Essential OS X Apps

By Tim Dorr
in Apple (macOS)

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Grand Master

.....

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Cyberduck A great, free, FTP client. I was considering purchasing Transmit after using quite a few other freeware clients, but this does everything I need and more.

"Built with an easy-to-use interface, this free, GPL-licensed FTP browser is a lean, mean, file-managing machine. Cyberduck 2.3.1 offers feature-rich FTP file management and handles basic tasks with ease."

HyperEdit I've not done a huge ammount of editing with this yet, but it seems to be a great, cheap, html editor.

"Tumult HyperEdit is a lightweight HTML editor with a preview pane that displays the web page live as you type. HyperEdit breaks the tedious cycle of writing html, saving the file, then reloading and viewing the page in the browser by combining the writing phase with the viewing phase. This clarifies the effects of your changes and speeds up the overall process of making a web page. W3C-based validation will red-underline any mistakes. It uses the same rendering engine found in Safari, so it is not only standards compliant, but also very fast."

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PureLogic

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Is there anything similar to DVD shrink on OS X? (Well, I've seen a few but I'm wondering what people like).

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Why not try them out yourself? :huh:

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PureLogic

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now thats a useful comment...  :rolleyes:

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Nah just asking, you'll find out more about a program when using it yourself. People always forget to mention a feature that can be helpful etc.

And hey man your comment is very useful too! :rolleyes:

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Grand Master

Elliott

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So are you getting a mac? If you are, welcome  :happy:

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You mean welcome back. This is like his third Mac. :p

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Grand Master

Wickedkitten Veteran

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You mean welcome back. This is like his third Mac. :p

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Dazzla is the human mac yo-yo.

Anyone want to bet how long he will keep this one ;)

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Grand Master

Fusion

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Has anyone given this a try:

http://www.fastdvdcopy.com/

Probably the closest I've found to DVDShrink on OS X.

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I have. It worked 2 out of the 3 times I tried it.

The one that didn't work didn't need to be compressed, it was just a straight burn. The final DVD would play on some DVD players but not others, and it wouldn't play on Apple's DVD player either.

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am_fek

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This thread is useful, but what about a 'OS X lemons' thread? I know I've paid for a few pieces of OS X software only to find out later that they are actually not quite all they're cracked up to be.

Before I go any further, I should point out that of the 30-40 shareware apps I've purchased, almost all of them are excellent and well worth the purchase price.

That said, here are a few examples of purchases that, in hindsight, were less than excellent:

PulpFiction: This seemed like a really great piece of software during the time I tried it. However, shortly after buying a licence I found that it crashed all the time, it became extremely sluggish after accumulating any more than a handful of feeds, and can't even properly display an accurate count of unread messages. Yes, I'm sure I have -98 unread messages in my inbox. That's two seconds of my life I'll never get back.

WeatherPop: For months I used this thing in spite of the fact that it provided completely wrong icons for the current forecast (ie rain and thunder icons for sunny weather, a moon in the middle of the day, etc). This was listed as a known issue on their site months ago when I first checked, and it's still happening. Sloppy.

Path Finder: Not really a lemon as such, just a piece of software I eventually came to realise I didn't need. Fully integrating it into OS X is just a little bit too fiddly and requires a little too much nursing to keep it happy. The features it integrates are nice but I don't use them enough to justify running a single app that bundles them all. You really need to want this app to get any use out of it (ie, you have to really really want the 'erase disc' icon on the toolbar of your Finder instead of having to go into Disk Utility, or the 'compress' icon instead of, well, right clicking and choosing 'archive' like you would in OS X Finder - I just didn't find myself needing these things very often or that badly). The price paid for those extras in being faced with a Finder environment that was just slightly sluggish and slightly resource-intensive was just a bit high. Still, it's not buggy per se so as long as you have a specific need for it, it'll be useful.

OmniWeb: This is really a great browser with heaps of brilliant features, but it is just simply too damn slow and still just a little buggy. Sometimes it can take as many as eight or ten bounces just to launch this app, and that's on a G5 with 2GB of RAM (just tried it then and it took 7 - all I'm doing is typing this in Safari and playing an iTunes playlist). Not good enough. Performance starts off as less than ideal at launch and declines from there to the point where bugs begin to appear. Omni's tech support acknowledged there were performance and stability issues relating to the amount of time OmniWeb has been running, and suggested quitting and relaunching. That's not really a deal-breaker in itself, but all of these things add up to leave just enough of a sour taste in the mouth that it's just as easy to stick with Safari+Saft in the end.

Windowshade X: This is a pretty neat haxie, but like the above examples there's just enough in the minus column here to make it seem like missed potential. The minimize-in-place feature is damn cool, but half the time pressing the MIP shortcut does the wrong thing (for instance it might make the window shade instead of MIP). When I'm working, I'm just too busy to deal with unreliable or inconsistent software. The 'cool' factor just isn't cool enough to compensate for the underlying issues. I'll add to this that I have generally grown wary of anything that runs off APE. While I love ShapeShifter (and I don't count that as a lemon at all, it's excellent), I rely on my machines to work without even the slightest hitch, so I'm going to learn to live without it for a while.

Unison and Transmit: Don't get me wrong, I like Panic's products. I will keep using them because they are better than the alternatives, IMO. However, there are still issues with both of these apps that I find annoying. Unison is slow and occasionally a little buggy. Transmit's type-ahead support is not up-to-scratch which occasionally makes getting files out of large directories a nightmare. I also can't get the 'raw FTP command' option to DO anything, but that's probably me not using it properly. Not that I'd know, however, as there is absolutely nothing of substance in Transmit's help documentation or on the Transmit website. Come on guys, when you're charging for your software, provide a break-down of how to use its features. In this regard, it's quicker and simpler for me to just call up a Terminal window and use FTP over a command line.

Pretty soon, when you start to add up all of these items, you begin to realise that you've spent a not inconsiderable sum of money on stuff that in a lot of ways just isn't up to par for the Mac experience. Some of the licences for this stuff costs $30 or $40 each. So while we're talking about the 'essentials', maybe it'd be useful just to throw out some caveats so the people who do decide to take the plunge at least do so knowingly.

Out of all of these examples, the only one I really regret purchasing is PulpFiction, and possibly WeatherPop (why I put them at the top). The rest are pretty good and I don't really regret having bought them. I'm just not sure that, knowing what I know now, I'd buy them again if I could go back in time.

And finally, hopefully this isn't necessary but I have a nagging feeling it might be: please don't give us any of that caveat emptor talk. Buying software licences isn't like buying a piece of furniture, a television set, or a car. You can't just take it back or get it fixed if it turns out not to work properly, and you certainly don't get any kind of warranty (in fact, most of the time you are paying for an EULA that specifically says the software may completely hose your entire system and, if it does, that's just too bad). Too often there's this insistence that the burden is always on the customer to check everything, to do all the testing, etc. There is something to be said for this for sure, it's bloody stupid to buy a piece of software without trying the evaluation version; BUT these vendors are still selling a product that in many ways and far too often does not live up to the experience they sold you. Most of the time the annoyances are relatively tiny, so that you may not spot them during an evaluation period, only to come across them later under more intense scrutiny. And yes, just in case you were wondering, I do research my purchases beforehand. I check sites' forums. I Google. But it's simply not feasible to expect someone to read through an entire forum of posts or go through 20,000 Google links just to make absolutely sure there is no possibility that somehow the weather app you're about to buy might show you completely the wrong icon. It's wrong to expect people to anticipate every possible hitch and rule each of them out prior to buying something.

As a Mac user I expect the things I pay for to work. Not for them merely to work sometimes, or temperamentally, but consistently and reliably. I certainly wouldn't tolerate the kind of issues I've pointed out here from Apple, and I doubt any of you would either. If Mail.app showed a negative number of messages unread, these forums would go absolutely bezerk. While I know these guys are usually small developers and their products are often just hobbies, we're not exactly paying them with 'hobby' money either.

So my advice to all the people here who, like me, may be just a little too eager to whip out the credit card: be prepared to be annoyed by software you buy from smaller Mac developers. Most of the time the apps will be insanely cool, but almost always they'll have just a few hitches that are mostly frustrating simply because you know that the app in question might just be perfect were it not for a few tiny blemishes.

What about everyone else? Any of you who read this thread a little less than thrilled with having purchased any of these apps?

(wow.. this was way too long. Sorry :()

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Experienced

shodan

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Has anyone given this a try:

http://www.fastdvdcopy.com/

Probably the closest I've found to DVDShrink on OS X.

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I've tried 2 or 3 times, It worked for me, but one thing is for sure, it's not FAST!!!!

It took a hell of a time to copy the dvd to hd, shrink it and then burn it, and I have an iMac G5. DVDShrink it's a hell lot faster.

Anyway, the copies were good, looked all right to me, and worked with DVD Player too...

I still like DVDRemaster anyway....

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