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I wish people would just get away from using Microsoft as the enemy to overcome. It is possible to just produce and release great software and be successful without paying any attention to Microsoft.

A browser without a soul? Software does not have a soul! This is just silly talk. Look at how Sun and other companies keep spinning their wheels trying to out do Microsoft while great small companies like Panic Software can produce great software. And how do they do it? They find a need they can fill and they make a great product. They do not look at what Microsoft is offering and try to replicate and destroy their marketshare. There is so much software that could be written for so many other purposes which goes well beyond what Microsoft offers. Be creative and start building it.

You want Transmit. MacOS 9 SSH proggie.

Could you perchance recommend an SSH/SFTP client for an iMac?

The command-line 'ssh' should do you just fine for remote logins and tunnels and such. But for SFTP, I'd highly recommend Transmit. It's an awesome FTP and SFTP client - probably the best solution you'll find short of Apple getting the Finder fixed up for real FTP access.

If you don't like shareware (Transmit is $24.95) my runner-up recommendation would be Cyberduck. It has a rather nice UI, development is rather rapid (bug fixes and feature refinements every month or so), and it is open source under the GPL. It's not as speedy as Transmit, and it has a ridiculously ugly rubber duck icon, but it's still a nice FTP and SFTP client. :-)

Hope that helps!

Check out Transmit - it's a good ftp client, not free though. Although I really liked it's clean interface so ended up buying it.

• Developer Tools
• fink, and then:
  • $ fink install nmap;
  • $ fink install osxutils
• Next is Carbon Copy Cloner,
• Transmit or some other ftp file browser.
• Finally, to make it "home", I'll install Windowshade X and Xounds.
• Also will edit my .bash_profile, naturally, and have been known to put a fnorder in the login script.

nobody asked, but that won't stop me from answering :)

For AIM: Adium
For a tweaked OS: Cocktail and TinkerTool
For a better OS: my collection of haxies for Unsanity's Application Enhancer (ClearDock, FruitMenu, Metallifizer, Mighty Mouse, ShapeShifter, SharedMenus, Silk, WindowShade X)
For privacy/security: NetBarrier, PeerVanguard (not because I trade P2P, but because I wear a tinfoil hat), Little Snitch
Helpful apps: Butler, QuickSilver, DragThing
For everything else: VLC, SBook5, Transmit, Path Finder, Apple Dev Tools

it's more than 10, but those are all put almost instantly on every fresh OS X install I touch.

Plays lots of audio formats

Video support (including internet TV tuner)

Individual parts of the UI (playlist, media library, player) can be undocked, repositioned, opened, closed

Media library can watch folders instead of how iTunes makes you add thigns to its library and then manages it in its own way somewhere

Reminds me of the old Beagle Bros. warning label showing things not to do to a floppy disk. Such as, do not set on fire, do not feed to crocodiles, etc...

With all these Unix & Open Source developers flocking our way, I can only hope that one of them might develop a decent ftp client for OS X :). Granted, there are some decent payware clients (like Transit), but is an ftp client really worth $25? On the free side, RBrowser Lite comes close, except that it can't change permissions on the remote host :-/.

Unison by Panic has live mp3 streaming, directly from your favorite newsgroups. Just click and listen - all the boring jobs of connecting messages together are taken care of, so it's compatible with thousands of songs already published out there.

Well maybe this project is about something entirely else, but does anybody ever read the articles around here? Yeah, I thought so :-)

I sense a patent suit! Who patented "silly disk care warning icons"? .... hmm... no one eh ... be right back ...

I don't know that much about MacOS (X or otherwise) support for WMA but I'm guessing that it's playable *for the moment* as there's supposed to be a Windows Media Player version for OS X. But in addition to the fact that WMP is an awful choice of a player, there's no telling when MS will discontinue that player and then you again end up with unplayable files.

I found this really cool audio player for MacOS 9 & X called Audion. It plays WMA, Mp3, OGG, and just about anything else you could think of.

I saw this and the first thing I thought of was that someone was reviving Beagle Bros, the awesome Apple II software company from the 80's.

I should mention: currently, some heavy JavaScript runs pretty slowly on Opera as compared to Moz (note: last I checked, you need to have Opera identify as Moz in order for the site to entreat you to that heavy JavaScript - browser detection means Opera gets lumped with Internet Explorer). Anyway, that slowness is purportedly getting fixed in the upcoming 7.20 release

"Like, on the iPod, you can even dream about using *another* software besides iTunes? But, oh, I forgot, Apple software is perfect, no one would ever want to use an alternative."

You don't need to use iTunes to use an iPod.

I think as Mac OS X becomes more ubiquitous, we'll witness a renaissance of Mac development and publishing. It's already showing with products like Transmit and Hydra (to name just a couple).

For those of you who weren't paying attention in the early to mid 80s, Bert Kersey was the mad genius behind Beagle Bros Software, the coolest software company out there. Their catalogs were a hoot and their products exhibited a complete disregard for taking themselves seriously (this site will give you some of the flavor of the Beagle Bros style), but their best claim to fame was their software. Not only did they write programs that let you do cool things with your Apple II, they showed you how to do the cool things yourself. They were open source years before its restoration to hipness.

Maybe what we need is someone who enjoys building marvelous toys and then distributing the plans so we can see how they're built, along with a programming environment a kid can use "straight out of the box". If I were doing this I'd do it in Python and distribute it on a CD with Python interpreters for the major platforms to give a kid the best possible chance of being able to start playing right away.

BBEdit is far from dead; it's a model for gui text editors across platforms.

The beautiful thing about BBEdit is that it's really a swiss army knife for text. It's good for a lot more than authoring code (which it does very well, with colored syntax for most languages).

The built-in grep engine alone saves me dozens of hours of work/year, all programs should be using it. Even if i'm laying out pages in Quark, chances are i'll run text through BBEdit for some cleanup.

For remote editing on my websites, i can easily ssh in and make my changes via a terminal, but for anything that requires a little poking around, i'll generally use Transmit over sftp and edit in BBEdit. Much easier to search through big files and look at multiple files at once than via command line.

The other beautiful thing is the Applescript dictionary. I've got plenty of scripts that use BBEdit as the engine to (cleanly) convert Word files to html, tag hundreds of test questions for online testing (WebCT), and a myriad of other automated tasks.

Pre-OS X, this was the only way to do this kind of work. Sure, this could generally be done with OS X/Linux shell scripts, but it's much handier to have a decent window where i can see my changes. Plus, Applescript lets me tie into other programs that i'm moving stuff in/out of.

For me, it's well worth the price. I bought it at 4.0, and i figure the upgrade cost is about 1/100 the price of the time it saves me every year.

"And it gets worse, because mounting a remote ftp site often seems to threadlock the entire OS: the dreaded spinning wheel of death."

I don't know how old the machines you're working on are, but if there are any Apple ][ systems there - Beagle Brothers used to have all sorts of great utilities. You won't find software at that link, but a museum to what they had.

And Disk Muncher is always key in case any of your scientist buddies show up with a game (say, Conan?) that's not yet in your library.

-OGG Vorbis Handling. If iTunes doesn't cut it for you, try Frogg. Personally I'd rather just wait for the plug-in to be optimized, which I'm sure it will eventually.

-Precision CD Burning. Get Toast. I don't use it, so I don't know what the featureset is like, but the impression I get is that it is fairly comprehensive.

-Precision CD Ripping. Try AudioCDRescue (you can get it from versiontracker) for your exact audio copy needs.

-Keyboard navigation. Check out the keyboard panel in the System Preferences. It's definitely unwieldy at times but you can do most everything without the mouse.

-Graphical FTP Client. I recommend Transmit although there are others, particularly if you use classic mode.

Good luck with the whole switching process.

Check out the excellent MacSFTP or Transmit. With either you can make an SFTP connect and then open text files in BBEdit. Very easy, reliable, secure, and all works together seamlessly (as if they were one program).

I live in MacSFTP and BBEdit all day.

The new version (2.1) of Transmit by Panic Software (great guys) has both SFTP support and basic integration with BBEdit out of the box. Check it out!

forget interarchy for sftp, check out panic's transmit. it is a very well constructed cocoa application and is $25 USD rather than interarchy's $45, but if cost is really an issue you can look into fugu a free sftp cocoa app written by the university of michigan coding cowboys...

couldn't the user above tunnel their connections though?

Why can't you play your Ogg files with Audion?

Or Unsanity Mint Audio?

Or Macamp?

They all support Ogg. And I'm sure I forgot at least a dozen more. Claiming the Mac can't play Ogg because iTunes doesn't support it is about as ridiculous as saying Linux can't do your budget because there is no spreadsheet built into the kernel.

The article poster is trolling on that last sentence, plain and simple.

Audion [panic.com] is a very well known player that has supported ogg for what seems ages. the argument that people wont know of a program unless apple makes it is really weak. if people want something, they look, its not hard.

You can try Panic's Audion, I am pretty sure they have a plugin which does what you need.

I bought a Power Macintosh 8600/250 in 1997...

...AND IT WOULDN'T EVEN BOOT INTO System 4!!!!!!

WTF. How is anyone supposed to get anything done? I can't even play StuntCopter or Cairo Shootout in the right resolution/screen depth! MacPaint becomes garbled and unstable under the "Finder", really just the damn MultiFinder in disguise! What a marketing ploy! Thanks ALOT, Apple!!!!!

</FUNNY>
<INSIGHTFUL LIKELY="maybe">

Seriously, if tons of people are worried about paying thousands to replace old shareware programs on the Mac with new commercial software, why not just write to your favorate Mac OS X shareware developer and request they create a replacement product? Be sure to elaborate on exactly what it would replace, and why such a thing would be popular with whoever needs that particular product. Panic and Ambrosia are probably two good places to start, and I'm sure there are hundreds more.

Trust me, the Mac shareware scene WANTS your feedback.

</INSIGHTFUL>

Try Audion from Panic. Supports MP3, MP3 Pro, AIFF, and Ogg-Vorbis.

www.panic.com/audion

In order to recieve $1000000, please follow the following instructions:
(Continued on page 53)

And when you start turning, you realize there were only 48 pages in the manual. It was full of stuff like that.

quick search led me to unsanity echo>/a>, MacAmp, and Audion.

No idea if they're any good though...

//rdj

Weird. Have you tried Audion to see if that does the same thing? I've stuck with SoundJam, but that codebase has gone into iTunes. I'd try a couple of different rippers if I were you: it may be the drive itself...

I'd really love to see better Ogg support tied into the iPod & iTunes myself.

I ripped 150 CD's into Ogg format early in this year from my FreeBSD box, and threw myself into the Ogg format totally.. hacking up a nice multi-queue ripper/encoder, and going at it. I was unhappy with how slow the Ogg encoder was (it was 0.7 at the time I believe), and artifacts that came onto some albums (Junkie XL comes to mind). I still dealt with it happily. When it came time to move from FreeBSD to MacOS X as my desktop, I simply began to use Audion as my

Then, I get an iPod. This throws my world upside down. Suddenly, everything I had ripped is useless. So, I begin re-ripping with iTunes. I don't care for iTunes for a player, but it's a DAMNED nice ripper/encoder for my albums. It's simultaneous rip/encode process means I can take a CD from insert to rip to encode to eject in 4 minutes (if I'm lucky and I score a 15X encode/rip time).. With it's auto-encode-on-insert and auto-eject-when-done modes, it makes it a real factory process.

Apple is making a very big deal about moving everything it can to a standards based form.. While Ogg is not really a standard, it'd be really nice if a future iPod firmware update would support Ogg's, being a first for a *publically available* portable audio device supporting Ogg.. it'd be keen, wouldn't it? :) Of course, it wouldn't actually be Apple doing it, since Pixo actually took care of this part of the software design I believe. A little strong-arming never hurt anyone though.

That and then I could theoretically store more albums on my little angel. I am worried about the extra firmware bloat on the iPod though. It's very saddening for me to say I won't ever go to Ogg's till my iPod has support for it now.. but we can keep on dreaming, can't we?

Is in Audion, but I'm not usre if it can QT -> ogg.

Are computer manufacturers stifling innovation in the pointing device market because they ship their computers with mice?

No, people have different needs, and the bundled product doesn't fit all of those needs.

iTunes ships with the MacOS, but there are alternatives. Audion for example is innovative, and development hasn't been harmed at all by iTunes.

WMP and RealPlayer use different formats, so the comparison there isn't the same. It's not a matter of bundling WMP, but of the merits of the different codecs.

I don't see anything wrong with bundling in this manner.

Well, don't use iTunes, use Audion! Audion supports Ogg Vorbis, last I checked. Try here to get it.

To me, running Linux on an iBook seems pretty silly when Mac OS X is available. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's Linux and it's free and it's the Right Thing to Do, because it Can Be Done... but c'mon, you can get pretty much any software you'd expect under Linux via Fink and the Darwin Ports collection. Run a nice window manager and rootless X, and you can get pretty much any app you like.

And then you can start looking at Cocoa and all the nifty things that are going to be coming from the NextStep/OpenStep legacy... IMHO, Apple's gotten the job done in creating a solid, usable UNIX desktop, as well as a mature, unified app framework.

Blah. Anyway, if you want Linux, don't waste your money on Apple hardware. Just stick with some cheap ol' Intel stuff. Go buy a used Sony Vaio, like my old one I'll be eBay'ing soon. :)

As for Ogg Vorbis, it's coming out of my iBook speakers right now. I use
Unsanity Echo, and sometimes Audion.

--

Wouldn't it be nice if there was an equivelant now ?

My whole interest in programming came from reading source listings like in the Beagle Bros. ads and from looking at others programs.
BASIC was open-source because it was compiled at run-time.

Bring on open source ! (how else are we going to learn ?)

You're not alone either... http://panic.com/goodies/

Try Audion 2, which works in OS X and 8.6/later. It's got Ogg Vorbis support built in, supposedly (I have not tried it.)

http://www.kaleidoscope.net/

Macs have whacked interface schemes since Greg Landweber and Arlo Rose hacked this piece of shareware out.

Kaleidoscope has schemes rivaling anything on themes.org.

I've always prefered the interfaces and icons of Mac users create to anything coming out of the Windows or Linux camps.

Take a look at Audion's Faces compared to WinAmp's Skins.

Is there a Windows or Linux equivalent to Icon Factory?

I hope the Mac OS port is Carbonized, at least. So, the way I see it, if mp3 decoding takes up minimal cpu time these days, then Sonique takes up the slack with its crazy skins and visual plugins.