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BRMUG Meeting Notes September 2006 - Software Alternatives Apple provides many fine software products with Mac OS X (Safari, Mail, Address Book, iCal, iChat, ...). They also provide nice additions via iWork (Pages and Keynote) and iLife (iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand, iDVD, and iWeb). Many of these products are excellent. But most (if not all) do have competitors (commercial, shareware and/or open source). Our goal in this presentation is to broaden your horizons and let you know about some of that competition. To start with, here is a chart showing Apple's offering and some of the competitors (as always, visit VersionTracker or MacUpdates.com for the latest versions of these products). Category Apple's Product Alternatives Browser Safari Firefox, Camino, Opera e-mail Mail Thunderbird, Entourage, Eudora, Pine Instant Messaging iChat Adium, Skype Now lets add a little detail to the comparisons. We will start with browsers. Product Pros Cons Safari Comes with OS Renders pages nicely Has Mac OS X look and feel Has Apple watching it for security problems and enhancing it Supports tabbed browsing Has some third-party add-ons (such as syntax highlighting, search features) Nice bookmark editor Limited 3rd party add-ons Closed source No ability to control animated iamges Has big memory leak problems Slow with multiple windows with multiple tabs open Major updates are infrequent Small market share - sites unlikely to code for it Crashes sometimes Closed source Limited toolbar customization - Can't add "new tab" button Firefox Freely downloadable Renders pages nicely and quickly Has the Mozilla development team behind it Supports tabbed browsing Many extensions available (public API for adding extensions) with supported download, install and update system Bookmark manager is separate window Supports themes DOM Inspector -- great for seeing the various parts of a web page Cross platform Works with Gmail Chat Foreign look and feel Crashes sometimes Poor tab closing mechanism Feels sluggish Camino Freely downloadable Renders pages nicely and quickly Has the Mozilla development team behind basic engine Supports tabbed browsing Looks and feels a lot like Safari Feels quick Works with Gmail Chat Very Customizable Small team doing Mac look-and-feel -- lags behind Firefox Opera Freely downloadable (recently) Very standards oriented Nice page rendering Pretty quick displaying pages Cross platform Supports extensions (via widgets) Manages bookmarks via a new tab Very Mac look-and-feel Little slow to load initially Small Mac audience Small market share The e-mail client world is very confusing. There really is not a clear choice across the board. It is much more important what e-mail server(s) you talk to mostly. Here is a table for quick comparison: Product Pros Cons Mail Comes with Mac OS X Has a lot of flexibility Is not overly standards compliant (can be a big problem when talking to other mail servers that also loosely support standards) Can connect to Microsoft Exchange server, but limited functionality Plentiful plugins for added support Closed source Thunderbird Has the Mozilla development team behind it Supports IMAP, POP, and html-mail Secure: Anti-phishing, attachments handled well, built in spam filter Automatic updates Supports themes and extension, Very customizable Adheres to the Mac OSX look-and-feel Supports News and RSS FREE No Support for syncing with Apple's Address Book Entourage Comes as part of the Microsoft Office Suite Adheres to the Mac OSX look-and-feel Supports IMAP, POP, html-mail, and Exchange Handles mail, tasks, contacts, schedules / PIM Industry standard for business-type email Plentiful good documentation, books, tutorials Closed source Expensive No "free" updates Can take a while to learn and customize Eudora Syncs with Apple's Address Book Supports IMAP and POP Very Customizable Secure: Good spam filter, attachments handled well Closed source Limited-feature "free" mode Updates by paid subscription Pine Program for Internet News and Email Runs on Unix variants, Windows, OSX Lightweight Secure - updated often Developed by the University of Washington FREE No graphical support for Mac OSX Only text based Not installed by default under OSX iChat is the dominant Instant Messaging client in the Mac world (by simply being there). Adium is worth considering -- depending on needs. And Skype has its merits also. Product Pros Cons iChat Comes with Mac OS X Works with .Mac, AOL, jabber and BonJour Audio chatting supported Video chatting supported (to iChat and XP AOL users) Just works Does not support tabbed messenging Closed source Limited chat protocol support Adium Freely downloadable Works with .Mac, AOL, jabber and BonJour Also works with Yahoo, MSN, Lotus Sametime and Novell Groupwise Supports Tabs (separate tab for each conversation) Source code available Highly configurable No video or audio conferencing Skype Freely avaialble Source code available Cross platform For Audio or video conferencing PC to "land-line" phones works GREAT Skype to Skype or SKype to phone system only Need a handset (camera for video) Future uncertain (legal system may impact)