Well TidBITS just had their 20th Anniversary. I read them throught most of the 90s as a text file in the SETEXT format with a tool call EasyView. This was a early version of Markdown that would use formatting cues to break the text document in to chapters and articles. The sidebar would have all the different editions of TidBITS.

TidBITS Inside TidBITS: TidBITS Celebrates 20 Years of Internet Publication.

So inspired by the regular free and cheap picks on Lifehacker, here are some of my recommendations.

First place has to go to GraphicConverter, if for no other reason that I’ve owned it and used it longer than any other piece of software. Think I’ve had it since System7 on my first color Mac. I remember it could open Amiga graphic files – probably still can. Technically I probably own 27 copies of this in various versions.

Coming in at a close second is BBEdit. Owned that one for a while to, can’t remember when I first got it but it predates OS X by a while. Plus I love the “Software that doesn’t Suck” tagline.

An honorable mention to Dragthing which I used sometime starting with System 8 and is still on my machine. Unfortunately it has lost the battle to LaunchBar which continues to have new tricks I continue to learn. Recently started using the clipping history for copy and paste – very nice.

Around for a good long time as well is Fetch and Interarchy, two file transfer utilities I keep around for slightly different reasons. Fetch I still use to speed test downloads because I like the transfer rate displays. Interarchy (nee Anarchie) is an all purpose file utility that I use for Web site updates and backups. Its mirroring and Netdisk features are still the best bridge between a GUI and the Unix world of ftp/sftp. Fetch comes from the pedigree of Dartmouth college alongside some other great Mac Software like Intermapper. Interarchy was another University derived software effort started with Peter N. Lewis which begat Stairways Software and was joined by Andrew Tomazos.

Got to go back to the folks at BareBones, owned just about all their software too, Mailsmith, Yojimbo, in addition to BBEdit. And I could still be using them all with their free lifetime support.

A newer connection is the folks at SmileonmyMac who have a lot of great stuff but TextExpander just works like nothing else I have. It must be hard to sell a little utility like that but this is a lifesaver. And I’ve got it on my iPhone. PDFpen is also the best PDF tool on the Mac. The number of times I’ve had to deal with a form or document and I just type on it and paste in a TIFF of my signature – that is what paperless was supposed to be about. Own just about all their stuff too.

Almost last but not least a special bouquet to HourWorld – a classic example of Mac Shareware. It lasted from OS 9 to OS X and still works on the latest machines – all be it in Rosetta compatibility mode. This bit of work has been on my Macs, and around my family of Macs for over a decade, through 3 major process migrations and at least 4 operating system architectures under Classic Mac OS and OS X.

And I add an “In Memorandum” section to some old software houses that aren’t producing anymore. The folks at Cassidy and Greene who did iTunes before Apple did with SoundJam and the classic game Glider. A morsel of their work still survives with SpellCatcher. A nod to Karelia Software who did desktop search before there even really was search. And Arlo Rose the original Widget-teer before Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Face it if these folks can make something useful for less than $29.95 chances are I’m going to buy it. If for no other reason than they will probably take the $29.95 and make something even better with it. Oh and I probably paid about a million dollars for all those $29.95 pieces of sofware, wonder how far back the records at Kagi go?? Maybe I can find it in my Eudora mailbox somewhere.

The first hit was portability. While the netbooks are small, I don’t think I ever took mine anywhere I didn’t take my last laptop. The form factor may look compelling but in the end it simply wasn’t a ‘carry anywhere’ device. Here is a quick comparison

• Height: Macbook 0.95 inch vs  MSI Wind 0.748-1.24″
• Width: 12.78“ vs 10.23″
  
• Depth: 8.94” vs 7.08″
  
• Weight: 4.5 lbs vs 2.6 lbs
• Weight with power adapter 5lbs vs 3.3lbs

The weight is the clear win for the MSI but the +/- 2″ doesn’t really matter as much as you might imagine. By the time you back up either with the power brick and a few other bits an pieces you aren’t saving any space at all. If you include the power bricks the Macbook closes the gap by 0.2lbs and just about all the dimensional differences.

Once you get past these specs, all the others go to the Macbook (unsuprisingly). The biggest is the screen, keyboard, and the battery life. In the end the MSI wind was a casual device. Anything more than a twitter update or a short email started to become a pain. In the corners, the special characters and cursor keys are especially small so typing and correcting things like URLs was really frustrating for my hands.

Now on the cost front, the two devices couldn’t be more different. So you could argue the comparision isn’t fair on that basis. If I was happy with Windows there were a number of laptop options similar to the Macbook. They couldn’t compete with the Wind on price but both would be sub-$1000.

As a Hackintosh, the MSI was pretty much a get-what-you-payfor operation. It could run the OS capabily but things like the webcam, bluetooth, and audio was problematic. After the initial ‘interesting’ period I was more likely to go to the den and use the ‘big’ machine rather than finding the Wind.

The final measure was battery life. You buy a portable to be portable and my experience with most PC/Windows devices is they are frequently ‘tethered’ not portable. If the Macbook with the new built-in battery can delivery anywhere near the 7 hours promised that will be the biggest measure of portability. As an example – I can shave another 0.5lb off the weight difference if I can afford to leave the Macbook’s power brick at home. And the carry-weight is down to about 1lb difference from the 2lb difference between the machines themselves.

Again as a cost analysis that is a completely different matter but in the end value is driven by how much you use it.