As a graphic designer and web developer I’ve come to rely on some specific tools to get my job done. Most graphic designers are tied to the Big Three in desktop publishing — Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign — all developed by Adobe, while web developers often use Dreamweaver for coding and Flash — if you’re a bad web developer . Although the latter group is a bit less homogenic, a lot of web developers just use a text editor.

I’ve ditched Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign a while ago and was a happy user of GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus respectively. Those applications are of course available on Linux as well, but in a lot of cases I had to find a replacement application. I’ve compiled a list of the most important applications I use daily — Mac application first followed by their Linux equivalent under the line:

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Mail.app (Mac)
The OS X default mail client, which I found to be quite good — Spotlight mail search being one of the major features for me. I’ve tried Thunderbird, which is too clunky (as are all Mozilla applications) for my tastes and even used Entourage at the very beginning of my life as a Mac user.

Claws Mail (Linux)
I thought I’d found my perfect mail client in Thunderbird at first, but I had some serious problems importing my email from Mail.app — which uses separate .emlx files to store each mail message, so you have to convert them to mbox files. Frustrated with Thunderbird I installed Claws Mail instead and I’ve come to like it. By adding a few plugins it has become a fully fledged equivalent of Apple’s Mail.

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Safari (Mac)
Safari might not be the browser with the most features, but I found the RSS capabilities to be a redeeming feature. Unfortunately the latest version had problems parsing my 100+ feeds, which often caused the application to a grinding halt (aka the “spinning beachbal fiesta”).

Iceweasel and Arora (Linux)
I liked Firefox on the Mac for its abundance of extensions, but hated it for its poor OS integration. Now I use Iceweasel (the Debian rebranded version of Firefox) as my main browser. OS integration is still a problem, also because Iceweasel doesn’t work well with the custom GTK theme I installed. But I think it’s the best browser option available for Linux. I also installed Arora, which is a simple WebKit browser.

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skEdit (Mac)
skEdit is an excellent text editor for the Mac, developed by just one person in his spare time. I used it daily and while the syntax highlighting engine could use some more polish, I really liked the code completion capabilities and project management of the editor. Even Panic’s Coda couldn’t persuade me to switch when it was first released in 2007.

Geany (Linux)
I’ve tried a lot of options, including Kate, Bluefish, Screem and Scribes, before settling with Geany. Because Kate is KDE application it didn’t integrate well with my GNOME desktop and both Bluefish, Screem and Scribes don’t offer code completion, which is a must for me after becoming accustomed to it while using skEdit. I might reconsider Bluefish if it gains code completion, but Geany — my current editor — has a lot going for it. Geany has code completion (unfortunately not for CSS) and is aimed to be lightweight. If project management was handled more like skEdit’s implementation it would be the perfect equivalent.

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Transmit (Mac)
Transmit is a very nice FTP application, developed by the aforementioned Panic. I particularly liked the favourites management and the synchronisation feature, which I used very often.

gFTP (Linux)
Unfortunately I haven’t found an equivalent for Transmit yet. Of course there are a lot of FTP clients for Linux and I’m currently using gFTP, but it’s just not as intuitive as using Transmit. Synchronisation isn’t part of the application, for example, and while it can be done with other ones (like rsync), it’s just not very practical. But maybe there’s such an FTP application being developed, but I haven’t found it yet — though I’ve heard good things about lftp, but that one is GUI-less.

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iBiz (Mac)
iBiz as a billing and account management software is very useful. A major feature is the fact that it can run on a server with clients connecting to the server application through Bonjour. Despite the fact that the application is marred with some severe interface bugs and usability issues, iBiz is very capable billing software.

No alternative, but I haven’t been looking for it, to be honest. iBiz is used by my colleague and me at work so that we have a central database of invoices and budget proposals. Replacing iBiz for both of us seems to be a better way, I don’t think any open source application is capable of using the file architecture of iBiz.

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iCal (Mac)
I used iCal to synchronise with our office calendars and publish my own calendar tot the office server.

Iceowl (Linux)
On Mac OS X I had the choice to run iCal or Sunbird. iCal looks better, so I went for that one. On Debian I use Iceowl (which is the rebranded Debian version of Sunbird).

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NeoOffice (Mac)
NeoOffice replaced Microsoft Office as my viewer for Word documents, Excel files and PowerPoint presentations.

AbiWord and Gnumeric (Linux)
I don’t really need a complete office suite, so I chose not to install Open Office on Debian. Instead I installed the much more lightweight AbiWord and Gnumeric. Both of them can open files created by both Open Office and Microsoft Office. I guess I’ll have to live without an application that opens Power Point presentations, but I hated those things anyway.

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Quicksilver (Mac)
Quicksilver is great. It’s hard to explain how I used this excellent application, because its capabilities extend to more than just an application launcher, but it allowed me to interface with my operating system much faster.

GNOME Do (Linux)
There are three applications that I know of that offer more or less the same possibilities as Quicksilver, being Katapult (for KDE), GNOME Launch Box and GNOME-Do. I had GNOME Launch Box installed at first, but it’s a very limited implementation of what Quicksilver is for the Mac. I came across Gnome Do later and it’s great, it also comes with quite a lot of plugins to install.

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Chicken of the VNC (Mac)
We run a headless file server at our office, so I use a VNC connection to do some administrative work on that machine. Chicken of the VNC is a simple Mac application which allows you to easily connect to a remote desktop.

GTK VNC Viewer (Linux)
I used Vinagre at first, but there’s a bug in the current sid version which stopped me from entering the remote desktop. After that had occurred there was no way to reconnect to the desktop with any VNC client (Chicken of the VNC included) other than rebooting the remote machine. I now use GTK VNC Viewer which is a very simple client (no , but does its job admirably.

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GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus (Mac)
The problem with running a lot of native Linux applications on a Mac is X11.app, Apples implementation of the X Window System. The problem is that by running applications in the X11 environment of OS X they never achieve the level of integration native OS X applications.

Since Apples move to Intel and the porting efforts of GTK+ by Imendio native Aqua versions of GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus are rapidly getting closer to completion. There are two groups I know of working on a native version of GIMP, one has a testing release available. I also compiled native versions of both the latest Inkscape and Scribus myself, following tutorials on the respective application wikis. Though those builds are far from complete or polished, they are very usable.

GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus (Linux)
Both GIMP, Scribus and Inkscape are of course available for Linux. But I have to say that, although it’s quite logical, the applications look much better in their native environment. All the more reason for Aqua native version on Mac OS X

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iTunes (Mac)
There are a lot of things I like about iTunes, on the whole it’s a very decent music manager capable of managing large music collections. The whole Cover Flow thing Apple bought and implemented in both iTunes and later in the Finder is of course just plain silly. Other features, like the three-paned browser and the album view are very nice and handy.

Banshee (Linux)
Rhythmbox, the default player for the GNOME desktop, seemed like a nice option, but I have big issues with audio buffering. When I quickly minimise and maximise windows, something which a dual core machine with 2GB ram should be able to handle, Rhythmbox playback stutters or pauses for a few seconds. I experienced this on my triple boot installation with Debian on a 8 GB partition and no proper swap space, so that might have caused the problem. I haven’t tested it with the current setup, because I’ve used Banshee ever since. I might try Rhythmbox again in the near future.