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Given my recent job acquisition, I’ll be spending quite a bit of my working hours booting into the Ubuntu Linux distribution directly. I don’t think I’ll be leaving OS X behind completely (need to keep my iPhone full of recent podcasts!), but I thought I would document the things that I’m already missing about using OSX.

• Campfire Theme for Colloquy - At Canonical, we spend quite a bit of our time sorting things out and having meetings via IRC. On a Mac, my preferred IRC client is Colloquy, specifically because of the Campfire based theme that Phillip Toland put together pointed out to me via his blog post.
• Safari 3 - For my money, the best web browsing experience on any platform is Safari 3. It’s got great memory management, Webkit is a fantastic rendering engine, and the interface is simple and non invasive. 
• Twitterific - More and more, Twitter is becoming the place that I go for recent news and events. I knew before the radio or television told me that Bernie Mac had passed away, not to mention getting the heads-up on the new iPhone firmware so that I could start my laborious download process. Twitterific on the mac absolutely nails the twitter experience for me, because when I bring my attention back to the app, it has stored all the tweets since I last focused on it in easy to parse format. The favorite -ing and link out shortcuts are just icing on that already delicious cake. 
• Interface consistency - It’s a hard thing to detail, but I know that in any Mac app, when I do a Command + Comma, I get the preferences page for that app and that’s just not something I’ve found on the Gnome desktop. I’m unsure if that is because of the differences between apps built in / for GTK, or if it’s more-so a result of the independent Mac community being so devoted to the Apple / Mac OS HIG. 

I know this may come across as whining, but there are plenty of things I prefer about the Ubuntu / Gnome / Linux desktop over the Mac OS X Desktop. I’ll revisit these things in another post.

I also understand that the open source community expects me to put my time into the places I’m complaining about, so rest assured that I’ve already begun a bit of work on a revised default theme option for Ubuntu that I plan to have ready sometime a bit later this year.