Zaphu Forum - Latest Comments in A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Bruce — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:25:00 -0000

You can find even more Mac freeware apps at http://www.macfreewarereviews.com

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:49:45 -0000

"however, if Firefox 3.0 doesn’t arrive soon Firefox will begin to lose market share"

LIke Firefox had any market share on Ma cin the first place. A niche browser on an very very niche OS...

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Franklin — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 23:15:19 -0000

@Nick - I certainly understand your frustration with FF 2.0, perhaps you should give the 3.0 Beta a try. I am cautiously optimistic about FF 3.0, you can find the latest beta version here.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Nick — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 09:40:21 -0000

"if Firefox 3.0 doesn’t arrive soon Firefox will begin to lose market share."

In my case, if Firefox 3.0 doesn’t arrive soon Mac OS X will begin to lose market share. I'm used to running Firefox across every platform I use in my day to day computing, and the problems I've seen with Firefox on the Mac are (amongst other things) making me seriously consider switching back to Linux.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Avid Reader — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:25:45 -0000

Franklin: My comment on the "mauled to death" discussion is that if I should say I am "bored to death" @ a party, event, etc., some of your readers must think I will really die from the effects of that activity! I have benefited from your tips and info for my Mac. Keep up the good work!

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Franklin — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:26:45 -0000

@Frost Land - WebKit, the engine behind Safari is open source, however, I'm not sure I'd consider Safari itself as open source.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Frost Land — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 06:33:30 -0000

Just in case you don't notice, Safari IS open source, like Firefox...

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Wayfarer — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:26:55 -0000

BLASPHEMY! Journler and Adium have always been two of my favorite apps and I still using them daily after upgrading to Leopard. They are NOT flawed or obsolete.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Franklin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:56:42 -0000

@Chris B - "From a general standpoint, it’s actually nice to have less apps to install" - I completely agree. While I enjoy trying out new software it is nice not to have numerous extra apps to install.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Chris B — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:42:54 -0000

Good discussion. As Franklin noted, the need for various apps due to Leopard updates will vary depending on the features you need. But, here's my opinion :)

iTerm: this is the one I disagree on. Terminal is still lagging. I spend a lot of time at the command line. Simple things like iTerm's bookmarks make a huge difference. I could probably rig up some solution for Terminal, but why, iTerm does it quite well, and has been working so much better than Terminal, well, since forever.

Adium: yep, I finally dropped Adium because iChat now supports multiple simultaneous logins to the same services (Jabber, etc.). Given that iChat also has the video chat stuff, this pushed me over the edge to now only needing iChat. I was a faithful Adium use for many years, and I would still easily recommend people check it out, just depends on your needs, as many, many folks have pointed out above.

Spaces vs. any virtual desktop: I've used all of the other solutions, and was last using You Control's or whatever it was called (and previously used Virtue, as well as CodeTek's until that basically become non-functional, etc.). Spaces gives me the features I need, and seems to actually work better than any other in terms of how well it knows what apps are on what desktops, and where to launch what apps, etc.

From a general standpoint, it's actually nice to have less apps to install. Of course, as a part time independent software developer myself, it's always hard to see an OS feature that potentially makes a 3rd party app obsolete or needed by fewer people. But, Apple, MS, and don't think Linux's are immune, have done this forever, so it's not something new or something a 3rd party dev should think they are immune to (there are certainly cases that suck more than others, and cases where you just can't understand why Apple didn't at least just buy the existing product, etc., but so goes the industry).

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

fluxam — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:06:13 -0000

So, for only $129 you can get a less stable, less secure OS that has apps that work nearly as well as those you described!
w00t! w00t!

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

ianonmac — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:25:56 -0000

@Wayne, just about everyone seems to get that wrong these days. I read how people often "loose" things, it's especially annoying when such people are much better paid than me.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

ianonmac — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:22:44 -0000

I'm a "Mac Switcher". Like many people I have free online storage, so I don't need iDisc, plus personally I have FTP webhosting. Add to this the fact that I use the most popular chat clients (MSN and Yahoo!) and iChat is then clearly not even close to replacing Adium.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Franklin — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 07:11:33 -0000

@Wayne - Thanks for your input, I fixed the typo.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

macgizmo — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 07:01:28 -0000

With the exception of VirtueDesktops, I don't agree with anything stated in this article. Most all of the apps listed offer way more features than found in the Leopard apps/features mentioned. And some of the comments (like Chicken of the VNC) are just flat out ridiculous.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Wayne — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:10:27 -0000

I think that your view on many of these is overly simplistic. Adium lives on for anyone who has mates on Yahoo! or MSN. CoTVNC is absolutely essential for anyone who needs to be able to get GUI connections to Linux boxes. Spotlight isn't even _close_ to being a replacement for Quicksilver and while the developer of that product is unsure about its future, Leopard had nothing to do with killing it.

Finally, you've missed some fairly important changes like the fact that you no longer need an SSH Agent tool or preference pane with the new agent setup in Leopard.

Oh, and one more thing... Lose, not loose ;)

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Shiva — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:08:16 -0000

Am I one of the few people who thinks that Apple is behaving more like a monopoly with every passing year, even though it has a smaller market share in OS (and now the cellphone).

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Curt — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:50:04 -0000

Ummm... I think this article is a bit misleading. Unless the Leopard OS has broken these apps (i.e. - they don't work anymore in 10.5), Leopard didn't maul anything.

What you mean to say is that new functionalities of Leopard may make these apps obsolete. However, most of us that use QS aren't going to be impressed at all with Spotlight. Notes in Mail (that is IF YOU EVEN USE MAIL) is a poor substitute for Journler. Stacks is a joke - eyecandy only, as most Mac power users don't even use the dock. [I haven't seen my dock in months.] And Spaces? Better implementation than VirtueDesktops? I don't think VD was so buggy. And jeez, Spaces really is not impressive at all.

I'll bite on FF, but this isn't anything that Apple did with Safari. FF was nuked by its own development team. Safari still isn't compatible with a lot of websites I commonly use. Ridiculous.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

sartre — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:44:09 -0000

People who don't use the correct word are loosers...&^)

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Franklin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:01:45 -0000

@Gah - See the intro to the post, I clearly state, "Here I list some of the best Mac freeware applications that I feel have been seriously undermined by Leopard or killed altogether."
Some of the applications on this list are undermined and some have ceased development, i.e. dead. I didn't think that only saying "A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled" relayed that. Open to interpretation I guess.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Gah — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:51:47 -0000

"I am saying that the need for the above applications has been undermined by some of Leopard’s features."

The title of the article is "A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death".

Mauled to death.

Dead.

As in, "replaced completely".

Don't backpedal, just accept that you posted prematurely and move on.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

pastaklovn — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:23:08 -0000

I would think Safari pretty much belongs in the "open source browser club". Sure, it's only the rendering engine, but that's enough to harvest the advantages of open source.

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Tony Arnold — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:10:43 -0000

@Franklin: I may have been a little hasty with my commenting (as always). The truth is that I actually decided to drop VirtueDesktops _before_ Steve Jobs said the word "Spaces" - it was when the Spaces icon appeared in the dock on the big projects at Moscone for the first Leopard demo at WWDC06. The icon was self explanatory, and it dawned on myself and two friends I was sitting with that Apple had finally released it's long rumoured virtual desktop implementation.

I had been discussing dropping the program before WWDC06, but that was indeed the moment I made the decision in my head - so you were pretty close ;)

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Mark — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:14:17 -0000

(1) MS's APIs are secret. Secrets in a monopoly are deemed stifling to robust, fair competition.

(2) APPLE allows development in it's environment, fairly.

(3) Scale of operation is NOT a factor. Scale of MONOPOLY is. MS could be bigger -- that's not anti-competitive. But when it "breaks" apps, forces apps to freeze and crash, gives false warnings that iTunes might be a virus, announces vaporware in order to stifle competition, prices licenses differently for those developers who pay to play, places features in the OS that disable 3rd party apps, that is anti-competitive. MS could be big (or biggest or the only) and NOT do any of these bad things.

(4) building a closed OS is not the same as being a monopoly or anti-competitive. Monopolies influence the market unduly, they don't merely "operate."

Re: A List of Mac Freeware that Leopard has Mauled to Death [Mac Freeware, Opinion]

Franklin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:35:08 -0000

@Tony Arnold - No offense intended, I apologize if some was taken. I used VirtueDesktop for months and had high hopes for it. I don't think I'm wrong that the announcement of Leopard's Spaces made the development of VirtueDesktops cease. The true shame is the loss of a potentially GREAT multiple desktops solution for Tiger users.