When Apple’s new big cat first appeared at the Word Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) in August of 2006 and then pounced on the scene in October of 2007 it sent shivers down the spines of some small and large developers in the Mac community. Here I list some of the best Mac freeware applications that I feel have been seriously undermined by Leopard or killed altogether.
Leave me a comment if you can think of a freeware application that you no longer need due to some of Leopard’s new features.
Adium: iChat 4.0 brought some great new features and included a few which made me realize, somewhat sadly, that I didn’t need Adium anymore. Some of those main features are tabbed chats, support of Google Talk, auto-accepting chats either via Chax or this way, more choices in message appearance, and a vastly improved appearance. Furthermore the new version of Chax allows for a unified contact window, automatically accepting files from trusted contacts, and even Growl support.
Quicksilver: Now that Spotlight automatically highlights the first result (rather than ‘Show All’), it is essentially a built-in launcher. I KNOW that Quicksilver can do much much more than just launch applications, find files, and lookup contacts, but most people used it for just that. The decline of this app is further exacerbated by the lead developer’s uncertainty about the future of QS, which you can read about here.
VirtueDesktops: I had high hopes for VirtueDesktops and used the app in Tiger for the benefit of multiple desktops despite a few bugs. Then once the word ‘Spaces’ came out of Steve Job’s mouth, VirtueDesktops’ developer, after careful consideration, decided to cease work on the project. I have been fairly pleased with Apple’s Spaces, except for a few bugs and annoyances, that is.
*Overflow: I admire stuntsoftware for sticking it out with Overflow, but I’m afraid Apple’s Stacks will be the doom of this application (unless they can sue Apple). However, Tiger users should definitely check out Overflow as it is a great app. *Not technically freeware but because the Grid view of Stacks is so similar to Overflow, I included it anyway.
Chicken of the VNC: This was a great free solution to remote desktop management in previous versions of OS X, however, Leopard’s ScreenSharing application that has been built into Finder has made this obsolete for me. Chicken of the VNC might live on in certain situations such as connecting to Ubuntu or other Linux machines.
CenterStage: Front Row has now come to non-Intel and older Macs with Leopard. Not only is Front Row included in Leopard regardless of Mac type, it is a new and improved Front Row similar to the version found on Apple TV. I’m sure some diehard fans will continue to use CenterStage, but the reason I downloaded it (my old G4 Mac Mini) is now gone.
iTerm: The terminal that came with Tiger was just terrible, especially for someone who spent a fair amount of time at the command prompt. So for years I relied on the great freeware terminal application iTerm. However, Leopard’s Terminal.app is much improved over Tiger’s. Complete with tabbed sessions and customizable themes, the new Terminal allows me to be happy at the command prompt without needing iTerm.
Journler: I realize Journler is multifunctional (beyond just notes) thanks to its support for media and date tracking of entries. However, I mostly used Journler for keeping all of my notes in a handy and searchable location. Enter Leopard’s new Mail.app which supports a new Notes feature. Once I figured out how to change the hideous font that is the Notes’ default, I decided to move all of my notes out of Journler and into Mail.app. An added bonus is that now I can place the notes on an IMAP mail server (such as Gmail) and access them anywhere.
iBackup: Time Machine (TM) is the new king of incremental backups. Love it or hate it, TM ships on every Mac now and is super simple to setup and use. Some people might think that Time Machine also makes applications such as SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner obsolete as well, however, I don’t believe that to be true. Making an exact duplicate of a hard drive is not what Time Machine was intended for. On the other hand, third party incremental backup programs such as iBackup are essentially unnecessary in Leopard.
Firefox 2.0: Before you call me crazy, note the ‘2.0′. While Firefox is bolstered by its wealth of add-ons, Firefox 2.0 is soooo slow and unstable in Leopard that I began using Safari. Safari 3 is obviously less customizable, but it makes up for that in its speed and stability. To be honest the only feature I miss from Firefox is the Google Browser Sync add-on. I in NO way think that Firefox is dead or dying, however, if Firefox 3.0 doesn’t arrive soon Firefox will begin to lose market share. Here’s to hoping that Firefox 3.0 can reinstate my faith in Mozilla and return me to the open source browser club.
Update - Some readers seem to think I am implying that Leopard’s built-in applications have the ‘equivalent’ features of the third-party alternatives. That is not what I am saying. Rather, I am saying that the need for the above applications has been undermined by some of Leopard’s features.
Update 2 - Thanks to everyone for their input. Reaction to this post has certainly been stronger (and in some cases more negative) than I expected. I began thinking about this post when I realized there were a number of third party applications that I was no longer using. The first ones that came to mind were VirtueDesktops, Adium, Overflow, and Quicksilver. I wrote the post out of sympathy for small developers that spent countless hours wrangling code for the good of the community. I felt bad that as Mac users upgrade to Leopard they might not feel the need for some of the applications created by third party developers. Perhaps I could have made this more clear.
Be sure to checkout my followup post, A list of Mac freeware still necessary in Leopard or read Sam’s take on the situation here.
If MS does this then everybody is shouting and cursing and they are literally forced to stop that.
I am glad to be a long time Linux user as it’s almost the only platform where competition is even and real and based on merit and quality.
Both the Mac and Windows platform suffer from intentional distortion, feature theft and API secrecy by their custodian so that other developers have no chance, this is the reason that a lot of them are walking away from that platform. In the end it will nibble a lot from the perceived value that both Windows and MAC has.
The problem for the fans of these platforms is that management of MS and Apple do not care in the long run, they are trying to maximalize their profit for their shareholders, that is their job.
XP, Vista, OSX or whatever product is just a vehicle (tool) to make money, when it fails to bring the perceived profit demanded by the shareholders it will just be thrown overboard like used gloves or a used throwaway-lighter and not even replaced if that is the perceived best option.
I know, there are also a lot of flaws in the Linux platform, most notably that solutions look different from both OSX and Windows (largely due to patents and stubborn developers). The good thing about it is that it only takes time and effort to improve and I think it will outlive both OSX and Windows.
Don’t think I do not like either commercial OS, I really like the time I had spend on a OSX machine, you can make chains of tasks so optimal that it almost makes one puke of happiness. I am less happy about Windows as there is no good shell to automate basic tasks.
Still I am happy of my Linux choice after all these years because last 2 years things really changed on GNOME and KDE for the better and it’s nice to see the process working out with each update.
Enjoy your MAC while still possible and I hope it stays that way for a long time.
Yaa101 | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
Also SSHkeychain, bless it, is no longer needed since ssh-agent now works properly.
@Yaa101 : your arguments don’t make sense.
What is ‘feature theft’ ? Ideas are free (or GNOME wouldn’t have got anywhere).
The Linux distros are no different, you still have a bundled browser and you are still free to download another if you want.
API secrecy? The API docs and developer tools are on the DVD. They’ve opened more of the internals in Leopard and it ships with DTrace.
And you saying users are ‘walking away’ because Apple bundle more functionality in the base OS?
As a developer I’m absolutely stoked to have updated ruby, svn, Xcode bundled wth my OS.
I’m not a raving fanboy, but the ‘commercial == bad’ argument is ridiculous.
Dick Davies | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
Just a short reaction…
I never claimed that commercial is bad, I just say that commercial has it’s own plan and the plan is not doing things to do things but to make money. This can be very good when ideas and commerce can lift each other to great heights, it can be very frustrating when it holds things down. Commercial is not altruistic, when it sees the thing it sell as waste at a certain point, and this point is always reached with commercial parties, it will be thrown away, just like blue collar workers.
I also did not say that users stay away but developers.
The 2 accusations tell me you wrote your reaction out of emotion.
Yaa101 | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
Rumours of Quicksilver’s death are seriously exaggerated. I want to launch Fireworks, I fire up Quicksilver and type FW - boom, top hit. I do that in Spotlight? Top hit is a “FWded” email.
Spotlight still requires you to actually type the word you’re looking for. Faster != smarter, even “just” for application launching
Hostile Monkey | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
iChat is only better then Adium (even that is debatable for chat at least) if all your contacts are on AIM. Setting up a jabber server so you can chat with MSN or Yahoo is a pain and so iChat remains unused on my system while Adium is the first app I fire up every day (weird since Adium started as a AIM clone).
James | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
I still need Adium as like much of Europe (unfortunately) MSN Messenger is our standard.
David Stevenson | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
Ok, let me get this straight, Apple is evil and crushing developers beneath its boot heel because it added features to 10.5 that other free applications have? The Kaleidoscope/Dashboard brouhaha from the 10.4 release is a much better example to point to if that is the argument you are trying to make. For the apps above? Yawn. Let me speak to the apps I’ve actually used:
Adium: I don’t really see how Adium is being mauled by iChat. Yes Apple added some features that have existed forever in Adium, but most of these same features have already been added by third parties to iChat. Which is really no different than the Chax mod. Plus, it’s a bit weird to spend half of the paragraph about how Apple is killing Adium by talking about a third party extension to iChat.
Quicksilver: I’ve used Quicksilver more since upgrading to Leopard than I had previously. The reason? Stacks. I my doc organized to have 4 folders of my most common used apps. For rarely used apps I would either use Quicksilver or just go to the Applications folder in my Finder window.
Overflow: This is an app I really wanted to like and use, even paid for a license. My basic problem with it, is that it took long to actually launch things. Basically due to my Doc organization it was always quicker for me to just right click on the folder and choose and app. Overflow was marginally quicker if the app I needed was already on the active tab, but once I had to switch to a different tab it was no contest. The other irritating thing was that the Overflow window would keep forgetting where I wanted it to live.
Chicken of the VNC: Ok I guess this is going away if you only connect to other Macs. But of people who used CotVNC before 10.5 I would bet a large percentage of them used it to connect to other OSs as well as Macs, I mean they aren’t exactly non-technical people if they even know about CotVNC. Actually if they were in a managed Mac area they would probably be using Apple Remote Desktop anyway.
Firefox 2.0: Well I stopped using Firefox 2.0 about a week after installing it on 10.4. Firefox’s complete inability to use standard controls, the excruciating amount of time it takes to launch and the memory leaks pretty much killed it for me.
The rest I haven’t used or even felt a need to go looking for them. Well I use Yojimbo and Journler sounds like a similar app. But I did pay for Yojimbo and will until Apple sucks the ideas out of the BareBones developers brains and incorporates all it’s features in 10.7 (probably take them that long, look at how long iChat has been in process). Besides, um the notes feature in Mail is kinda weak. Not exactly the greatest example of Apple mauling third party developers.
Phuul | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
@Yaa101 - I agree that it is a shame for big companies to make money off of ideas created by ‘the little people’ but that is the nature of things I suppose. I feel that big companies with deep pockets (such as Apple) should make every effort to buy rather than steal ideas.
@Dick Davies - I’ll be sure to try ssh-agent again
@Hostile Monkey - I was and still am a huge fan of quicksilver. However, having one less program to keep updated is a plus for me and I guess I don’t make use of abbreviations when launching apps. That said, Quicksilver’s learning ability is a nice feature and a big plus over using Spotlight.
Franklin | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
@Phuul - First, I never said apple is evil.
Now for the apps, iChat with Chax in Tiger was functional but still very ugly and clunky. Plus it didn’t support Google talk so I fell in love with Adium. Now, sadly I don’t feel the need for Adium.
The Notes feature in Mail is definitely weak but it gets the job done (barely) and is handy since I can sync them via IMAP allowing access from other locations. This might not ‘kill’ note taking apps such as journler or yojimbo it has removed my need for them.
Franklin | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
Yaa101 said: “If MS does this then everybody is shouting and cursing and they are literally forced to stop that.”
The difference is that MSFT is a monopoly. This isn’t just a bad name to call them — the US court system has declared them to be a monopoly, and so therefore they *are* one.
Monopolies have to act differently than other companies do. They are forbidden from using their monopoly as an advantage in another business. In the olden days, that meant that you couldn’t use your steel monopoly to help your coal business or your railroad business.
Today, that means that MSFT gets bitched at if they tread on Real’s toes or Mozilla’s toes, and that bitching has the force of law.
It’s the price you pay for having a license to print money, and that’s what MSFT has.
Mordaxus | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
One thing people haven’t mentioned about Adium yet is that it includes support for OTR (Off-The-Record Messaging), an encryption plugin to keep your chats secure. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/
Adium also now has Audio/Videa support via a plugin: http://www.adiumx.com/blog/2007/11/av-for-adium.php
Cactus | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
The way I read the article is that Feature theft is what the maker of this article describes above here and I am doing an observation.
I have no moral message when I talk about the commercial interests, they are just commercial interests and what I described in the former post is their modus operandi, it’s just how the beast works.
The MAC environment is just as much a monopoly as Windows is, they only look different but both are modeled as chained and bundled sales, lock-in, exclusion of others from their environment, only real difference is scale of operation, not the attitude.
The reason I use Linux is because I have several itches, I could buy a shiny superdeluxe scratching machine or one that has to be reset often because it stops scratching at the most ridiculous times.
The Linux solution is to ask a fellow developer to scratch for a moment instead. Linux is a big collection of solutions that is shared with all who accept their simple licence.
Yaa101 | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
@Cactus - Good point, it is a shame that iChat only supports encryption for @mac accounts and not AIM or Jabber.
Franklin | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
@Yaa101 - Linux is a great platform, we are big supporters of linux,
http://www.zaphu.com/index.php?tag=ubuntu
One of the reasons I like OS X so much is that I get the stability of Linux with the ease of use found in a Mac.
Franklin | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
Google Talk was supported in the previous version of iChat. I used it all the time to talk to Google Talk friends.
Christian | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
“The Notes feature in Mail is definitely weak but it gets the job done (barely) and is handy since I can sync them via IMAP allowing access from other locations. This might not ‘kill’ note taking apps such as journler or yojimbo it has removed my need for them.”
If the notes feature in mail is replacing journier or yojimbo you didn’t need them anyway. You could have used stickies. I use yojimbo for about a thousand things, notes being only one of them. It is beyond silly to use 1/10 of a product and then make a big deal about something else replacing it.
jack | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
@jack - Thanks for the comment, however, use stickies for hundreds of notes? Ah no, that is beyond silly.
Franklin | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
@Franklin - You mean stability of *BSD, which is much more stable than Linux.
Deep down I love all OS and all programming languages as I am a computer freak for a long time but alas, one has only time for a small subset of what is going on.
What I like about Linux is it’s dynamics, there are a lot of people influencing it’s development, I mean the whole collection of OS, not only the Kernel. The result is not always stable but it’s roadmap is very interesting, the time of mimicking existing solutions is years past and things are getting done the Linux way, the personality of the platform is really shaping up.
Yaa101 | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
Adium will be far from dead. I use both Adium and iChat: iChat for AIM and Adium for everything else. (What can I say, I like the iChat interface and don’t use tabbed chats.) Though I’m not running Leopard, I don’t imagine that this would change since iChat has become a better AIM client and Adium remains the swiss army knife of messenger apps.
And while Firefox is breathtakingly awesome on Windows and Linux, it has never been a good Mac app. This is supposed to be changing, but for now, it reeks like a port. But that other Mozilla browser, Camino, is a native Mac app, is fast as hell, and runs the same rendering engine as Firefox. So I use Camino when I need Mozilla (Firefox) compatibility and Safari all the rest of the time.
While I used to use Firefox for its developer tools (like the DOM Inspector), Safari 3 now runs circles around them in developer / site debugging features. So now Firefox doesn’t see very much action anymore.
Yaa101: That is a bit overstating it I think. Adding tabs to iChat or virtual desktops isn’t exactly the same as Microsoft reverse engineering CP/M.
Most of these are features that have been around in one form or another for a very long time, and were not invented by the authors of any of those programs listed here.
Hell, if any operating system copies other company’s ideas without paying for them, it’s Linux. The only difference is that Linux does it under the altruistic umbrella of “free,” so they get by with it. Hell, the operating system itself is in many ways a wholesale copy of UNIX.
Personally, I’m very thankful for open-source software. It’s because of open source software that I can do 99% of the things I do on a computer. I just don’t pretend that they’re somehow more unique feature-wise or less likely to copy a feature than a commercial company.
Rich | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
“Thanks for the comment, however, use stickies for hundreds of notes? Ah no, that is beyond silly.”
I’ve seen people do it. With stickies and spotlight you’re good to go. Or plain text notes. Imap is all you’re missing.
It’s like this. You own a corvette and only use it to go down the block to buy milk. It’s way overkill, but that’s what you use it for. One day someone gives you a bicycle. It does the job. You have a basket on front for your milk, and it doesn’t take gas. So yay, it’s as good as the vette.
The vette is easy to replace because you didn’t need it in the first place. It’s that simple.
(actually many of your points in this post make the same mistake. You should have titled it “Freeware that I don’t need” because many of these applications are more advanced that their leopard counterparts. You simply don’t need the added features.)
jack | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
@jack - You should have titled it “Freeware that I don’t need.” That idea is certainly what got me thinking about writing this post. However I only see your corvette analogy applying to Journler, Firefox, and Quicksilver. I guess I feel that sometimes people use advanced applications for certain tasks and only begin using their more advanced features over time. However, if the reason to initially download the application is gone, is the need for the more advanced features diminished? Time will tell I suppose.
Franklin | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
@Rich - I am not overstating anything, I just say that the development teams of both Windows and MAC are looking what is popular among their users and put it into their core apps. I am not saying that this is good or bad but that it works like this. It is mostly about nuances (shortcomings) in core apps that caused developers to offer solutions for that. The new set of users will often not discover the other solutions because it is into the core apps now. Again I am not saying that this is good or bad, but just how it works.
As for Linux copying, first of all, Linux as Kernel is a clean rewrite of the UNIX idea, not it’s code, but that is how evolution of knowledge takes place, you need a core platform from which you discover the world and adapt along the way.
Under the hood the Linux platform as whole really is different just like the other OS out there. So it’s solutions look and feel different from other OS, even when superficially they look alike.
For instance, *BSD looks on the surface like UNIX and Linux, but believe me, these are different worlds and have different solutions to similar problems.
There is nothing wrong with twisting ideas of other people and make your own variant unless you make much money as patent issuer or troll.
Yaa101 | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
“However, if the reason to initially download the application is gone, is the need for the more advanced features diminished? Time will tell I suppose.”
Perhaps. It’s hard to make statements beyond a user to user case.
By the way, I do agree with your overall point (I know it doesn’t sound that way). Over the past 4 years I’ve given up many 3rd party applications for OS applications. So I’m not disagreeing with you. I guess my point was that there’s a difference between an application matching the competition and just being good enough.
Anyway, first time at your blog. Enjoyed the story. Will certainly return.
jack | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
Gotta agree… More often then not, the free built-in software sucks compared to the third-party software whose market gets killed (even with Apple)…
Steve | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
I will not be dumping Adium to use iChat anytime soon. The majority of my contacts are MSN/Live Messenger and Y!
Also, Leopard’s “ScreenSharing” is only good if you’ve got two Leopard Macs. I don’t think Chicken of the VNC is going anywhere anytime soon.
It’s great to see Apple incorporating some popular features into the new OS, but I still think there’s more than enough room for great freeware/shareware/indie development.
Chris | Dec 12, 2007 | Reply
While you make good arguements for most of the applications you mention, I’m afraid that Screen Sharing is not yet a replacement for Chicken of the VNC (CoVNC). Why? Well I do programming support for 3 different customers of mine with at least 10 different computers (of theirs) and CoVNC lets me label each connection with a name so I know what address is connected to which computer. The best Go To Server can do is list each computer’s IP address. This is NOT user friendly. But maybe one day…
MacMan | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
@Phuul - Hi, I’m the developer of Overflow. Obviously it’s not going to be a solution for everyone, but I am sorry to hear it didn’t work out for you. I am curious about the problem you were having with Overflow forgetting it’s location though - if there is a problem there I would certainly like to get it fixed! You can send me an email at dan@stuntsoftware.com if you get a chance.
I’m pretty biased, but I will say that a lot of users are still using Overflow on Leopard - some new people are even using it because Stacks didn’t live up to their expectations!
Dan Messing | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
Firefox is not unstable on my Leopard system, and it’s certainly not slow. I don’t think FF has crashed once since I upgraded to Leopard the week it was released. Given that almost all performance issues with websites are due to network congestion and webserver overloading the claimed differences in page loading “performance” between any of the top browsers is usually irrelevant and often unnoticeable. Addons such as Adblock and BugMeNot plus it’s cross-platform ease of use make FF as indispensable as always.
David S. | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
I’ve recently moved to Flock because of Firefox’s memory leaks (100% CPU usage FTL) and Safari’s lack of pretty much every nice feature in Firefox. Flock is beautiful, and I haven’t had a single issue with it yet. Interestingly enough, it’s based on the same engine as Firefox, yet manages to do so without all the memory leaks and CPU issues.
David Portela | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
Very thought-provoking post. I got here through Fake Steve Jobs.
I would love to make iChat my primary chat application, because it really is a cool program, but it just doesn’t match Adium for features yet. Like other commenters, I have chat contacts on multiple services, mostly AIM and Yahoo. Since my girlfriend is on Yahoo, well, that pretty much means I have to use something besides iChat to chat with her.
Overall, I love the idea that Apple includes best practices and good software ideas into their included bundles with the OS. It increases the value of the OS and the hardware.
Hell, I abandoned Microsoft Office for iWork late this year, and I’m thrilled with it. If Pages would add just a few tiny features, I’d drop Quark in a heartbeat. Apple is on a roll, and though it can frustrate freeware developers, such is the way of the world.
Leif | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
@David S - If Firefox is stable for you in Leopard then count yourself lucky and keep doing what you are doing. I myself hope to return to FF if 3.0 squashes the bugs that have been plaguing me. You might be curious to know that Safari has a few good plugins such as Inquisitor and Safari Adblock. In general, I think that competition in the browser market is a great thing. A world with just Internet Explorer is a scary one indeed.
@Leif - Good point, if I used Yahoo or MSN I’d probably still be using Adium. Adium is one of the best freeware applications out there. I also starting using iWork this year and have been very pleased.
Franklin | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
Yaa101, for the love of all that’s holy, please stop referring to our platform as “MAC”. That shows annoying ignorance, and undermines your credibility and effectiveness in everything else you say.
It’s just the Mac. Note that is it not an acronym; it’s a contraction / diminutive for Macintosh.
And use the definite article (”the”). Don’t say “I’ll publish for Mac”, or “I enjoy using Mac”. Instead say “the Mac”. If you skip the definite article, then use “MacOS” instead.
Leo | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
Instead of Firefox 2.0, try BonEcho:
http://www.beatnikpad.com/index.php
It’s a build of FireFox, it’s the same, but it runs on Intel Macs specifically
chenry | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
Oops. This is a better URL for BonEcho
chenry | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
Overflow has more functionality then stacks.
Stacks is an ok feature, overflow is a very powerful app.
Ziv Kitaro | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
I am an avid mac user, have been for the past 10 years, and I don’t see that changing (at least for a long long time), but I fear the day that the mac world will be overrun with windows viruses and that it’s quality will diminish to that of, dare I say, Vista. (gasp)
That scares me to think about, but I think it’s the only possible way seeing as how Apple sold more computers this fiscal year than in it’s whole professional existence. Not to mention all the “Get-a-Mac’ ads that are plastering this worlds television sets and computer monitors, telling people that Mac is “in” and windows is “out”.
But who knows, maybe by some miracle Apple will remain the computer for graphics geeks and code monkeys alike. And by some miracle the Apple phase will pass and I can enjoy the fact that I am once again one of the few proud Mac owners. I hope so. I don’t want to live to see the downfall of the Macintosh.
Kyle Steed | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
Hi there - Tony, developer of VirtueDesktops here. I found your comments about how quickly I dropped Virtue to be a little harsh. Do you know how much work is involved in writing a software product and supporting it at the same time? OK, now try doing that for nothing.
Truth be told, I still believe I made the right call on this - Spaces is a much smoother, more stable implementation of virtual desktops (and has been since it was first demoed at WWDC06 - it really hasn’t changed all that much).
Just be a little more sensitive to the authors of these programs - you’re bitching about something that doesn’t cost you a cent, remember?
Tony Arnold | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
With the exception of Spaces and Overflow, each of these “mauled” apps was an enhanced version of something that was already bundled with OS X.
If they spent 90% of their effort duplicating the functionality of the built-in app, and the other 10% innovating, and then Apple eats away at that 10%, whose fault is that? Another way of saying that is, how many tabbed translucent terminal applications do we need?
I use several of these apps but it’s frustrating to have several things index my hard disk looking for launchable apps, several terminal apps that all need to be configured with my favorite fonts, connection scripts, window colors, etc., several browsers that all need to be fed my list of saved passwords and bookmarks, and on and on. I welcome the consolidation.
If developers want to keep from getting “mauled” they should stop taking apps bundled with the OS, adding one or two features, and then trying to make a living out of selling it. Either go the open source route (e.g. Firefox, Adium, VLC Viewer, Songbird) and leverage the work of many to pull ahead of the closed-source competition, or pick an app that isn’t part of the the basic OS bundle (e.g. OmniGraffle, Quicken).
Jamie Flournoy | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
uhm… sorry, but this list makes no sense at all…
Adium does MUCH MUCH more than iChat. iChat 4.0 is not a solution for people with ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo and many others. Remove it from your list.
Quicksilver has been dying for a long all on its own, even before Leopard. I replaced it with LaunchBar on all of my Macs over the past week, because i got sick on _constant_ Quicksilver crashes. Again, Leopard has nothing to do with it.
ChickenOfTheVNC? Please… Last version (2.0b4) they released was in January of LAST YEAR, so this app died all on its own. Now, Leopard ScreenSharing has nothing to do with a fact that there are people that need to connect to other operating systems running X11, which cotvnc still works pretty well for.
iTerm was buggy and ugly with a major lag from developers. Im glad i dont have to use it anymore.
Mail.app replaced Journler? What about people like me, who DON’t use Apple’s half-assed Mail.app? Yes, there ARE people like that and Journler has been a life saver for me for a loooong time. I only wish it had a sync-between-computers feature…
Firefox 2.0. Die. Die. Die. I’ve been using 3.0b1 since the day it came out, and i have to say, im pretty happy. New Safari is good, but there is no way it mauled Firefox to death.
All that said, i have to tell you that the only thing that got killed by Leopard is a company named Unsanity and all of their products. However, i would not blame Leopard here either. Unsanity developers are cowards, who completely ignore their loyal customers begging for upgrades, or even updates on the progress. We are being completely ignored for over 2 months now. Our posts get randomly deleted, and now, they enabled comment approvals on their blog, which means to DO read it and they DO approve posts, but they would not say _anything_ to us.
igor | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
@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.
Franklin | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
(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.”
Mark | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
@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
Tony Arnold | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
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.
pastaklovn | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
“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.
Gah | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
@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.
Franklin | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
People who don’t use the correct word are loosers…&^)
sartre | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
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.
Curt | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
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).
Shiva | Dec 14, 2007 | Reply
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
Wayne | Dec 14, 2007 | Reply
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.
James | Dec 14, 2007 | Reply
@Wayne - Thanks for your input, I fixed the typo.
Franklin | Dec 14, 2007 | Reply
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.
Ian | Dec 14, 2007 | Reply
@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.
Ian | Dec 14, 2007 | Reply
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!
fluxam | Dec 15, 2007 | Reply
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).
Chris B | Dec 16, 2007 | Reply
@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.
Franklin | Dec 17, 2007 | Reply
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.
Wayfarer | Dec 21, 2007 | Reply
Just in case you don’t notice, Safari IS open source, like Firefox…
Frost Land | Dec 21, 2007 | Reply
@Frost Land - WebKit, the engine behind Safari is open source, however, I’m not sure I’d consider Safari itself as open source.
Franklin | Dec 21, 2007 | Reply
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!
Avid Reader | Dec 22, 2007 | Reply
“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.
Nick | Jan 1, 2008 | Reply
@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.
Franklin | Jan 2, 2008 | Reply
“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…
J | Jan 7, 2008 | Reply