you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

I’ve been using Grab for a long time, out of convenience despite the fact that it really really sucks. The resulting captures are usually blurry if you’re capturing web pages. I always forget the screengrab shortcut key. (It’s Shift+Ctrl+Apple+4). It’s still inferior to the original picture quality of the source, but better than Grab.

I’ll post some screengrab comparisons later. In the meantime, I’m deleting Grab from my dock.

On the PC, it’s easy. Just hit Print Screen and paste it to Photoshop. The grab is 100% identical, pixel for pixel.

A lot of very good software can be had for free or low cost. Unfortunately, sorting the good ones from the bad ones takes knowledge and experience. There’s a lot junk out there masquerading as useful software, but in reality are adware, spyware, malware, or other nonsense.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen these junky programs installed by friends, family members, and clients install. Some of these programs are semi-benign, like proprietary media players. Then there are the unscrupulous companies or websites that make trojans and spyware.. programs that pretend to do something useful, but are in fact malware or other malicious software. Some pretend to be Internet history erasers, Windows registry cleaners, virus checkers, and spyware removers.

My rule of thumb is: be very selective and stick to a few very good products. Use what geeks use. Some programs you will have to pay good money for (like Adobe’s graphics suites), but many are open-source programs that are free and reliable. I try to use these whenever I can. Is open-source software better? Not necessarily, but one advantage is that there is no mystery about them. The source code is freely available for anyone to look at and modify, unlike closed source programs which is a black box you can’t see inside of.

Here’s a few free and open source (FOSS) programs and utilities for the Mac I use on a regular basis:

Adium - Chat software. I’ve ditched iChat completely now in favor of Adium. iChat started giving me problems after I enabled web sharing to test out sites I’m developing on my local machine. It’d try repeatedly to login to AOL’s IM servers and ends up getting me locked out for 15-20 minutes at a time because AOL thinks I’m doing some DOS attack. Now I use Adium and no problems so far, except for occasionally people sending me emotes that Adium doesn’t know. It lets me connect to people using Yahoo and MSN and I don’t have to install half a dozen different chat clients.

Transmission - BitTorrent client. At only 2.5 MB, it’s lightweight and advanced and light years ahead of the official client from Bram Cohen. On the PC, I use BitTornado. There’s literally dozens of BT clients and looking at the features comparison chart will make you give you an aneurysm. For the sake of sanity, I’ll stick with BitTornado and Transmission. I’ve used BitTornado for several years now.

Cyberduck - FTP client. On the PC, I use Filezilla. The Filezilla Mac version was pretty crummy when I tried it out last, so I didn’t use it. It may be better now, but I’m not sure.

OS X and Windows XP come with a zip/unzip utility built-in. Mac’s is pretty crummy, but it does the job. Geeks like to use .rar (better compression rate than zip). For this situation, you’ll need WinRAR for the PC, or UnRarX for Mac. WinRAR is not free, but you can use it forever without registering. It’ll nag you though.

VLC Media Player - video playback. This awesome programs supports nearly every video format on the planet. Stop messing with plugins and codecs. Download VLC and you’ll never use QuickTime player or Windows Media Player again. Available for Mac, PC, Linux.

Cross Platform:
get VLC Media Player here

Mac
get Cyberduck here
get Adium here
get Transmission here
get UnRarX here

PC
get Filezilla here
get BitTornado here
get WinRAR here