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> OmniFocus has many web-based alternatives...I use Trello, personally I love Trello, but it’s an OF ‘alternative’ at best. It is no way a replacement. OmniFoc

> OmniFocus has many web-based alternatives...I use Trello, personally I love Trello, but it’s an OF ‘alternative’ at best. It is no way a replacement. OmniFocus is an order of magnitude more powerful. Even an app like Things doesn’t get close; I use both, and while I’d like to maintain an OF=home/Things=work separation, there are a bunch of things that I do that Things just can’t handle. On the subject of quality software more generally, this is one of the major frustrations I have when forced to use Windows. On my Mac, if I need a bit of software to do a job there is generally – not always, of course, but generally – something well written, well supported, and beautiful. I find it, give the developer $5-$50, and enjoy a long and fruitful relationship. If I need software on Windows, it’s a hot mess. I mean it’s just a fucking disaster. You Google what you want and get all sorts of shite. You risk your neck and download some file from Sourceforge. You ‘install’ it and have to reboot. Reboot? To install software? Wow. Okay. So you reboot then you launch the software and guess what? It’s a fucking turd. I hate it. Viscerally hate it.

Crinus 8y ago
> I find it, give the developer $5-$50, and enjoy a long and fruitful relationship. > You Google what you want and get all sorts of shite. You risk your neck and download some file from Sourceforge. You are comparing buying an application from a commercial developer who - if nothing else - has at least an incentive to provide a good experience and downloading an application for free written by someone who may or may not care further about the program than dumping it in a shared hosting service and you are surprised that the former is better? How about 'finding' equivalent commercial software for Windows? > You ‘install’ it and have to reboot. Reboot? To install software? Unless the program targets Windows 95/98, this is not necessary and the largest majority of programs designed for Windows 2000 and later should not need reboot (even during Windows 9x it was unnecessary most of the time and was there 'just in case'). > I hate it. Viscerally hate it. Then do something about it: support the developers who write quality software.
- jen729w 8y ago
  > You are comparing buying an application from a commercial developer... My point was that it’s much, much easier to find good software for the Mac. The pattern tends to be search, find, buy, enjoy, vs. Windows search, get frustrated, download some shite, hate life.
  - Crinus 8y ago
    Windows has a lot more software than Mac and unlike Mac, software in Windows keeps working for years on (i personally use a lot of older software, largely because it is faster on modern machines). This means you have a TON of options, but at the same time Sturgeon's law enters in the picture so with the more options you have more crap. The other side of the coin is that you also have more quality options too. Yes it is harder to find good software, but it is far from impossible. One way is to look for sites dedicated to software and then look for comments about those sites in Reddit, etc and ignore those that have bad comments. Another way is to ask in communities like Reddit's /r/software - people will try to steer you towards cheap/halfass solutions and ask you why would you want to pay $1 to do X instead of spending a few weeks jury rigging the free Y+Z+W+4+5 (which btw are open source, thus have god given quality status) to do mostly the same thing except a little more broken, but if you insist about what you want, you'll often find good software there (i have found some nice apps through the subreddit myself). TBH it has been years since i used a Mac extensively, but i do not remember finding quality Mac software being any different than quality Windows software - i mostly relied on sites and communities too.
    - ubermonkey 8y ago
      AS a 20-year Mac user, I have no idea what you mean by "unlike Mac, software in Windows keeps working for years on".
      - Crinus 8y ago
        Apple does not pay much attention to backwards compatibility, deprecates APIs all the time, changes how they work, etc and if something is undocumented it is free for all to axe it regardless of how many applications use it. Microsoft, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to backwards compatibility and tries to keep things running regardless of them being documented or not (which IMO is the right approach to take, if something is accessible then it is part of your public interface regardless of it being intentional or not - of course this can lead to more messy implementation, but this is secondary to keep applications running). As a result, none of the programs in my 2009 iMac work anymore - a few games, a few commercial applications (e.g. Pixelmator), etc, every time i upgraded macOS i lost one or two applications that were not compatible, until the point when macOS itself became not compatible with my iMac (and i am certain that if i try to move any remaining applications to another Mac, more stuff will not work). No matter what workarounds i tried to do, they didn't work. On the other hand, i have Windows software from a decade before my iMac even existed that still works perfectly fine under Windows 10 exactly because Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility. For example i have a boxed version of Paint Shop Pro 7 (the last great version of PSP with the best UI for an image editor, IMO) which comes with the application itself as well as a couple of addons (an animation editor and an image organizer) and all of them work literally out of the box (some older applications might need a few tweaks here and there but they usually work easily, but others like PSP7 work with no tweaks at all). For me this is a big reason why i stopped buying software on macOS: with their behavior towards API compatibility, Apple forces an expiration date to the software. On the other hand i do not even care if the company behind some piece of Windows software will exist or not in 5 years, since chances are i'll be able to run it regardless (assuming there is no need for Internet-based activation or some bullshit like that, which is why i avoid that type of software too). I guess Linux is kinda similar here, partly because Linus insists on backwards compatibility but also because even if the APIs change you can still compile the older libraries, although that is talking from a purely personal perspective (this would be very high on the "tweak difficulty" for most people) and in practice nobody sells stuff i'd be interested on Linux anyway so i haven't experienced it beyond trying some older game demos from very early 2000s (which mostly worked after i installed an OSS emulator and an older C++ library, with the exception of -IIRC- a Shogo port that needed Gtk1 for the launcher - which i could compile or copy from Slackware that still provides packages for it, but i lost interest). Still i'd trust Windows more to stay compatible and even under Linux i'd trust Wine before any other API. And note that in all that i ignore Apple changing CPU architecture every few years (which, according to rumors, are going to do again soon).

Crinus 8y ago

> I find it, give the developer $5-$50, and enjoy a long and fruitful relationship. > You Google what you want and get all sorts of shite. You risk your neck and download some file from Sourceforge. You are comparing buying an application from a commercial developer who - if nothing else - has at least an incentive to provide a good experience and downloading an application for free written by someone who may or may not care further about the program than dumping it in a shared hosting service and you are surprised that the former is better? How about 'finding' equivalent commercial software for Windows? > You ‘install’ it and have to reboot. Reboot? To install software? Unless the program targets Windows 95/98, this is not necessary and the largest majority of programs designed for Windows 2000 and later should not need reboot (even during Windows 9x it was unnecessary most of the time and was there 'just in case'). > I hate it. Viscerally hate it. Then do something about it: support the developers who write quality software.

jen729w 8y ago
> You are comparing buying an application from a commercial developer... My point was that it’s much, much easier to find good software for the Mac. The pattern tends to be search, find, buy, enjoy, vs. Windows search, get frustrated, download some shite, hate life.
- Crinus 8y ago
  Windows has a lot more software than Mac and unlike Mac, software in Windows keeps working for years on (i personally use a lot of older software, largely because it is faster on modern machines). This means you have a TON of options, but at the same time Sturgeon's law enters in the picture so with the more options you have more crap. The other side of the coin is that you also have more quality options too. Yes it is harder to find good software, but it is far from impossible. One way is to look for sites dedicated to software and then look for comments about those sites in Reddit, etc and ignore those that have bad comments. Another way is to ask in communities like Reddit's /r/software - people will try to steer you towards cheap/halfass solutions and ask you why would you want to pay $1 to do X instead of spending a few weeks jury rigging the free Y+Z+W+4+5 (which btw are open source, thus have god given quality status) to do mostly the same thing except a little more broken, but if you insist about what you want, you'll often find good software there (i have found some nice apps through the subreddit myself). TBH it has been years since i used a Mac extensively, but i do not remember finding quality Mac software being any different than quality Windows software - i mostly relied on sites and communities too.
  - ubermonkey 8y ago
    AS a 20-year Mac user, I have no idea what you mean by "unlike Mac, software in Windows keeps working for years on".
    - Crinus 8y ago
      Apple does not pay much attention to backwards compatibility, deprecates APIs all the time, changes how they work, etc and if something is undocumented it is free for all to axe it regardless of how many applications use it. Microsoft, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to backwards compatibility and tries to keep things running regardless of them being documented or not (which IMO is the right approach to take, if something is accessible then it is part of your public interface regardless of it being intentional or not - of course this can lead to more messy implementation, but this is secondary to keep applications running). As a result, none of the programs in my 2009 iMac work anymore - a few games, a few commercial applications (e.g. Pixelmator), etc, every time i upgraded macOS i lost one or two applications that were not compatible, until the point when macOS itself became not compatible with my iMac (and i am certain that if i try to move any remaining applications to another Mac, more stuff will not work). No matter what workarounds i tried to do, they didn't work. On the other hand, i have Windows software from a decade before my iMac even existed that still works perfectly fine under Windows 10 exactly because Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility. For example i have a boxed version of Paint Shop Pro 7 (the last great version of PSP with the best UI for an image editor, IMO) which comes with the application itself as well as a couple of addons (an animation editor and an image organizer) and all of them work literally out of the box (some older applications might need a few tweaks here and there but they usually work easily, but others like PSP7 work with no tweaks at all). For me this is a big reason why i stopped buying software on macOS: with their behavior towards API compatibility, Apple forces an expiration date to the software. On the other hand i do not even care if the company behind some piece of Windows software will exist or not in 5 years, since chances are i'll be able to run it regardless (assuming there is no need for Internet-based activation or some bullshit like that, which is why i avoid that type of software too). I guess Linux is kinda similar here, partly because Linus insists on backwards compatibility but also because even if the APIs change you can still compile the older libraries, although that is talking from a purely personal perspective (this would be very high on the "tweak difficulty" for most people) and in practice nobody sells stuff i'd be interested on Linux anyway so i haven't experienced it beyond trying some older game demos from very early 2000s (which mostly worked after i installed an OSS emulator and an older C++ library, with the exception of -IIRC- a Shogo port that needed Gtk1 for the launcher - which i could compile or copy from Slackware that still provides packages for it, but i lost interest). Still i'd trust Windows more to stay compatible and even under Linux i'd trust Wine before any other API. And note that in all that i ignore Apple changing CPU architecture every few years (which, according to rumors, are going to do again soon).