Mac becomes Mc
Back in February 2006, when thriftmac was first getting its feet wet, I chose some of the best free Mac apps I could find to get things rolling. Among them was MacSolitaire.
It was — and is — clean, crisp and easy to use. There’s nothing fancy about it, but it works exactly as you would expect — perhaps “standard” would be the best way to describe it. Four years later, which is like 20 years in computer time, I can still recommend it as a good solid way to pass the time playing Klondike.
So what’s changed? The developer, PCV, has come out with McSolitaire 2. At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me. Surely, the “a” between the “M” and the “c” was left out inadvertently. But no. The original MacSolitaire and the newly released McSolitaire are listed as two different apps.
So of course I couldn’t resist comparing the two.
McSolitaire 2’s main claim to fame is the ability to go full screen with the click of a button. This feature only works, though, if buy the iPhone version, which somehow unlocks it on your Mac. (I tried this, but couldn’t make it work. You may have better luck.)
Other than that, the differences between the two are scant. If anything, the original has a few more preferences. For example, you can opt to double-click to move the cards.
Also, the graphics in the free version of the new McSolitaire 2 are not as sharp, likely because they have not scaled down well from the the full-screen option. And the thicker black lines around the cards are unwieldy.
Compare the MacSolitaire Jack of Hearts with the McSolitaire 2 King of Hearts:
Overall, McSolitaire 2 is a disappointment. Unless you really need full-screen, you’re better off sticking with the tried and true MacSolitaire. And while you’re at it, give PCV’s Double a try — it’s a nice implementation of the classic Shanghai-style game.
After years of giving away freeware, PCV is trying to make a bit of money, and who can blame anyone from trying to make a living. Let’s just hope he’s able to iron out the wrinkles in his offerings.
Update: That didn’t take long. McSolitaire 2.1 is now out with a larger default size for the free version. This significantly improves the graphics.
Behold:
Posted Friday, March 5, 2010 in Reviews
DaisyDisk vs. DiskRing
Last fall, I downloaded a free version of DaisyDisk as part of a MacHeist promotion. It creates a graphical representation of the contents of a folder of your choosing — sort of like a pie chart with concentric bands for each level of data, with the top level in the middle and lower levels expanding outward.
Confusing? Have a look at a sample:
At the right of the graph — not shown in the screenshot — is a colour-coded list of what each section represents. For example, the yellow-orange section close to the middle represents a project, and outward from it are sections representing folders for documents and images associated with the project. You can hover over them to get details such as the location of the folder and its main contents.
But what, you may be asking, has a $19.95 program got to do with freeware? Via the suggestion box, we received a tip about the open source DiskRing, which does much the same thing as DaisyDisk. Have a look at the graph it created of the same folders:
It looks familiar, yet somehow different. The main difference is in the use of colours. DiskDaisy attempts to use shadings of the same colour to represent a folder and its sub-folders. It’s easy to see, for example, that the yellow-oranges go together in a single hierarchy.
On the other hand, DiskRing’s approach to colours seems almost random. If there is a method to it, I couldn’t find it. Still, though, you can puzzle it out by hovering and observing the spatial relationships of the sections.
Another difference is the reported sizes of the folders. Each program lists folder sizes, but — strangely — they don’t agree. DaisyDisk says the main folder shown in the screenshots is 71.3 MB, while DiskRing says it is 68 MB. So who is right? I went to Get Info as the final arbiter, and DaisyDisk was the winner.
We love freeware here at thriftmac, and our sincere thanks go to the developers who make it possible, but in this case the free alternative doesn’t measure up. Keep an eye on DiskRing, though — it could become a contender.
Posted Thursday, February 25, 2010 in Reviews
GIMP vs. Photoshop
Is GIMP just as good as Photoshop? I tried both on a single task to see how they compared. But why even bother with GIMP in the first place? Money, of course.
The last I checked, you could get Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended for the Mac for $162.50 on eBay. There were still nine hours of bidding left, so the price likely went up before it was finally sold.
This is not a bad deal, and you could probably find others. The fact remains, though, that if you want Photoshop, it’s going to be pricey at best.
Since we’re all about freeware here at thriftmac, the alternative is GIMP. Its name is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, but when pronounced out loud, the word becomes derogatory. Think lame.
Unfortunately, if you’ve had experience with Photoshop (or pretty much any Mac program), your first impression of GIMP will indeed be of something lame. The palettes have cheesy icons and roughly hewn fields and widgets. And you have to use Windows-esque menus attached to the windows with yet more crude icons.
But they say you can’t judge a book by its cover, so let’s move on.
The main area of GIMP presents you with a window and a message urging you to drag a file in to open it. I tried to drag a png graphic from the desktop several times without any luck. But opening it from the menu was no problem, so we’ll let that one pass.
Since the graphic was quite small, my first thought was to zoom in with a keyboard shortcut. With Photoshop you do this with Command+. With GIMP, you simply use + and – to zoom in and out. It’s not quite that simple, though, because to get at the plus-sign on a keyboard, you have to press shift. The minus-sign doesn’t require this. It’s a bit confusing, but not unprecedented.
Next I needed the colour picker. GIMP has a tool that looks a lot like the one in Photoshop and worked as expected. If you’re using the pencil or paintbrush, you can hold down the Control key to invoke the picker. (In Photoshop, use the option key.)
Switching to various tools in the palette is an odd experience. For example, if you want the pencil, and the window where you’re working is highlighted, a single click won’t do. First you must click on the tool palette to highlight it, then you must click again to choose the pencil. There’s none of this in Photoshop (or any other Mac program that I know of), so you’ll have to get used to it.
Next, of course, I had to choose what size I wanted for the pencil. There’s a bunch of presets, or you can type in the number you want. But honestly, the widget for the presets is so poorly done, it will make your eyes hurt. See below:
I soldiered on, finished my work and this is what I got — the little arrow you see here and beside the “Download Site” links throughout thriftmac.
So is GIMP as good as Photoshop? No. But if you can’t afford to take part in the bidding at eBay, it’ll do the job. Perhaps the best thing about GIMP is that it is similar enough to Photoshop that you can use it as training for when you have enough cash to take the next step.
Posted Wednesday, January 20, 2010 in Reviews
Alpha Alert: TotalFinder
Mac users have long dreamed of the day when Apple would grant their wish of Finder windows with tabs.
How much simpler life would be: instead of windows proliferating as your work progresses, you just stick to the one window with multiple tabs and switch between them. How much more usable Finder would be: it could be pressed into service just like other Mac programs with one-stop shopping.
Many hoped such a thing would arrive with Leopard. But no. With Snow Leopard? No new features really did mean no new features.
Developers have stepped into the breach, though, and one of the results is Path Finder — a killer app that does an amazing makeover of Finder for $39.95. Tabs similar to those found in Safari are but one of its plethora of features.
Seem like overkill? Then how about TotalFinder? Its developer, Antonin Hildebrand, has been toiling in the obscurity of alpha for some time now, but has suddenly found himself cast into the full light of day with the addition of tabs.
He was able to do this thanks to the Chromium codebase, made available when Google came out with its tabbed web browser, Chrome. And, as you may have guessed, the Finder tabs in TotalFinder are just like the ones in Chrome.
It really is a treat to use. Once Chrome for Mac comes out of beta, I may start using it full-time because I like the tabs so much. And to have them in Finder as well would double the pleasure.
Before you rush into a TotalFinder installation, there are a few things you should know. First, it’s alpha. That’s not even as good as beta, which can be dicey. Second, it installs a plug-in called SIMBL, which by itself may be harmless, but may lead to problems down the road if you upgrade your operating system. Third, Hildebrand intends to eventually charge a fee, although there is nothing on the site at this point to indicate how much.
The good news is that uninstallers for both SIMBL and TotalFinder are included, so if you get cold feet, you can make a quick exit.
Of course, the best way to get this tab thing on the road would be for Apple to do it. In the meantime, let TotalFinder show you how your dreams could become reality.
Posted Friday, January 15, 2010 in Reviews
A side of notes
One of my favourite Mac freeware apps of all time is Sidenote. It runs in the background, with the only evidence of its existence being a two-pixel-wide strip on the side of the monitor ready to be hovered so it can slide out for your note-taking pleasure.
It piqued my curiosity, needless to say, when I discovered there is a competitor to Sidenote called SlidePad. It, too, hides on the side of the monitor. And it, too, can be made to slide into view when you want to jot a note.
It didn’t take much testing, though, to discover that SlidePad falls short in both features and implementation. Let me count the ways:
1. Viewing: With Sidenote, you move your mouse to the side of the screen (which side is your choice) and the app slips into view. You also use a keyboard shortcut, which by default is control-D. It’s reassuring also to have that sliver of white on the side so you know it’s there.
SlidePad can also be brought out from your choice of sides with a mouse move, but it then stays out and can only be put away with a keyboard shortcut — option-Space (or by clicking on a menu item). And when it’s hidden, it’s hidden — no clues exist to its whereabouts.
2. Icons: SlidePad runs like any other program with an icon in the dock and menus you can click in the menu bar.
Sidenote has none of that — just the aforementioned sliver of white, the height of which can be configured. It truly is a background app that gets out of your way.
3. Options: Sidenote allows you to print, email and export your notes. You can add an image via a screen capture service. You can categorize your notes with colour coding — although I would like to see an option for naming the categories.
SlidePad also exports and prints, but there is no option for email. As with Sidenote, you can drag and drop an image, but but there is no facility for screenshots. The one advantage I could find is that it allows you to reorder your notes.
4. Development: Sidenote has been without support for the past few months as the developer finishes his thesis. Pierre Chatel says that will be done this month, so we’re hoping Sidenote will soon be back on track.
SlidePad appears to be a giveaway designed to draw attention to shareware offered by Dare to be Creative. This is not a bad idea and raises hopes that features will be added to make it more compelling.
For now, Sidenote is the clear winner. But competition is a good thing, and Dare to be Creative has many good programs, including the well-received MainMenu — so we have high expectations.
Posted Wednesday, January 6, 2010 in Reviews
Magic Mouse learns new tricks
As I suspected, more programs are on the way to add functionality to Apple’s Magic Mouse. The latest is MagicPrefs, which sports a nice interface for assigning actions to clicks and taps with one to four fingers. It also lets you set the tap sensitivity, which is a good idea. And to top it off, you can dial up the mouse’s tracking speed, which addresses a common complaint.
MagicPrefs now clocks in at version 1.1, but it still has a long way to go. Three-finger click, four-finger click and three-finger tap all do a good job of invoking Exposé in its various forms. The others, including an interesting one-finger middle axis click, are a bit sketchy. Or, as noted with an asterisk, “potentially hard to use.”
Still, I like the direction this app is taking. It’s super simple to set up and use, and has lots of handy features. For example, you can now save presets for your various needs. Gaming, anyone? Also, you can turn on real-time graphical display to see on the screen where exactly you’re clicking and tapping.
The tough part, as with similar apps, is getting everything to work smoothly. While it’s nice to have a way to tap out Exposé from your mouse, it’s not so nice to have your desktop unexpectedly appear because of an accidental tap or click. Prediction: The first developer to get it all totally right will have a hit on their hands.
Posted Monday, December 7, 2009 in Reviews
A merry freeware Christmas
Festive freeware seems a bit slow in arriving this year, but we were able to find three that should bring Christmas cheer to your Mac:
Xmas Mail Stationery provides a template for Apple’s Mail app with a Christmas theme. You’ll need Leopard or Snow Leopard to make it work. It’s a nice addition to the stationery pre-installed in Mail since Apple doesn’t provide anything specific to the holiday season. I found installation a bit of a chore, though. According to the instructions, the file can be placed in one of two folders. The first one didn’t exist and the second one didn’t work. I wound up creating my own folder with the appropriate path and it worked fine.
By the way, the photos can easily be changed with drag and drop — just like other stationery.
Update: More Christmas stationery is available from aMac Island. This package includes six themes, and is much easier to install.
Festive Lights is one of the more amazing widgets I’ve come across, featuring a slew of options and almost endless customizations — all so you can cheer yourself up from time to time with some Christmas lights in the dashboard. Installation, as with any widget, was a snap. What was not apparent at first was the tiny “tag” hanging from the top left with an “i” in the middle of it. Yes, this is where you click to set patterns, speeds and colours for your lights. You can even download various lightsets that other people have created or make your own. And if you’d like to display them on the desktop — well, there’s an app for that.
That little tag on the left is where the magic happens. This shows the widget with the maple leaf lightset installed.
Jubilee screensaver creates mesmerizing abstractions of holidays lights ranging from subtle to vivid. Just double-click to install, then test it in System Preferences the way you would any other screensaver. Clicking on the Options button gives you a choice of four themes: Vivid rainbow hues, Chanukah cool blue and white, natural unadulterated glow, and creepy Christmas-Halloween mashup.
I actually prefer the Chanukah theme, but I couldn’t get a screenshot of it.
So there you have it — three freeware apps to make merry with your Mac.
Posted Friday, December 4, 2009 in Reviews
Has iStat Menus met its match?
iStat Menus has a lot going for it. It keeps track of what your system is doing with nifty little graphics in the menu bar: CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage and activity, network bandwidth, and temperature sensors. Configuration is neatly tucked away in a preference pane, and as a bonus you get highly configurable date and time for the menu bar. Best of all, it’s freeware.
Could anything be better?
We recently discovered a program called atMonitor, which covers pretty much everything iStat Menus does, then goes a lot further. The same system activities are monitored in the menu bar, plus a few others can be added. If you don’t like a cluttered menu bar, you can opt for a floating window, which nicely displays system activities in graphs that update horizontally. Icons for the three most active apps are shown on top.
But that’s not all. A “top” window lists all the process in order of activity — not just the apps you’re familiar with but also background stuff with arcane names such as fontd and pboard. When you click on one of the names, information is displayed in large area above — including a description from iusethis. A tool bar allows you to renice, signal, pause or kill the process.
So is atMonitor better than iStat Menus?
In some ways, yes. There are a lot more options and features, some of which I haven’t touched on here — priorities, triggers and logging among them. You can even download themes or change the colours. On the other hand, atMonitor is not quite as polished as iStat Menus, and you do need to have it running in the dock like any other program. In fact, this may be atMonitor’s greatest drawback — iStat Menus is more discreet. For example, while iStat Menus may not have a floating window, you can get a similar effect by clicking on its menu bar graphs to see more detail.
The verdict
Since both programs are free, why not use both? Keep iStat Menus running for your everyday needs. It’s unobtrusive, attractive and covers the basics. Fire up atMonitor when you really want to puzzle out those processes with your undivided attention.
Posted Wednesday, November 4, 2009 in Reviews
Is this the successor to Quicksilver?
Quicksilver, along with Adium, stands head and shoulders above other free Mac apps in terms of popularity. Power users have discovered ways to bend Quicksilver to their will, so that it does a ton of stuff without their fingers ever leaving the keyboard. And even if you’re not a power user, the basic functionality has a lot to offer.
But lately, Quicksilver has gone through a few rough spots that have raised doubts about its future. Its main developer, Nicholas Jitkoff, has left. An update for Snow Leopard is still in beta. Development as an open source project remains shaky.
Our best hope, it turns out, may be to follow Jitkoff to his new job at Google, where he is working on Quick Search Box. The name is less than inspired, but the product, so far, is slick.
QSB quickly (as you would expect) searches your computer and the internet for the keywords you type in. It then presents a list of its findings, along with options for what to do with them. Typically, you would launch a program or file or open a URL in your web browser. Other choices include Quick Look, Show in Finder and Move to Trash.
Quicksilver users, of course, might scoff, because they are used to an array of plugins and forum advice that allow them to make their Macs do backflips. QSB isn’t there yet, but it does have a plugin architecture, which surely means that its abilities will be extended. One plugin currently pitched by Google allows you to interact with Twitter.
Aside from the functionality, I have to admit I’m a sucker for QSB’s polished and intuitive interface. I’m used to a more cluttered and complicated look from Google products, but this one borders on sophisticated. For example, I like the way it shows a nice big icon of the app you’ve selected.
If you haven’t used programs like Quicksilver or QSB before, you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, Spotlight does a good job of finding and launching. And it’s not all that hard to fire up Safari and do a search from the ever-present Google search box.
For many people, Quicksilver is an efficient way of interacting with their Mac. You get one-stop shopping from the keyboard. Not all minds work the same way, of course, and for some people the benefits may not outweigh the time and effort it takes to learn something new.
The best thing about QSB is that it offers an alternative for who have come to rely on Quicksilver but fear for its future.
Posted Saturday, October 10, 2009 in Reviews
iTunes vs. doubleTwist
It’s hard to believe anyone would want to try to compete with Apple’s iTunes juggernaut, but that’s what the folks at doubleTwist are doing. Their big pitch is that they offer a choice. But unless that choice is particularly compelling, why would anyone consider it?
Let’s take a closer look.
When you fire up doubleTwist for the first time, you’re asked to create an account. That’s fair enough — you do the same thing with iTunes, although you may have long forgotten this step by now.
» The amazing similarities
The first thing that struck me about the interface is how similar it is to iTunes. Even the icons are almost identical. You’ve got a sidebar on the left with categories for music, photos and movies. The difference is that doubleTwist lists everything it finds on your Mac — not just the stuff in iTunes. This provides added access, but can be a bit messy if your collection is not well organized. A nice feature is that you can import your iTunes playlists and make your own within doubleTwist. You can, of course, double-click a song to play it.
One of the great selling points of iTunes is the store where you can choose from thousands of songs, buy them, download them to your computer and sync them to your iPod. You can also do this with doubleTwist. But in this case the store is Amazon, which has thousands of DRM-free MP3s for sale. Unfortunately, they are only available to U.S. residents, which is a big fail for those of us in the rest of the wide world.
doubleTwist also has something called My Feed. Maybe I’m just dense, but I couldn’t find any documentation on what looks to be an intriguing element.
Another feature not to be overlooked is the ability to share pictures and movies on services such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Or just use email. If nothing else, it’s handy.
» But what does it do with an iPod?
The big test came when I actually plugged my iPod into my iMac. At the time, doubleTwist and iTunes were already running, which might explain the beeps emitted by the iPod. Did it go crazy trying to connect with both programs at the same time? In any case, I quit iTunes and doubleTwist, restarted them one at a time, and my iPod happily showed up — along with all its songs — in the sidebars of both.
About 15 minutes later, the iPod somehow disconnected, complete with a warning that it had not been properly ejected. I’m not sure if this was related to doubleTwist, but it seems to have survived unharmed.
doubleTwist supports a whole array of devices beside the iPod. This is a definite plus over iTunes, but it can also lead to some oddities. For example, I’ve got the portable drive I use for Time Machine backups in the sidebar as well — complete with categories for non-existent music, movies and photos. I’m not sure whether to consider this humorous or amateurish.
» Conclusion
In the end, some nifty extra features and a clean interface found in doubleTwist make it an interesting alternative or complement to iTunes. But unless you really detest iTunes, it’s unlikely to be a replacement.
Posted Wednesday, October 7, 2009 in Reviews
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