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ. While I prefer AIM, I would also like to see Yahoo Messenger and others as native OS X applications. One application called Fire claims that it can do AIM, ICQ and Yahoo, much like EveryBuddy can do. It is still a beta release and so it a Jabber client, so it may be a little while before this is widely used.

Since BSD is at the core of of OS X, it is possible to run MySQL as a database server. As a result, there are all kinds of MySQL applications popping up. One that I really like is SQLGrinder. It uses a JDBC driver to talk to the MySQL database. Once you are connected you can run queries against the server or browse the database structure with the Schema Browser. This application is still in beta development, it will be a very useful tool once it is finally released as stable. And while SQLGrinder is a great tool, there are others like.

Problems with MacOS X>>