Red Hat Diaries/0046

Getting It Together

Running a Mac is infinitely better than running a PC - there's no question about that - but acclimating - finding the software you need - can take a bit of work.

Others have done this before me. A geek at ZD made a big flurry over it a few months back, turning it into sort of a game; Dan Gillmor at Silicon Valley News, on the other hand, did it because he was just sick and tired of Microsoft, and because he saw OS X as a better ride than generic Unix or Linux.

And today we have MS Office for the open source crowd - OpenOffice, or if you want the same product but would rather not pay, StarOffice; we have the GIMP for graphics; we've got lots of stuff. Most of this runs so-so on OS X without a direct port - much the same way you'd expect a Unix program to run on a PC with only a generic port. It's not exactly what the doctor ordered, and may not even be good enough until the doctor gets there.

Of course running a MS compiler on a Mac would require that Connectix stuff - which is certainly amazing, but still, there's something funky about leaving all the woes of Microsoft behind and then having them all in a little window. It's better to go back to a MS box for those rare (and sad) occasions.

So far, a good FTP program is conspicuous in its absence; but a good graphics program is not any longer. Comparable in a way to Paint Shop Pro, but without the hysterical bloat and at a third the price - a fraction of a fraction of what Adobe want for their industry standard Photoshop - is GraphicConverter from Lemkesoft, a kind of 'standard' in the Mac world.

http://www.lemkesoft.com

Syd's been using it for a month, mainly for editing her digital photos, and it seems to do the trick. It can resize, it can certainly handle about ten times the formats PSP can (with hundreds more format options PSP never mentions), and as stated above, it has a footprint a fraction of what bloat farms like the more recent versions PSP have. And it seems rather stable too. It's a 'carbonised' program, which means it's more or less self-contained (as opposed to nib-based Cocoa apps written with the NextStep environment), and its executable is 4.7MB (4,980,956 bytes), while the entire setup, with plugins, scripts, user manual (in PDF) etc. is 7MB (7,374,882 bytes). On the big side to be sure, but not bad. Not bad at all. About one fifth the size of PSP, with comparable functionality.

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