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> No firewall that suspends connections for an interactive prompt Almost every third-party firewall for Windows has been able to do this since at least the ear

> No firewall that suspends connections for an interactive prompt Almost every third-party firewall for Windows has been able to do this since at least the early 2000s. ZoneAlarm had this functionality in 2001, two years before the initial release of Little Snitch. > no way to create virtual audio devices or route audio in Windows This has been possible via third-party software since the mid-2000s (Virtual Audio Cable, VB-Cable, etc.). The other things have equivalents in Windows, too, like Adobe Illustrator for designs, and trackpad vendor-specific software (e.g. Synaptic, Asus) to use it for handwriting.

LoganDark 4y ago
> Almost every third-party firewall for Windows has been able to do this since at least the early 2000s. ZoneAlarm had this functionality in 2001, two years before the initial release of Little Snitch. ZoneAlarm is a whole antivirus afaik, not just a firewall. If there's something out there that can replicate WFC[0]'s functionality while suspending connections instead of blocking them, I'm all ears, since that's my biggest gripe with how Windows Firewall works (since WFC is only a front-end to it). > This has been possible via third-party software since the mid-2000s (Virtual Audio Cable, VB-Cable, etc.). By installing drivers and rebooting your computer and you get a fixed number of them. On macOS with Loopback and Audio Hijack, you can create any number of virtual audio devices and route audio between them however you want with switches and filters and etc. in real-time. > The other things have equivalents in Windows, too, like Adobe Illustrator for designs, and trackpad vendor-specific software (e.g. Synaptic, Asus) to use it for handwriting. Adobe Illustrator is not the same type of software (this is why Adobe created Adobe XD). It's not usable for the reasons I used Sketch. As for handwriting, Inklet was more advanced than that, it allowed you to scale and move the working area around the screen with gestures, and actually write into other applications instead of a dedicated signature window (which is what this "vendor-specific software" were designed for). My point isn't that you can find some solution to create a similar result, my point is that the actual pieces of software that are available are quite unique and don't really exist anywhere else. There's just something attractive about macOS being a true Unix with a huge userbase of people who will pay for good apps. [0]: https://www.binisoft.org/wfc https://www.binisoft.org/wfc
n0zmer 4y ago
Virtual audio cable was the shit and yeah you are correct, it does exactly what the Mac app does (and it was on Windows way before Mac was even a real thing). Used to use it to stream audio into a ventrillo channel lol
- LoganDark 4y ago
  > it does exactly what the Mac app does no... it doesn't. sure, there are programs you can install that will add virtual sound devices on Windows, but I can't find any program that will let you manage them dynamically, let alone do half the things that Loopback does. VAC does actually let you restart the entire driver to change the number of virtual audio devices, if no programs are using any of them. But another big selling point of Loopback is the ability to capture audio from applications without having to change the output device, which I believe is technically possible on Windows (Discord can do it sometimes) but there isn't a program that exposes it through a virtual input device yet. Linux does seem good for this audio stuff specifically—there may or may not be pretty Linux GUIs for arbitrary audio mixing/routing—however on Windows there are no good examples of it. or, again, none that I can find. VAC certainly isn't one. Of course, even on Windows, I use Voicemeeter on a daily basis and I have tried to fool around with VSTHost for real-time filters (like dynamic range compression, which I had used a lot on macOS to watch movies), but there's significant latency and I cba to figure out what the problem is. Voicemeeter is still useful for muting my microphone with a macro key though. If I wanted to try to make something like Loopback myself I'd probably need to continue my months long search to figure out how to write userspace drivers. Because I still can't figure it out. I'm not trying to shill Loopback here, I'm just giving it as an example of a Mac-exclusive app that does something that you can't easily get on another OS right now. Maybe it's just cause nobody's put in the time yet, but macOS still seems to have more power-user-esque apps imho.

LoganDark 4y ago

> Almost every third-party firewall for Windows has been able to do this since at least the early 2000s. ZoneAlarm had this functionality in 2001, two years before the initial release of Little Snitch. ZoneAlarm is a whole antivirus afaik, not just a firewall. If there's something out there that can replicate WFC[0]'s functionality while suspending connections instead of blocking them, I'm all ears, since that's my biggest gripe with how Windows Firewall works (since WFC is only a front-end to it). > This has been possible via third-party software since the mid-2000s (Virtual Audio Cable, VB-Cable, etc.). By installing drivers and rebooting your computer and you get a fixed number of them. On macOS with Loopback and Audio Hijack, you can create any number of virtual audio devices and route audio between them however you want with switches and filters and etc. in real-time. > The other things have equivalents in Windows, too, like Adobe Illustrator for designs, and trackpad vendor-specific software (e.g. Synaptic, Asus) to use it for handwriting. Adobe Illustrator is not the same type of software (this is why Adobe created Adobe XD). It's not usable for the reasons I used Sketch. As for handwriting, Inklet was more advanced than that, it allowed you to scale and move the working area around the screen with gestures, and actually write into other applications instead of a dedicated signature window (which is what this "vendor-specific software" were designed for). My point isn't that you can find some solution to create a similar result, my point is that the actual pieces of software that are available are quite unique and don't really exist anywhere else. There's just something attractive about macOS being a true Unix with a huge userbase of people who will pay for good apps. [0]: https://www.binisoft.org/wfc https://www.binisoft.org/wfc

n0zmer 4y ago

Virtual audio cable was the shit and yeah you are correct, it does exactly what the Mac app does (and it was on Windows way before Mac was even a real thing). Used to use it to stream audio into a ventrillo channel lol

LoganDark 4y ago
> it does exactly what the Mac app does no... it doesn't. sure, there are programs you can install that will add virtual sound devices on Windows, but I can't find any program that will let you manage them dynamically, let alone do half the things that Loopback does. VAC does actually let you restart the entire driver to change the number of virtual audio devices, if no programs are using any of them. But another big selling point of Loopback is the ability to capture audio from applications without having to change the output device, which I believe is technically possible on Windows (Discord can do it sometimes) but there isn't a program that exposes it through a virtual input device yet. Linux does seem good for this audio stuff specifically—there may or may not be pretty Linux GUIs for arbitrary audio mixing/routing—however on Windows there are no good examples of it. or, again, none that I can find. VAC certainly isn't one. Of course, even on Windows, I use Voicemeeter on a daily basis and I have tried to fool around with VSTHost for real-time filters (like dynamic range compression, which I had used a lot on macOS to watch movies), but there's significant latency and I cba to figure out what the problem is. Voicemeeter is still useful for muting my microphone with a macro key though. If I wanted to try to make something like Loopback myself I'd probably need to continue my months long search to figure out how to write userspace drivers. Because I still can't figure it out. I'm not trying to shill Loopback here, I'm just giving it as an example of a Mac-exclusive app that does something that you can't easily get on another OS right now. Maybe it's just cause nobody's put in the time yet, but macOS still seems to have more power-user-esque apps imho.