Negative Space Software Select

This is the software that I use regularly and strongly recommend. I've also sprinkled a few discussion groups and software sources as well.

This is all Macintosh software. While I’m a strong proponent of buying a computer based on whether or not it does the job for you, let me recommend that you get a Macintosh if you want to serve to the net. You’ll spend a lot more time putting up content and a lot less time mucking around the system. This is from a person who has used a large number of different computers as personal computers and as servers.

GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus

These three open source applications—GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus—are invaluable for designing professional images and layouts on a budget.

They’re also very useful if you’re planning on letting other people improve on your designs. Inkscape’s native format is SVG, and it can easily save in the standard SVG format for other drawing applications. All three of them are freely available, which means that if you make your documents available in those formats, anyone can go ahead and download the software package necessary to edit them.

More Information

Nisus: I use Nisus Writer Pro for almost all of my new documents now. It’s a lot easier to use than the other word processors I’ve tried.

browsing

Cyberduck

“Cyberduck is an open source FTP and SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) browser licenced under the GPL with an easy to use interface, integration with external editors and support for many Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour, the Keychain and AppleScript.”

GNU Privacy Guard

GnuPG encrypts and signs your data and communications. It is available both as a command-line tool and as various GUI applications.

Comp.Sys.Mac.Misc

General discussions about the Macintosh, its software, and hardware. You’ll want to pay attention to any subgroups in the “comp.sys.mac” hierarchy.

Interarchy

Interarchy is a nice, simple ftp client and archie client for the Macintosh. If you do applescripts, it is highly scriptable. Cost is a bit steep for an FTP client (you can find some really nice ones for free), but it does have some useful features.

Accessing the Web via E-Mail

If you would rather grab web pages via e-mail, you can do so from a number of servers around the world.

G. E. Boyd’s Everything by E-mail Web Page

Software archive—Version Tracker

If you’re looking for free, inexpensive, or really expensive software, there are lots of places to go. Version Tracker is fairly nice, and has a decent enough comment system.

Firefox

I personally like Safari a lot, but when I can’t use Safari, Firefox is my browser of choice. It’s a great web browser.

design

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide^•: If you’re doing web pages that use stylistic enhancements, you should really be using style sheets and this book will get you there. If you understand HTML, you will find CSS a snap to use. This is a well-written book by the number one CSS expert.
GraphicConverter: GraphicConverter allows you to take pictures from just about any source and turn them into gifs or jpegs that you can use on the net. You can modify them in numerous ways, and even create them from scratch. If you’re a programmer, you can create your own ‘plug ins’. It supports animated GIFs, quicktime movies, and the PNG graphic format. It can convert between most graphic formats you are ever likely to run across—even the old TRS-80 graphics.
POV-Ray: POV-Ray is a ray-tracing program for Macintosh, Unix, DOS, and Windows. It is very powerful, full-featured, reliable, and free. It also uses a “programmer-style” interface rather than a graphical one. The tutorial that comes with it is well-written, so it’s worth a look .Persistence of Vision is very useful for those of us who like to automate our image creation. It uses a simple scripting language to build up complex 3-dimensional imagery.
Inkscape: “Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor. Supported features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.”
Understanding Comics^•: Everyone who is interested in comics as an artform or as a medium of information exchange should read this book. You’ll have fun just leafing through it reading the various chapters.
GIMP: The GIMP image manipulation program is one of the best free software packages of any kind. Fully multi-platform, the GIMP “is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction”.
Mozilla: The Mozilla browser suite is an all-in-one browser, newsgroup reader, mail reader, and HTML editor. The HTML editor doesn’t yet provide support for embedded scripting languages such as PHP, but is otherwise a fine web page editor.
R2Net: It’s a bit grotty to work with, but R2Net can convert most of your Rich Text Format word processing documents to html pages—and automate the process of converting them in the future without your having to edit the HTML by hand.
HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide^•: I’ve never found an HTML book that I’ve considered great. This one is probably the best. It covers just about everything in HTML, as well as a little bit of Cascading Style Sheets.
Audacity: “Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.” Audacity is a very useful cross-platform sound editor. Among its many features it has some amazing noise reduction.
FileMaker Pro: FileMaker is a very useful desktop database package. It is the easiest to use: I can go from idea to implementation usually in less than an hour. There was a time when I created this web site using FileMaker and Applescript.
Ghostscript: Ghostscript allows you to view postscript files. It also allows you to create PDF files from your postscript files. This means that you can create Adobe PDF-format files for free: Ghostscript is freeware and open source.
Scribus: Scribus is a very nice open source page layout application and includes full PDF creation. It is also scriptable using Python if you need to automate page layout tasks. Scribus is very useful for making documents that need to be shared with other editors, since anyone can get the Scribus application unrestricted.

programming

Xcode: This is the premiere programming package for Mac OS X, and it comes with every Mac. Xcode allows you to program in Objective C, C, C++, AppleScript, and Java. Groups are working on integrating other languages such as Python, Perl, Ada, and Pascal.
Fraise: Fraise is the successor to the great text editor Smultron. It’s an easy-to-use, powerful, free, text editor with tabs, split windows, syntax coloring, and more.
Webmaster in a Nutshell^•: Without doubt the best reference work for webmasters that you’ll find. It contains the “reference” part of most of O’Reilly’s web-relevant nutshell books. You can find references for HTML, the CGI standard, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, PHP, HTTP, and configuration statements and server-side includes for the Apache/NCSA webservers.
Perl Cookbook^•: This is probably the most useful Perl book I own. Whenever I need a solution quickly—which is often here at the University—I am very likely to find my start in the Perl Cookbook.
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide^•: JavaScript gets a bad rap on the web, mostly because of advertisers who abuse its ability to open windows, which is too bad, because JavaScript can do some really nice things for web surfers. This guide is one of the best references for enhancing your web site with JavaScript.
Programming Perl^•: If you already know programming, and want to learn Perl, Programming Perl is the best place to start. Includes a short overview of how Perl programming differs from C programming, and an indepth look at the structure and functions of Perl.

serving

Apache Webserver: Probably the most widely used web server, it is available for most platforms and it is free. It comes installed on Linux and Mac OS X. Apache provides wonderful support for server-side includes and CGIs, and add-ons can add faster Perl access and secure web pages.
ht://Dig: Ht://Dig is a very nice, easy to configure open source search engine. You will want to use the latest 3.2x version, and don’t let the lack of updates fool you: this is a very useful piece of software.
Macjordomo: Of the two mailing list packages on the net, this is the easiest to use. It’s free. It can handle up to ten mailing lists with 30,000 subscribers per list. I’m not sure it’s still available, but I’ll bet you can find it if you look around.
Analog: WWW logfile analysis: Probably the most widely used web server ‘hits’ analyzer. It is available for most platforms. It is extremely fast, and if you’re a programmer you can do wonders with the computer-readable output.
MHonArc: MHonArc allows you to convert e-mail to web pages. It is perfect for archiving mailing lists to the web. It’s written in Perl, so you’ll need that as well.
Procmail and SmartList: Very useful if your host also needs to manipulate e-mail. However, this Unix software is not for beginners. Procmail allows you to set up ‘recipes’ for what to do with different kinds of mail, based on who it is from, what the subject is, just about anything. SmartList is a mailing list package that works with Procmail.
Swish-E: This is a Unix web page indexer. The current version can create indices of your local files and remote files. It can be used to create off-line or on-line indexes of documents.
Comp.InfoSystems.WWW.Servers.mac: This is a discussion group for discussing web and Internet servers for the Macintosh platform.

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Jerry

A Wintel user I know posted a message about a problem with his mouse. Carl replied he was having a similar problem and invited Joe to attend a PC user group’s meeting with him to get help.

Well, Joe was fairly busy and didn’t want to attend the meeting. He told Carl he felt he could live with the problem for a while. Carl’s reply to Joe was classic:

PC’s require total commitment. You need to either adjust your priorities, or buy a Mac.

Contents of Negative Space™ as a whole Copyright © 1994-2024 Jerry Stratton. Individual copyrights remain held by their respective authors unless they specify otherwise. Site titles, such as Negative Space, Strange Bedfellows, Biblyon Broadsheet, Highland Games, and FireBlade Coffeehouse are trademarks of Jerry Stratton.

Negative Space Software Select last modified April 5th, 2010.