The one thing that I would like to do that I could with PuTTy is connecting to a device through the serial connection. As far as I know, we can't do that with any built in app. At least, I don't know how. There was one that I tried that was for an OLD version of OS X, but it did not work for my purposes.
I am in need of a program for OSX essentially the same as PuTTy for Windows. Use minicom but you'll need to install that via macports and configure minicom. PuTTy type program for OSX Company.
You can use screen for that. Screen /dev/tty.0 9600 (or whatever baud and interface it is) To find out what the serial connection is use 'dmesg' as root and it should show you when you connect the serial cable to your machine. If you're to noob to figure that out you could use minicom but you'll need to install that via macports and configure minicom. There are GUI ones I'm sure, but I've never really needed to use them.
So I gave up on Putty and MacPorts. I've now removed both programs.
For normal ssh communications, I just use terminal command line interface program. For USB to FTDI serial communications I'm using a program called. It seems to work just fine. (settings = device with USB in the title, baud: 115200, packet: none-8-1 and flow: none) Hint: You want to have the USB/FTDI device plugged in with Cornflake running BEFORE you power up the Raspberry Pi.
Update: So Cornflake worked fine, kinda, sorta. It didn't hide my login password which is not normally a problem, but I'm teaching others realtime with screen broadcast. Any command line tool that does fancy stuff (e.g.
Nano) fails in Cornflake. Instead I've now migrated to using the native command line terminal and the screen command, Open Terminal. $ ls /dev/tty. # to see all available ports. You can now use the screen command to to establish a simple serial connection.
$ screen # to create a connection. In my particular case: $ screen /dev/tty.usbserial-AE00BS5L 115200 This works quite well.