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Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Oct 1, 1996 by Rob Sugar

It's a big mistake to equate the high commercial profile of software with either its usefulness or its functionality. In fact, there have been many highly promoted products that have been of dubious value, and there are many shareware and freeware products that ought to be part of every electronic designer's toolbox. Most of these inexpensive utilities and programs are kept up to date and work well with current iterations of the Macintosh operating system.

Small packages

Chief among the freeware entries is a venerable utility called PopChar. It manifests itself as a small icon on your menu bar that, when clicked, produces the entire alphabet of whatever font is currently active in your application. Selecting a letter form in the Popchar window neatly places that character wherever the cursor is blinking. All it takes is one trip to keycaps to realize how handy Popchar is for selecting picture fonts, or for finding obscure accented characters in any font.

Other utilities might be considered "one-trick ponies," but can be useful nonetheless: Dialog View changes to whatever sizes you choose the widths, depths and fonts of all your "open" and "save" dialog boxes. ProSwitch lets you change applications by just clicking on the icon in the top righthand comer (just like in the glory days of Mac System 6), or allows you to use the keyboard to switch among open programs. YesNoCancel lets you select items in dialog boxes right from the keyboard. Stretch lets you resize windows by dragging any corner; it also lets you dean up cluttered desktops by shrinking windows to icon size.

There are a number of shareware programs that provide stiff competition for commercial offerings. For example, Disinfectant is a virus detection and repair program that is nearly as powerful as its commercial counterparts, Virex or SAM. And although you can't download new virus codes to augment your current program, as the commercial products do, the program is quickly updated as new viruses are detected.

Another successful entry is Clipfolio, the best in a series of recent Clipboard replacement programs. Clipfolio allows you to create a user-selected number of clipboards, and save or dump them in any order. It works in most applications and copies and cuts many kinds of data.

HTML helpers

There is a whole host of products available for Web authoring. Graphic Converter has many of the same capabilities as DeBabelizer, but is inexpensive shareware. The quickest way to get pages ready for the Web is with TextToHTML, a shareware program that can convert ASCII text files to HTML pages as easily as dropping the text file on top of the program's icon. Because the Internet is continually evolving, the really cool software is almost always available as freely distributed beta or freeware programs. A great example is GifBuilder, a program that lets you build small animations that run on your Web page, without the need for fancy plug-ins.

XPress x-tras

For the print-minded, it's important not to overlook software that can enhance your page-layout programs. There are many truly useful and sublimely free XTensions that work with QuarkXpress. No Quark-head should be without these Quark-endorsed Xtensions: Bobzilla Thing-ama-Bob, Stars and Stripes, XStyle, PS Utilities and Calibration.

Many commercial packages include some XTensions you can find for free. Although you won't find a freeware XTension that can scale items or create layers, there are many programs that do really useful things. Check out Quark's Web site at http://www.quark.com.

Because shareware is continually being updated, the software recommendations in this article may already be out of date. Still, savvy publishing managers should try to keep up with what's out there in the shareware and freeware world. Most commercial online services have useful collections of the stuff. On the Web, Dr. Shareware (http://www.rbi.com/~salegui/jim/archive) is a database of shareware sites. Users can also go to one of the search engines, such as Yahoo (http://www.Yahoo.com), and search for "shareware."

Remember that shareware isn't free, and if you try it and like it - and use it - you should pay the requested, usually modest fee. Shareware is a lot cheaper than commercial packages, and it keeps the pipeline flowing with updates and new stuff. I'm always looking around for new and useful shareware. Send your favorite programs to me at auras@csgi.com.