I've been gotcha'd

Note to self: never swap CF cards in a card reader connected to a Mac without firstly dismounting (ejecting) the card - my second CF card got wiped clean without warning. Lexar's ImageRescue software managed to haul up seven of the eight photos on the card, of which four were retrieved in perfect order. The remaining three had data corruption problems and were either badly scrambled or couldn't be opened. Painful experience.

I'm still looking for software to replace what I've been doing on the PC. Firefox works fine, with the exception that the Mac doesn't really understand the concept of a middle mouse button, so I'm stuck with using Command-click to launch links in tabs. Speaking of tabs, Tabbrowser Extensions for Firefox was a little quirky at first, but has since settled in and is just purring.

To replace SharpReader, my RSS reader on the PC, I happily found NewsFire, which is freeware, pretty, and oh-so-stable.

I couldn't really find a good replacement for mIRC though. Colloquy looked pretty nice but had a tendancy to slow down with multiple active server/channel windows. The typing lag coupled with message windows grabbing focus made me give up; I'm now back to running multiple instances of BitchX, using screen to manage sessions in Terminal.

Adium is a really sweet multi-service IM program for the Mac, like Trillian for the PC but much nicer. You don't get all of those nifty individual features like Avatars for Yahoo! Messenger, but everything else just works. Seeing as how the Mac versions for most IM services just plain suck, Adium fills the gap very nicely indeed.

For viewing AVI files and the like, it's a toss-up for me between VLC and MplayerOSX. Both have their quirks and issues, and I'm still trying to get used to them, but they play most of what I want to watch.

I'm still running both systems side-by-side, trying to figure out what else I need to find alternatives for. But the prognosis seems good for switching to the iMac as my main system. Stay tuned.