The Lonesome Road

Before I start - let me apologize to all the people who develop software for a living. I have no idea how you work. I only have a theoretical idea on how software goes from concept to a finished product.

People who own a Mac are lucky people - they have a bunch of talented people who think of innovative ideas - and then implement them. I am of course talking about the applications that are developed by people all over the world and hosted on the Apple site. (In case you are a Mac user and do not know about this - shame on you. Click here to see what you have been missing)

Here’s a confession - I hate the default Windows Explorer. It’s a pain to use and has a horrible interface. I do not like the concept of having two windows open in order to perform file operations. So, the logical step was to look into split pane explorers. The one I like the most is Directory Opus. It’s light, powerful and amazingly customizable. Unfortunately, it’s also very expensive. At USD 60, it’s not exactly cheap software. Thus, I had to end my affair with it after the trial period ran out. There are alternatives like 2xExplorer, but they don’t provide the power that I want (need is more like it).

The reason I talk about this is that the other day, I ran across this on the Apple site. It’s called Xfolders, and it’s a split pane explorer for OSX - and it is free. I am willing to bet that it will stay free for a long time and go on to have a great feature set.

Regular readers will know my obsession with Quicksilver. As a long time keyboard fan (mouse = bad - except while gaming), I prefer to use the mouse as little as possible. The problem is that I hate shortcuts cluttering my desktop and I don’t like navigating through the start menu. So I spent a *lot* of time looking for QS alternatives. I am currently using two of them (yes - two of them) - Colibri and Launchy.

Why am I using two? Plan to do a head to head review once I use both of them for a couple of weeks. The problem with both these software is that they are pale imitations of QS - though, to be very honest, they are good software - but a comparison finds them woefully lacking in power.

Finally, there’s Growl. It’s a smart notification system that interfaces with various software installed on the system and provides information about them. And people find ways to make it better all the time - see Anshul’s post on how to interface Growl and Thunderbird. Go to the Applications link and you will find an ever increasing set of applications that are being supported.

A windows equivalent does exist - it’s called Snarl, and it can be found here.

Why am I talking about this (other than my obsession to shift from my Windows system to a Mac)? Let me put it this way - I think I can safely say that Windows developers outnumber OSX developers by a large margin. I am also sure that the Windows system does provide a good set of tools for software development and a large set of APIs. Why is it that the Mac communiy comes out with the better developed and better supported software?

Here is why I say this. Snarl and Colibri seem to be dead in the water. The Snarl page has not been updated since last year. Similarly, the last update for Colibri seems to be from last year as well. I even mailed Michael Walter, the dude behind Colibri to say thank you and to ask if a new version was coming out. So far I have no response. In contrast, try the Growl and QS homepage and forum. Ideas, features and feature requests are all over the place.

Why is there such a contrast between the two development cultures? I have no idea. If someone is making a QS/Growl for Windows, I would happily test the beta product (QS offers it for free) and pay (a reasonable amount) for the finished software.

Windows developers - wake up!