OpenSouce for OSX
October 16, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
2comments Categories: OSX, Puter Stuff
OpenSouce Mac is site listing a few must have applications that are opensource and run on the Mac. On this list I’ve found a few applications worth mentioning.
Instant Messaging
First is an application called Adium which sounds similar to what I use on Linux and Windows for multi-protocol Instant Messaging, Gaim. Having just now installed this application, it appears to have quite a few options and settings. Off-hand I also notice it can handle the OSX Bonjour protocol.
Down on the second page they quietly list Fire. Oooo. I like this one a little better. Seems to have fewer options or perhaps they’re just laid out better (screenshots). I’m giving this one a try for awhile.
Image Manipulation
Another interesting application is called Seashore. Apparently it’s based on GIMP, which as everyone knows is an excellent opensource application for Windows and Linux which provides some of the features as Adobe Photoshop along with a few extras of it’s own. Unfortunately you can only get Gimp to run on OSX with X11 running. I was going to download Seashore, but after some searching it sounds like it’s a bit too green to be used yet. It also sounds like it’s a massive undertaking.
I really can’t believe there’s not a simple image editing utility that comes with OSX. Preview allows me to convert to JPEG at least, but converting to other formats, resizing and cropping aren’t as easy.
RSS
While I do have ThunderBird installed on all my machines and use it as my primary email client on my Linux and Windows workstations. I found that OSX Mail, despite all of it’s numerous failings and much fewer features is awesome for offline viewing and searching through my gigs of email via the integrated Spotlight. My RSS reader of choice is ThunderBird and I’m not going to fire it up on OSX just for it’s RSS capabilities, which has left me hanging, as everything else I’ve seen is a gross mockery of a decent reader. Listed on the site is Vienna, which after installing and using appears to be more of an extension of Safari than anything else. Blah.
As an alternative on the list I see a cross-platform application called RSSOwl. It’s Java based which I’m not crazy about, but this thing looks full featured. In it’s tools repository is a search utility which looks online and can discover feeds that match your criteria - sounds neat, but the results are unimpressive. The layout is very similar to Thunderbird, I think I’m going to give it a try for a few weeks and see if it grows on me.
If anyone has input on quality applications to try that aren’t commercial I’d be interested in hearing about them.
