What Mac software is wanted?

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Hello.
I have been a developer for more than 20 years, supercomputers, mainframes, banking, games, film, military, embedded, robotics, blackberrys, you name it. I wrote a ray tracer years ago on BeOS (DDJ article in my name November 1999) I ported it to the Mac (Carbon API) in like an afternoon or something and the binary is still availbale on my "Free and fun stuff" web page.. I'd do more Carbon or Cocoa stuff, but I am not sure what.

I was mucking around with iCalender (RFC2445) protocol the other day in the code base on the corporate servers and I got to thinking what about a little application to synchronise the iCal calander program on the Mac and Google Calendar and sell it for like $10 or $20, maybe support .Mac services also. Nah, there is probably a free application to do it already. Then I started thinking some more...

What application would you pay $10 or $20 for that is small and not requiring a cast of thousands to develop and you simply just can not get on a Mac, every time I come up with something it has been done to death already... Maya and blender are excellent packages on the Mac, Shake vs Premiere, I dunno, I am not experienced enough on either to judge.. Office products... Microsoft Office or Open Office, games, thousands to choose from, little utilities, there are lots of them..

Name one small simple piece of software, not requiring huge investments or new equipment, you wish you could download for the Mac for a few dollars but can't..


Regan
 

cwa107


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Glad you asked this.

I have been looking for a Mac version of one of the following two programs:

ePrompter
Popeeper

These programs are very simple mail clients that run in the background and periodically check your POP/IMAP and Web-based mail accounts. I'm sure there are similar programs that just do POP/IMAP, but there's only one recourse for checking Web-based accounts - and that tends to be difficult and kludgy to use (MacFreePOPs).

I would gladly pay $20 for such a program, if it were native, easy to use and was fairly unobtrusive. I currently use Mail.app with FreePOPs, but it's annoying at best.
 
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For me it would be a simple MP3 tag editor - done to death certainly but nothing comes close to MP3Tag for me. Simple but capable. Doesn't try to do too much and get it wrong, good interface. I still drop into parallels to use it in Windows because even after 12+ months I still can't find something as good in native Mac format.
 
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Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for the feedback and interest. Everything I highlighted is subjective. User interfaces tend to be. My choices and user interface preferences may not be anywhere near yours.

For me it would be a simple MP3 tag editor - done to death certainly but nothing comes close to MP3Tag for me. Simple but capable. Doesn't try to do too much and get it wrong, good interface. I still drop into parallels to use it in Windows because even after 12+ months I still can't find something as good in native Mac format.

What I find amusing about MP3Tag is that there are google ads all over the site advertising competing prodcuts. I had a bit of a look around and there are a few itunes plugins, perhaps there is something good out there, perhaps not. I might keep researching...

Glad you asked this.

I have been looking for a Mac version of one of the following two programs:

ePrompter
Popeeper

These programs are very simple mail clients that run in the background and periodically check your POP/IMAP and Web-based mail accounts. I'm sure there are similar programs that just do POP/IMAP, but there's only one recourse for checking Web-based accounts - and that tends to be difficult and kludgy to use (MacFreePOPs).

I would gladly pay $20 for such a program, if it were native, easy to use and was fairly unobtrusive. I currently use Mail.app with FreePOPs, but it's annoying at best.


I am currently involved in a corporate project involving mail, JSP, J2EE, J2ME, mod_perl, C#... and the company loves to sue everybody, employees and their spouses, clients, suppliers... I should wait a while before embarking on mail related stuff, however it does sound interesting but perhaps Apple will enhance the Mail.app in future releases. I use Mail.app and my ISPs POP server on my other Mac. On the X Window system (SunOS, Ultrix and other dinosaurs) there used to be a program that displayed a mail box and a flag would pop up as soon as mail came in. It was called xbiff.. I assume you are after something like that. In preferences in Mail.app I can schedule how often that it connects to the server and add as many mail accounts as I want. There is an AppleScript menu in Mail.app for most things I would want to do with it.

Regan
 

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