Installing Putty on OSX?
So I gave up on Putty and MacPorts.. I've now removed both programs due to breakage around gtk dependencies.  

For normal ssh communications, The built in terminal app and screen command line interface programs do everything putty is needed to do on windows or other os.  

For a while my USB to FTDI serial communications used a program called Cornflake.  Choose ettings = 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.  


In the end Cornflake worked fine, kinda, sorta initially but has issues with some things you may want to do.   


It didn't hide my login password which is not normally a problem, but I'm teaching others realtime with screen broadcast so those credentials leaked. 
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, per this reference.

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 &lt;port_name&gt; &lt;baud_rate&gt;          # to create a connection.


In my particular case:

$    screen /dev/tty.usbserial-AE00BS5L 115200


This works quite well for all my needs.