Remembering Steve Jobs
Several years ago, when the first iMac came out, I happened to spot one displayed outside a computer store in a mall. Being a Mac fan, and hoping the iMac would help revive Apple, I was of course drawn to it.
As I admired the Bondi-blue baby, the store owner — wearing a Microsoft T-shirt — came out and immediately started in about how Apple was dying and there was no point in buying this computer. I’d be better off buying the special cord he had used to plug in the iMac, he insisted.
At the time, I considered it to be my worst ever retail experience. So I wrote the details in an email and fired it off to Steve Jobs. I have to think that reports like this must have rankled a perfectionist like Jobs. Today, Apple stores provide one of the best experiences you can imagine.
Why would I have thought that Jobs would have any time for my little problem? It was because I believed that he genuinely cared. I’ve always had that sense about him. He was an idealist who triumphed in an age of cynicism.
Posted Wednesday, October 5, 2011 in Opinion
Download.com's dubious top five freeware
It was sad to see VersionTracker absorbed by the Borg collective at Cnet — a cumbersome site devoid of personality. VersionTracker had changed over the years, but — to its credit — managed to retain something of its indie roots.
No use crying about it, though. Download.com is here to stay, so we can either get used it or take our patronage to MacUpdate. I decided to give Download.com a chance, and was immediately attracted to a link called Top Freeware. After all, there might be some stuff there worthy of inclusion in the thriftmac collection.
Here are Download.com’s top five freeware apps, as measured by how often they’ve been downloaded:
1. VLC Media Player
2. YouTube Downloader+
3. RAR Expander
4. AVG Linkscanner
5. uTorrent
VLC is totally understandable, because it can play just about any media file you throw at it. And I’ll go along with uTorrent as one of the best bittorrent clients (along with Transmission) available for the Mac.
But let’s have a closer look at those other three interlopers.
YouTube Downloader+: I can only assume people are downloading this because the name is descriptive of something they would like to do: download YouTube videos. First of all, I couldn’t get this ugly Java thing to work. But why would I want to when I’ve got Safari? Here’s how: Navigate to the video you want, open the Activity window and find the biggest file in the list, then double-click it. You’ll get a file called videoplayback.flv in your download folder, which plays just fine in VLC.
RAR Expander: Mac users sometimes receive files from their Windows-using friends that are compressed using the RAR format, so of course they go looking for a program that will expand it. It’s only natural that they would use the keywords “RAR” and “expander” in their search. Unfortunately it leads to RAR Expander as the top hit. Sure it supports Applescript, but you’re unlikely to need this. Do yourself a favour and scroll a bit further for a program worthy of space on your Mac — UnRarX. Nice interface, nice icon, and yes it will expand those RAR files nicely.
AVG Linkscanner: This one is baffling. I don’t mean to offend any Windows users, but I can only assume this seemingly pointless app is being downloaded by switchers used to the paranoia that comes with the threat of viruses in the Windows world. Macs are indeed vulnerable, but there has been no widespread exploitation that I know of in recent years. If you’re thinking of installing it anyway, consider the plight of this commenter at Download.com: “It is taking me hours to remove this crap! Causing nothing but trouble with my machine.” Update: the October 2010 issue of MacLife rates AVG Linkscanner as lame: “Seemingly random distribution of caution badges. Dramatic-sounding definitions of risks don’t actually say anything.”
Posted Wednesday, September 8, 2010 in Opinion
'Comment-gate'
I found out about a Safari extension that allows for comments at Daring Fireball from a link at Daring Fireball itself. I’m not sure if that counts as irony, or merely happenstance.
In any case, I could hardly wait to try it out, because the site’s owner, John Gruber, is one of the most successful independent bloggers on the Web, and is also famously opposed to having comments on his site.
His reasoning, as I understand it, is that he wants his prose to stand alone, unsullied by what others have to say. If we want to rebut or dispute, we can do so on our own platform.
Some say he commits the same sin as Apple — creating a “closed” system. They say he should be “open” to the conversation. My opinion is that he makes a good point, and is entitled to run his site as he sees fit.
Out of curiosity, I installed the extension and checked out some of the comments. Most of them are thoughtful, some are pointless and some are crude. On top of that, the extension adds “with comments” to the site’s logo in the Marker Felt font that Gruber is known to dislike. It’s like adding insult to injury, much to the merriment of commenters who get the inside joke.
I allow comments at thriftmac, because I often get useful information — such as when someone tells me about a dead link, or lets me know that a certain app is no longer free. They also point out spelling or grammar mistakes, which I appreciate. Plus, they give me an idea of what programs people like the most. (Bomberman, anybody?) And, of course, the comments often amplify points in the article.
The difference, though, is that I’m in control. I can delete offensive remarks and block spam. With Gruber’s site hijacked by an extension, he is left to open to all sorts of mischief. That doesn’t seem fair.
What, then, is he going to do about this? I figure he’s up to one of five things:
a) Sweating bullets.
b) Steadfastly ignoring the whole thing.
c) Quietly working on a way to block it.
d) Preparing a press conference in which he demonstrates the whole thing is overblown.
e) Having a good laugh, because he was the one who created the extension in the first place and the joke’s on us. (Plus he can pull the plug at any moment.)
I hope it’s e.
Posted Thursday, July 29, 2010 in Opinion
Everything new seems old
When Apple decided not to have design awards for Mac programs this year, Ars Technica heard the outcry and stepped into the breach. But looking at the nominees chosen at Ars, I’m beginning to understand why Apple took a pass — there’s not much out there.
The first category for best new apps is the most disheartening. Three of the five programs are actually just new versions — 1Password goes back to 2006, while Panorama and Transmit go back to the days of OS9 at least. Another one — Steam — is a service that was initially released in 2003. The only truly new program — Flickery — is a desktop front end for flickr, which of course has been around in one form or another since 2004.
The category for most innovative apps also suffers. One of them, Notational Velocity, first came out in 2006. True, there is a new version with some nice refinements, but the original innovation of mouse-free note-taking is a bit long in the tooth. And another of the apps, Dropbox, is more of an Internet innovation than a Mac innovation.
That’s not to say these apps are’t good. I use 1Password, Transmit and Dropbox regularly, we’ve been enjoying Steam’s free offering of Portal, and I would heartily recommend Notational Velocity. Perhaps it’s a sign that Mac software has matured to the point where there isn’t much that is genuinely fresh. The software that’s really knocking our socks off is being made for the brave new world of iPod touch, iPhone and iPad.
Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2010 in Opinion
An iPad future
You know about IT. Depending on the size of the company this can be one guy or a group of guys whose job it is to keep the computers running.
When a server crashes, they get it back on its feet. When someone loses a file, they find it. When someone is baffled by how a program works, they show them how to use it.
We all accept this as normal. Frustrating, but normal.
(Apologies to information technology professionals for oversimplifying your work, but I’m trying to make a point.)
Now suppose I suggested that those same companies create other departments. How about TT (telephone technology)? This group would be responsible for making sure the phones worked and people knew how to use them.
What? Shouldn’t phones just work?
Or how about PT (photocopier technology)? Same scenario. Yes, they break down from time to time, but it would be ridiculous to need full-time staffers to deal with them.
Now try to imagine a future where we don’t need TT, PT or even IT — because we have devices (let’s not even call them computers) that never crash, that keep files where you expect to find them, and are as intuitively easy to use as the photocopier.
In this future, writers could concentrate on writing and designers could concentrate on designing. They wouldn’t have to be “computer savvy.”
Will the iPad — and devices like it — lead the way to such a future? If this is indeed what Apple is aiming for, I hope they make it.
Posted Wednesday, February 3, 2010 in Opinion
Are Mac users a bunch of snobs?
A couple of years ago I wrote an article titled, FileZilla is one scary monster. Even after all this time, it still gets comments — most recently from Ernie, who declared himself fed up with the attitude of Mac users:
The stuck up, ‘holier than thou’ attitude so many of you Mac users have leaves a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach.
The article in question noted FileZilla’s “appalling” icon and expressed relief when it wouldn’t launch. But, as Fred_M pointed out in the comments:
While I’m sure that Cyberduck is great for technophobes and beginners, it’s simply a less powerful tool. It’s like the difference between Textedit and Openoffice.org when you compare Cyberduck to FileZilla.
So I’ve been wondering if Mac users truly are superficial and judge apps not by what they actually do, but how they look. It’s tough to find hard evidence for this one way or the other, but I decided to take a stab at it.
Some people can’t even get past a program’s icon, refusing to use an app that puts something ugly in the dock. Below are icons for some of the most popular FTP clients available for the Mac, whether paid or free.
Top row, from left: Captain, Cyberduck, Fetch and FileZilla. Bottom row, from left: Forklift, Interarchy, Transmit and Yummy.
The attention to detail in some of them is amazing. You almost feel like you could jump in the forklift and drive it away. The duck was updated when Snow Leopard came out just so that it would look good when scaled to 512 by 512 pixels. Even oldtimers like Fetch and Interarchy have kept up with the evolving look of the Mac. And how about Yummy? It looks so good you could eat it.
FileZilla is undoubtedly the plain Jane of the bunch. But has this affected its popularity? It’s impossible to say for certain, but the number of downloads each app receives might be an indication. Here’s how the eight programs stood recently in terms of downloads from MacUpdate:
1. Transmit
2. Cyberduck
3. Fetch
4. Captain
5. Interarchy
6. Forklift
7. FileZilla
8. Yummy
FileZilla — despite being free and despite having a good reputation among some power users — is behind six other apps, five of which you have to pay for. It could be that this is because the other apps have been out longer — after all, FileZilla is a relative newcomer. Still, you might expect that if Mac users were all about features, they would have embraced the free and powerful FileZilla — pushing it up the download standings.
So what can we conclude from all this? Maybe we’re snobbier than we like to think, but a better word might be sophisticated — and what’s wrong with that?
Posted Wednesday, October 21, 2009 in Opinion
A tricky balancing act for NetNewsWire
Back when NetNewsWire first became freeware, at the beginning of 2008, the plan was to make money from anonymous data that gets sent back and forth with syncing.
As I understand it, this information could, for example, be sold to marketing companies looking for trends in what people are interested in buying.
When the next version of NetNewsWire comes out, you will no longer be able to sync with NewsGator or DotMac. You will, however, be able to sync with Google Reader. Apparently this is a much requested feature, but it could be that the developer, NewsGator, has some kind of deal with Google for sharing data. Or perhaps the idea is that more people will use syncing if they can do it with a service as popular as Google Reader.
Either way, it’s all the more surprising that NewsGator would risk alienating much of its user base by placing an ad at the bottom of the sidebar on the left. Some people are already defecting to Vienna and other news readers in protest.
And with a smaller user base, syncing data would become less meaningful and presumably be worth less to Google or other companies.
Likely one of two things happened:
One, NewsGator did not anticipate a user rebellion.
Two, they really need that extra revenue stream from advertising.
There has been talk of offering a paid version for those who don’t want the ads. In fact, a similar model exists with other apps such as Tweetie.
The problem, though, is that many people — including me! — paid for NetNewsWire back when it wasn’t free. We can only hope they’ve kept track of all those licences they sold and will be able to honour them. If not, it could be a real shemozzle.
As luck would have it, I downloaded the beta but can’t get ads to show up, so it’s hard to know if I’ll find them so irritating that I’ll want them gone. My hunch is that I would put up with them. First, because I know it’s virtually impossible for software this complex to be truly free. Second, because the developers have just as much right to make a living as the rest of us. And third, because, well, they really aren’t — judging by this screenshot — that bad.
In the end, my feeling is that NewsGator and NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons have solid reputations, and they will figure out a compromise to make most, if not all, of us happy.
Posted Saturday, August 1, 2009 in Opinion
Worst scroll wheel ever?
Apple Gazette has published a list of the five worst Apple products of all time. But maybe we should also have a list of the five worst product components of all time. Right at the top of the list I would propose the scroll wheel on Might Mouse.
Oh, it starts out fine. That little button feels just right under your forefinger, smoothing moving up and down, left and right. You can easily fall in love with it. Unfortunately the love affair is doomed, because eventually — the time seems to vary — that scroll wheel will stop working.
In my case it would scroll down but not up. I tried all the suggested fixes you can find around the Internet, including Apple’s own website. They work for awhile, then you’re back to fiddling around with it. This can be particularly annoying if you’re trying to get some work done.
So now I’m using a Kensington PocketMouse. The price is right and I enjoy being able to manipulate it with my fingertips. It’s nowhere near as sexy as Mighty Mouse, but it happily scrolls up and down without fail. That’s something I can easily fall in love with.
Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 in Opinion
Inspiration
After watching Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, I’m convinced that the United States has not only elected a good man as president, but a man who can inspire good things in both Americans and people around the world. That, I believe, will be his real power.
Posted Tuesday, January 20, 2009 in Opinion
And Macworld goes out with a whimper
Some ho-hum upgrades to iLife and iWork, semi-controversial changes to the MacBook Pro, and DRM-free music on iTunes. (I wonder how many people know or care about DRM?) The Phil Schiller keynote that just wrapped up will go down in Apple history for one thing only — it was the last.
Posted Tuesday, January 6, 2009 in Opinion
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You'll find nothing here but 100 per cent, totally free software for Mac. There are no demos, no crippleware, no "freemiums." The only exceptions are for programs supported by tasteful ads. In some cases, developers ask for a donation — and we encourage you to make one if you find the program useful. Let us know if you find an app here that is not totally free, and we'll delete it. And if there is a program that deserves to be here — but isn't — we'd like to hear about that, too.
