After three months of Mac use, I’ve more or less settled in.

I stuck to Opera for email, web browsing and RSS. I know that most of Opera’s goodies (such as mouse gestures and Speed Dial) are available in Firefox as extensions, and I’m a happy Firefox user at work, but I feel at home in Opera. I like the convenience of having web, email and RSS all in the same application, and I like the feeling of supporting the underdog.

The bundled text editor in OS X is almost as primitive as Notepad. I’ve been evaluating TextWrangler for a while, but I’m not completely happy with it. It’s got some small shortcomings that, taken together, really annoy me. Why did they have to come up with their own shortcut for switching between documents? Why does the Find & Replace dialog never remember my settings? And why is there no keyboard shortcut for Replace & Find Again, when all other search commands have one? If you have a better text editor to recommend, let me know. All I really need is a smooth multi-document interface, syntax highlighting, and a user-friendly search with regexp support.

For organizing photos, I’m going with Picasa. It is fast, easy and convenient to work with, has good tagging support, doesn’t copy my photos into a black hole like iPhoto.

I have a bunch of Office documents that I need to keep working with. For these, I tried NeoOffice. But my initial conclusions (clunky, ugly, slow, and no support for mdb files) remain valid, and I just couldn’t stand working with something so clunky.

So I downloaded Parallels Desktop, and went back to Windows and Office for my spreadsheet and database needs. It felt GOOD. Parallels is a joy to work with: fast, easy to install, convenient to run, and I have full access to all the OS X documents from Windows. I almost forget it’s there: it just feels like I’m using two operating systems in parallel, seamlessly.

And I don’t miss Windows at all.