Macheist What Improvement For Mac
Macheist What Improvement For Machine
MacHeist is a software promotion company best known for its Mac software bundles that are promoted and sold each year in numbered events. MacHeist 3 sold over 175,000 bundles and raised over a million dollars for charity. Feb 26, 2010 New MacHeist. Discussion in 'Mac Apps and Mac App Store' started by andrewhart, Feb 24, 2010.
Click to expand.Then you obviously don't know anything about MarinerWrite. MW is one of the best textprocessors for the Mac. It fully supports the original saving as PDF - not he crab that Apple provide us with. And it is even one of the best to open and save into RTF keeping the formattings - also better than both OpenOffice and Neooffice! - The only real 'missing' in it is that it can't save as ODF/ODT./QUOTE But the MacHeist web site itself was still a garbled mess.
Their brand name is dead so far as I'm concerned. Click to expand.Yeah. At least with a quick look, I couldn't even figure out how to tell what was in the 'deal'. I later figured out that if I let the annoying ad video run (I had aborted it almost imediately the first time I clicked there), it eventually goes through a long-winded ad for each of them. Maybe there is a simple list somewhere, but I didn't find it. (I might also have missed things because the site is one of those that messes up pretty badly if you use large fonts.
After eventually listening to the darned ad video, I couldn't think of any of those apps that seemed worth the cost. (Ain't nothing 'free'; the cost here seems to be a combination of the time to download and check them out, plus the cost of giving them an email address - of course that would be a sneakemail one, but still). I did glance at MarinerWrite a little longer than most of the others, but aside from the fact that it is only conditionally in the bundle, the support forum for it looks discouraging. Not much activity on the forum at all, and a significant fraction of what is there seems to center around complaints that the updated version allegedly promissed in 2005 (and then again about every year since) hasn't shown up yet. Click to expand.I think the reason that there is very little activity on the forum is because there aren't that many problems with MW: I find it to be one of the most non-problematic textprocessors ever made for the Mac.
I've been using it since some time back to the ver. 1.5 or there about, and have always been using it as my secondary textprocessor for anything smaller works.
My main textprocessor is and has been NisusWriter since ver. 3.3.1European through ver. 4.x, 5.x, 6.x and now the NWPro, - but MarinerWrite has always been placed next to NW/NWP - first in the classic Controlstrip and now in the dock.
Click to expand.Just now updated to work with Rosetta? At about the time I'm more like looking to phase out those things that require Rosetta? That doesn't encourage me much. I've already got a host of word processors on this machine.
Open Office, iWork (I don't actually use that much, but it as only $41 if I bought it with the new machine, so I did). I had NeoOffice on my prior machine, but decided I very minorly preferred OO for now. I've also got a copy of MS Ofice, but haven't yet moved it from my old machine to here; not sure that I will. I don't actually use word processors much at all. I mostly use text editors. For 'serious' work I use LaTeX. I've probably spent more time fiddling with word processors to decide whether I like them than I've spent actually using them.
(And I swear I've spent more time helping other people with them than using them myself. Just because I've never once used a particular product doesn't seem to keep some people from expecting me to help them with it - sigh.) I'm not hearing anything that makes me real excited about jumping on this one. Requiring Roseta and not supporting ODF are two pretty big negatives for me. I get stuff in ODF regularly.
And based on reading the forums, counting on some feature promissed for a future version 'real soon now' is not something I'll do. They have all but officially announced that they won't be doing much work on the word processor through at least the first quarter of next year.
I got an email from them tonight offering a program called squeeze available for free download in advance of the bundle. It is supposed to compress files on your HD (You get to choose which ones) so you can save space but they are still readable by snow leopard. I couldn't find any reviews or other impressions so I decided to test it out my self. I dropped a folder with 64 gig of music and movies into the compression tool and saved a whopping 43.3 MB. A 1.5 gig folder of FLAC rendered a savings of 24.6 KB. I went to the app's website to read the FAQ.
It stated that media files are ignored for the most part since no major savings is achieved. My next question is, what can I see a major benefit from compressing? The website doesn't offer a great deal of guidance on that. I suppose I will play around with it for a while.
Click to expand.Image files like.jpg and.gif are already compressed by nature of their file format - and the same goes for most video and audio files. While I don't know exactly what compression Squeeze (or snow leopard) uses, it likely works best on other things like text files, Word docs, spreadsheets, etc. Photoshop files will likely compress some as well - but to a lesser extent.
I thought about trying Squeeze. But I wonder what it does if you decide to delete it? I would hope there's a way to undo the compression, but it didn't come with any documentation so I'm not quite ready to trust it.
Click to expand.Unfortunately it seems that Squeeze skips very small files entirely. In addition the small files that it does compress it doesn't store properly - if the compressed data for a file is less than or equal to 3802 bytes then it should be stored in the decmpfs attribute and there should be no resource fork, but Squeeze uses the resource fork to store the data anyway. There is one other problem that concerns me much more however. I hope I'm wrong, but it appears that Squeeze does not support uncompressed data blocks for HFS+ compression. That by itself is not a serious problem (although it is a significant omission), rather the real problem is that it still tries to store compressed data blocks that are larger than the original uncompressed data blocks - this could result in a buffer overflow which may cause some files to become corrupted. Fortunately I think Squeeze validates compressed files before finalizing them, but there are some cases where having the large compressed data blocks appears to work and if Apple makes any changes to their HFS+ compression implementation there is a chance those files could become corrupted. Click to expand.I have been thinking about xslimmer, however the website for the manufacturer doesn't appear to say that it actually uses compression.
According to the FAQs it appears to strip unnecessary binary from apps thereby saving loads of space. This may explain why another xslimmer user was able to save even more space with squeeze. Now that I have used squeeze a bit more I really like it. I saved 30% on my apps folder. Here is the xslimmer documentation Here are the faqs for squeeze. Worth a read if you are on the fence.
I have seen no performance loss at all. The fact that HD is typically a bottleneck on the system seems to support the theory that compression would actually create a bit of an improvement.
Macheist What Improvement For Macbook Pro
Click to expand.If you go to the Xslimmer homepage there is a small section titled 'Snow Leopard Ready', where it mentions a 'system compression mechanism'. In the application's preferences, under Advanced, there is an option to compress the slimmed binaries under Snow Leopard. I know this works because when I just slimmed the most recent version of WebKit (initially 166 MB), the size after removing other binaries/languages is 127.8 MB, but after compression it is 62.1 MB. Also, not all apps compress with xSlimmer. While WebKit's size gets cut in half, Google Chrome doesn't get compressed at all. Not sure why though.