Apple Mac HQ

I was out of town this weekend so I’m a little late on this news, but it’s important and I wanted to share it with everyone. On March 1st, David Watanabe made NewsFire, his popular RSS reader, freeware. So why would he make this program free? David said, “Call it an experiment to draw people into the fold. Call it temporary insanity. Call it good will. Call it stupidity. I’m never really sure what my motivations are, but this one feels right in my gut.”

You’ll remember that it wasn’t that long ago when NetNewWire became free too. In that article I said, “This really makes it hard for any other Mac developer to sell an RSS client.” It looks like that statement is looking a little more true today. My hunch on why NewsFire became freeware is that sales were slowing due to NetNewsWire becoming freeware. Rather than kill the project, giving it away is a great way for people to experience your software and increase the likely hood of a return customer. David sells two other products so giving away NewsFire is a way to promote those pieces of software.

I’ve never used NewsFire but it is often recommend on various forums as a great RSS reader. If you don’t like your current method of reading feeds, you should give it a try.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Anyone using a Mac knows that the Mac development community is producing some amazing applications right now. With Mac sales at an all time high, those new to the Mac often don’t know about some of the great applications available. While there are a multitude of fantastic shareware applications available, the Mac community also has a number of great freeware and donationware applications to choose from.

I enjoy dabbling in a little web development and have purchased a number of fantastic tools. Despite owning a number of great shareware web development applications, I wanted to focus this article on some applications for those who don’t want to spend the money for shareware applications or just don’t have the money to spend. I’ll breakdown the best freeware applications into various web development categories.

Web Server and Languages
MAMP - MAMP stands for Mac Apache MySQL PHP. MAMP is a stand alone web development environment. Just install MAMP and you’re basically ready to go. MANP includes a desktop widget to easily start and stop Apache and MySQL. If you’re looking for the easiest way to setup your web server, database, and php then MAMP is your application. You can be up and coding in less than a few minutes.

Image Editor
Seashore - Seashore is a Cocoa based open source image editor. Seashore features gradients, textures, multiple layers, and alpha channel editing. Seashore is based around the GIMP’s technology and uses the same file format. While you could just download the GIMP instead, Seashore does not use the X11 windowing system that some OS X users don’t care for.

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Popularity: 54% [?]

The cornerstone of my Mac backup plan now works in Leopard. That’s right, SuperDuper has been updated to work with OS X 10.5. Perhaps one of the last major shareware applications to be updated for Leopard, the delay drew a lot of criticism from users. Some users had switched to using Carbon Copy Cloner due to the delays with SuperDuper. Many power users have implemented a backup plan and SuperDuper has become vital to so many users of its users. I actually delayed upgrading to Leopard because SuperDuper wasn’t yet Leopard compatible. I upgraded a little more than a week ago so this update comes at a perfect time for me.

Other than full Leopard compatibility, what else is new? SuperDuper 2.5 brings the ability to store bootable backups alongside Time Machine backups. You can also run scheduled copies on demand. A revision history can be found by selecting Help > Revision History from the SuperDuper menu. When I get home I’ll update this post with more information about the changes made in 2.5.

It appears like the traffic from the 2.5 release is crushing the Shirt Pocket servers as their forum and blog are both down. If you can hold off downloading the new version for a few hours you might want to wait for the traffic to die down.

SuperDuper will make bootable copies of your Mac hard drive and it won’t cost you a dime. For $28 you can purchase the software and it will unlock additional features likes scheduling, Smart Update, scripting, and more. The Smart Update feature saves hours of time backing up and if you are serious about backing up then $28 will be money well spent. As an alternative, you can also try Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) from Bombich Software. CCC is donationware and if you find it indispensable I highly suggest donating to the developer.

Popularity: 22% [?]

If you’re like me, you really enjoy the holiday season. The time between Thanksgiving and New Years is full of family and friend get-togethers, Christmas lights, fantastic dinners, presents, and more. Giving is also a very important theme of the holiday season. This holiday season I’m going to extend the giving to Mac developers.

In honor of the holiday giving spirit, I challenge the Apple Mac HQ readers to give a little money to some of the Mac freeware/donationware developers who write software that make your life easier. If you have a little money tucked away in your Paypal account, think about giving some money to those developers that give their software away. Do you have a few favorite applications that are free? If so, drop a little money in their virtual piggy bank.

As someone who donates time to a community effort (a local adventure racing club), I know what it feels like to volunteer my time and energy. Volunteering can be a very tiring effort, and while you feel great when you get compliments, there are always some who make you feel less than valuable. It’s impossible to make everyone happy.

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Popularity: 9% [?]