Comments on: The Best Things in Mac Are Free

By: Frank Berger

Frank Berger — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 07:41:56 +0000

Well, although I use a mac for 80% of my private work (on job they force me to use windows….they force me with money :)) and have converted half a dozen people to OS X, I think your statement is a invalid simplification.
E.g. is there anything like the “total commander” for the Mac? It’s liberal, (the only nag is that you have to press a Button at the start), and it’s the best Zip and FTP-Tool I ever used and brings a bunch of other tools with it and naturally it is a great overall file manager. Oh… and you pay once and get every upgrade for free.

I looked once at the pathfinder…. I didn’t liked it but I won’t judge it because I havn’t used it enough. The other ones I looked at can’t compare
- Disk Order [some nasty bugs, lacks some features],
- muCommander [lacks some features, e.g. tabs are missing. ] . I like it and support it (German translation is from me) but still a long way to go
- XFolders [lacks some features] same as muCOmmander

Your judgement with other software might depend on what you are used too… e.g. I didn’t like TextWrangler, I prefer TextPad on Windows (and I recently saw the free Notepad++ that looked nice too)

So, I think your statement is an oversimplification.

By: Philippe Lhoste

Philippe Lhoste — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:38:52 +0000

PS.: We bought this G3 in 1995, to be clear… Not today. I don’t hunt freewares of MacOS anymore, as she switched to Windows, using her Mac mostly for reading the e-mails and using our old SCSI scanner… I still didn’t found a good way to make the Mac to communicate with my Windows computers over the router-based network. I finally upload files from the Mac to the Apache server on Windows using a browser…

By: Philippe Lhoste

Philippe Lhoste — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:35:21 +0000

Same for me. My wife bought a Mac G3 with MacOS 8, and I found very difficult to find a free text editor (BBEdit free? I hear that here…), a good FTP program (Fetch is quite limited) or even a simple program to split and join files! Not to mention rename utilities, programming languages, and so on.
There are there, but very hard to find.

On the other hand, you have loads of text editors (even if 90% of them is crap, you have choice and they are free, so it costs time, but you will get something fitting your needs), several good FTP programs, tons of split/join or rename utilities, and so on. And that’s not from yesterday, true freewares were already common 10 years ago, although indeed much less than today.

Now, with Unix-based Mac, freewares and open source programs are indeed much more common on MacOS X (I believe there is a Mac version of SciTE). MacOS 9 or lower programs are even harder to find…

By: Stephen Gilbert

Stephen Gilbert — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:13:14 +0000

I guess it does depend on your experience. When my school gave me a Mac so I could support my students who were using the Mac I was surprised by the things that were very difficult or cost money, compared to Windows.

For instance, my students had to FTP their Java applets and Web pages up to the server. The Linux kids didn’t seem to have any problem using command-line FTP and on Windows the students just used Windows Explorer. We never installed any FTP application at all. When I got the Mac, I was surprised that I couldn’t do that in the Finder. I bought a copy of Pogue’s Missing Manual and did discover a free FTP program (which seemed to disappear when Tiger came out). My office-partner recently heard about CyberDuck and started using it in her Web design classes.

I had the same experience with text editors; I’ve used the free Scintilla Text Editor on both Windows and Linux for years. It’s a small (400K) single file that the students can carry around with them and store in the limited file space the school gives them on the server. It does syntax highlighting, as well as compiling, error location, and running from within the editor. Many students hate to give it up when the class moves to BlueJ and Eclipse.

I do have my Mac students use TextWrangler, but then they also have to use the command-line to compile. I’ve searched through the BB-edit plugins page for a compile-edit-run script, and haven’t found anything as convenient as what SciTE does out of the box. (I should also point out that at the time I got my Mac, BBEdit had discontinued BBEdit-Lite, and was selling TextWrangler for $50. At that time there didn’t seem to be any free Mac text editors I could find.) The Mac students in the class also end up thinking “Windows is easier”.

I like working on the Mac; my experience mirrors your original poster, though.