Seems like lists are an in thing these days (however, the use of the phrase “in thing” probably isn’t “in” anymore). The Mac commercials would like you to believe you can do doggone near anything on a Mac. Well, the Mac certainly has its advantages, not the least of which is that it’s not a magnet for every virus, trojan horse, and rootkit out there. But even after a over a year of using the Mac, there are a FEW pieces of software that I wish were available for the Mac.
- Winamp. Not because there’s any lack of audio players for the Mac, but because there is a wonderful libray of plugins for Winamp that, sadly, don’t work with anything other than Winamp. The one plugin I’d love to see work with a Mac audio player, above all others, is the SqrSoft Advanced Crossfading Output plugin. No Mac program, nor cross-platform program seems to know how to do decent intelligent crossfading of songs. Workaround: You can run at least some versions of Winamp under Codeweavers CrossOver Mac – and yes, I have written about this in a previous post.
- Paint Shop Pro (preferably one of the pre-Corel versions) – Here’s the thing, everybody these days seems to be in love with Photoshop, but for many users Photoshop is too expensive, and too complicated to learn and use. Then there is the cross-platform program The Gimp, which is free, but it tries too hard to be Photoshop. Back when I occasionally used Paint Shop Pro, I always thought it struck just the right balance between being simple enough for anyone to use, and still letting you do some good editing tricks. Things like improving a photograph, or giving an image a transparent background were simple. And when it was time to save the completed image, you could tweak the compression level any way you wanted – you weren’t limited to two or three presets. There are at least half a dozen image editors for the Mac, but none work as well as Paint Shop Pro did. I sort of expected that editing images would be something that the Mac would do well, right out of the box, but if it does they sure manage to hide the capability well. EDIT: GraphicConverter (suggested in the comments) seems to come pretty close, although it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while.
- Cool Edit 2000 – What Paint Shop Pro was to image editing, Cool Edit 2000 was to sound editing – a very intuitive interface and just enough power to do everything you might want (assuming you’re not running a professional audio studio). In particular it was great at noise reduction, and had many built-in filters to help you clean up lousy recordings. Once again there is a cross-platform alternative called Audacity, but it takes forever to load and is too complicated when you just want to do some simple editing (like changing the volume level of an audio file, or trimming silence at the start and end – the sort of thing that was easy under Cool Edit 2000). As with the image editor category, it seems your choices are “will do anything but difficult to use”, or “easy to use but won’t do much.” Paint Shop Pro and Cool Edit 2000 were in that “sweet spot” of “easy to use and still had plenty of capabilities.”
- Total Commander – I’ve said before how much I think that Mac OS X Finder Sucks, but if you try to find a decent dual-pane file manager for the Mac you won’t find one as full-featured as Total Commander. What I’m looking for here is ease of use – give me buttons to select my various drives (or Volumes, as they are known under OS X). Don’t make me click-click-click-click-click to get to frequently used locations. I would run Total Commander under Codeweavers Crossover except that it knows nothing of permissions. Strangely enough, the dual-pane file manager I most often use on my Mac is a Linux program called Midnight Commander, which I install using Rudix, as previously mentioned in my post appropriately titled How to install Midnight Commander under Mac OS X (the easy way, using Rudix).
- TextPad – It’s not that there’s any lack of text editors available for the Mac – in fact Smultron is pretty good, and loads quickly, and is what I use for probably 90% of the text editing I do on the Mac. But the one thing that Smultron won’t do, that TextPad makes easy, is comparing the contents of two text files to find the differences. And also, with TextPad, if you have more than one text window open it’s just a couple of clicks to arrange them in some coherent order (Smultron will let you split a window once, but doesn’t make it obvious how to get multiple files into the windows. And too bad if you want to see three files at once). You can, of course, compare two files by eyeballing them in Smultron, but TextPad has a tool to do that, that shows you the differences in the two files – much better because the computer looks for the changes, not the user. EDIT: Text Wrangler (also suggested in the comments) seems to do a lot of what TextPad does, although I wouldn’t say that it’s quite as easy to use as TextPad for some of the functions that the two have in common — but then, that may be partly due to my lack of familiarity with the program. And wonder of wonders, it is free!
- (I know, I said five, but consider this a “bonus” added a couple months after the original article): WinSCP – There are times when you can SSH into a remote system, but if you want to look at the directory structure without doing a bunch of typing at the command prompt, the only thing that will work is SCP (no, SFTP won’t always work in such situations – maybe in theory it should, but very often SFTP login attempts are rejected). SCP is sort of the “fallback” when nothing else will work, and it’s proved invaluable on several occasions over the last several years. Under Windows, I’ve always used WinSCP, because it shows me the files in a dual-pane display similar to that of Total Commander or Midnight Commander, and lets me easily copy files to and from the remote system. Apparently there simply isn’t a comparable program – certainly not one that’s as easy to use – available for the Mac.
The common thing about five out of six programs on this list is that they are easier to use than any of their Mac counterparts (that I’m aware of, anyway), and have additional capabilities as well. Note that I’m comparing Apples and Apples here, so to speak – I’m pretty sure I could find some really expensive software for the Mac that would do what these programs do (particularly for image and audio editing), but I’m not running a professional photography or recording studio, and none of the Windows programs I have listed were terribly expensive back when I was familiar with them. Anyway, if you use any of these and are considering moving to a Mac, be aware that you may have trouble finding something you like as well as you liked those programs.
If anyone has found replacements for any of the above that you are totally happy with, please feel free to leave a comment. But note that if you are commenting on a Winamp replacement, it’s either got to support Winamp plugins or at least have the equivalent of the SqrSoft Advanced Crossfading Output plugin built in, or it doesn’t count (you can still leave a comment, of course, it’s just that I already know of plenty of other ways to play audio files without crossfading).
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Dave Miller said
#2: GraphicConverter. http://www.lemkesoft.com/
#5: Install XCode. There’s a program included with it called FileMerge that does side-by-side GUI comparison/merging. If you’re looking for something integrated with a text editor, Check out BBEdit. http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
#6: Transmit. http://www.panic.com/transmit/ (sftp is what WinSCP uses for the GUI version)
Joy said
Paint Shop Pro supposedly has a version available or will soon for Mac OS X. As Dave Miller mentioned a good and inexpensive Photoshop replacement is GraphicCoverter. It can work with a large number of image formats and has been around for years.
Check out Path Finder for a Finder replacement. It’s a little too busy for my tastes but it’s built in Cocoa and is very fast.
Instead of clicking you can use keyboard shortcuts to get around the Finder. Command-Option-G brings up the Go to Folder dialog. Just type in the location you want to move to. Just like in Terminal, typing the first couple of letter and hitting the Tab key provides auto-complete. Once you’re familiar with the various locations of directories, this is a pretty fast way to move around the computer.
Bare Bones Software (Publisher of BBEdit which is one of the best commercial text editors available on the Mac platform.) has a free text editor Text Wrangler which allows for file comparison. It does not have all the bells and whistles of BBEdit but it’s a good text editor.
A very nice sftp client is Fugu by University of Michigan programmers available here: http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/. My personal favorite is Fetch which is free to educational users. It’s been around since Mac OS (classic) days and has a lot of nice features.
Have you tried using Garageband for your crossfading needs? I’m not much for creating and/or mixing music but this might be an application to check out. Also, check out Audacity. There are a ton of available plugins which may do what you need.
michigantelephone said
Out of the comments so far, the only one that I’ve found truly pertinent is the one about Text Wrangler. I had downloaded this program in the past, but for some reason never paid much attention to it, and Joy’s comment prompted me to take another look. It’s not exactly like TextPad, but it’s a very capable piece of software in its own right, and it does allow text comparisons, although it doesn’t show the difference as nicely as TextPad does (you have to click on each individual difference listed in a separate bottom pane to get it to show as highlighted in the comparison windows – I didn’t see a way to show all the differences at once, but perhaps I missed it). I’m also not sure if it has macro recording and playback capability as TextPad does, but it just may. Still, it’s a great suggestion; I definitely want to give it another try next time I have a task where that might need such capabilities.
As for some of the other suggestions, none of them would work for me. Not that I’d even consider a couple of them – for example, NO WAY would I pay THIRTY BUCKS for a FILE TRANSFER PROGRAM – that is just plain ridiculous in my opinion, particularly when most people who use that software use it to do simple FTP, and you can do FTP for free using Finder, not to mention several other pieces of free software, or even from the command prompt in Terminal if you know the syntax. To me, that typifies what’s wrong with some Mac users – give them a pretty icon and they’ll fork over ridiculous sums of money for something that they could do for free with even minimal research. Not all Mac users want to just throw money around with reckless abandon, even assuming they can afford to do so.
By the way, SFTP and SCP are NOT the same thing. SFTP is an FTP session tunneled over SSH. SCP is Secure Copy, a different protocol. Usually when you need SCP, it’s because you can SSH into a server, but no FTP server has been set up (yet). It’s one of those things that when you need it, nothing else will do, but you usually don’t need it for very long. Just because a piece of software will do SFTP does NOT mean it will also do SCP.
The crossfading I mentioned has to take place in an audio PLAYER, not an audio editor. And I’m pretty sure that no Mac audio players support Winamp plugins. This is a case where there’s really only one piece of software in the entire world that does what I really want, and it happens to be a plugin for a Windows-based audio player.
As for Paint Shop Pro for the Mac, I’ll believe that one when I see it. I hate Photoshop with a passion; it’s far too difficult to use. Paint Shop Pro compared to Photoshop is like Windows compared to Linux (and not a particularly user friendly version of Linux, either). I understand that some people like it, or they like one of the Photoshop “workalikes”, but if you tell me a graphic program is “like Photoshop” I know already I’m going to have all sorts of problems using it. When I had the opportunity to use Paint Shop Pro, it hit the sweet spot where it was easy enough to use, yet still capable enough to do most everyday tasks, and to let you do them easily at that (EDIT: BUT GraphicConverter may indeed be the ticket, see my next comment).
But thanks for the suggestions – even if they don’t work for me, they might for others.
Dave Miller said
SFTP is not FTP tunneled over an ssh connection, it’s a separate protocol which is integrated into the ssh protocol. The “sftp-server” is integrated into openssh on the server side, it doesn’t require installing an FTP server. If you can ssh into a box, you have sftp available, unless the administrator has disabled it.
I apologize for mentioning BBEdit and Transmit, given the restriction that they be free software – I missed that stipulation on the first go-round (it was implied in one paragraph, but I missed it).
Transmit does actually operate almost-fully without having to pay for it. Without a license key it won’t let you save bookmarks or use the synchronization feature though, so you would have to enter the full connection info for the server you want to connect to every time.
GraphicConverter, likewise, will operate for free indefinitely, with some of the more major features like batch conversion disabled.
Both, of course, will nag you occasionally if you run it without a license key.
michigantelephone said
Dave, I see where the confusion lies – from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_File_Transfer_Protocol :
“The term secure file transfer protocol can refer to both following protocols:
* SSH File Transfer Protocol, a file transfer protocol specifically developed by the IETF to run over secure shell (SSH) connections
* Secure FTP, the practice of running a normal FTP protocol session over SSH (FTP over SSH)
The ambiguity comes from the acronym for the SSH-based SSH File Transfer Protocol having the same acronym as one of the terms referring to tunneling true FTP connections over SSH: Secure FTP. The real SFTP protocol does not use FTP, but it is implemented in a diverse array of clients such as FileZilla, WinSCP, and the command line program ’sftp’ from the OpenSSH project included on most GNU/Linux and BSD distributions. Clients which implement tunneling raw FTP over SSH (so-called Secure FTP) are much more rare, but include version 3 of SSH Communications Security’s software suite, and the GPL licensed FONC.”
(End of Wikipedia quote)
All I know is that there are times when SFTP does not work (for whatever reason – I don’t know why and really don’t feel like trying to find out), and SCP does. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, it seems SCP is the only thing that will work, at least until I can get into the device and set up FTP or something.
I took a look at GraphicConverter and you’re right, it reminds me a lot more of Paint Shop Pro than anything else I’ve seen so far. I thought I’d looked at it before but maybe it was during the time I was fighting with OpenVPN and I only gave it a perfunctory look, or maybe because of the name I didn’t think it was the equivalent of PSP – who knows. Tonight I looked at it (again??) and it’s actually a lot more like Paint Shop Pro than I remembered, so good call on that one – thanks!