Programs worth paying for
21/04/2005 02:04 | Categories: Apple | 0 Comments
Contrary to what some people might think, Apple-land has quite a thriving small independent software development community. While I sometimes think that Mac developers should try to embrace open source (in whichever flavour you like BSD, GPL, etc), I also think that it is fair to reward people who develop some small but cool tools for OS X.
I'm writing this because since I got my Powerbook over a year ago I have already paid for four tools that make my computing life a bit easier, or at least, nicer 
Ecto is a very nice and well designed (though the interface got a bit confusing in the newer versions) desktop publishing application that allows users to post to their blogs via XMLRPC or Atom. These lines are being written from Ecto, by the way 
Newsfire is really cool RSS reader, whose tagline is "Mac RSS with style". It has a very simple interface (check out the screenshot) but it supports things like smart groups where you can group and filter feeds in a similar way to iTunes' smart playlists or even podcasting. The UI and effects are really impressive, specially when feeds are literally flying over each other to reorganize after one of some of them have been updated.
Pithhelmet is my latest purchase and it is definitely the most worthy plugin for Safari. I still wish it was easier to add blocked content via the right-button contextual menu like Mozilla's AdBlock does but by default it already blocks 98% of the ads so I'm basically nitpicking On a related note, I know I could use Firefox and AdBlock in OS X but it is just so ugly! Besides, with the recent Safari 1.3 update, Safari feels like a much much faster browser now (speed was the last reason why I switched to Firefox a while ago)
And the fourth piece of software for which I have paid is one that I haven't received yet: Mac OSX 10.4 "Tiger". I hope it won't take long for my package to be shipped and delivered after the 29th