Ode to the Shareware Authors
Welcome! This is my third November as a columnist for My Mac, and in the previous two Novembers I have written a seasonal “what-I-am-thankful-for” column. This year, I intend to do the same, but instead of a multi-point list, I have one specific thing that I want to bring up and express my sincere thanks for:
Plain and simple, Mac users are blessed with outstanding shareware authors.
This is certainly not a new revelation, but one that I have come to appreciate more than ever in recent months. This is because of one simple fact: I’ve experienced the shareware on the Dark Side, and it wasn’t until I saw how dismal it is over there that I appreciated how good Mac users have it!
For those of you who have never heard me rant about this, the campus of the college I attend is virtually 100% Wintel. Thus, I can use the WWW and email servers on campus via my Mac, but no other parts of the campus network, such as the numerous Windows-only applications they have available. This isn’t a big deal, but to ensure compatibility and use a couple of the very Windows-specific applications available, I decided it would be nice to run Windows occasionally. So, I purchased Virtual PC 2.0 from Connectix, with Windows 95.
This is not going to be a review of VPC; I’ll just say that on my 250 MHz G3, it performs good enough for me, and although I’m not about to try playing many commercial 3D games with it, it runs fast enough that I thought I could try to find some cool shareware games for Windows 95 to play.
There aren’t many.
I was appalled at the dearth of good shareware titles for Windows, especially the lack of good arcade games. Even the “top picks” and most popular files at the big software download sites were mostly demos of commercial games. The few shareware titles I did download and try weren’t nearly as good as any of the games that Adam and I review each and every month in Game Guys. If we were doing that column for a PC magazine, we’d have run out of material a long time ago!!!
The same applies to other genres of software, at least in my experience. Maybe someone with more experience on the Wintel side can point me towards good PC shareware, but I haven’t found very much, whether looking for games, utilities, interface enhancements, or anything else. There is no comparison to Macintosh shareware!
So, this one’s for you, all you shareware authors. This is to not only the Ambrosias’ and the FreeVerses’ and the Greg Landwebers and the John Brochus’ out there, but to all of the lesser-known authors who have also devoted countless hours into producing quality programs. Thank you for providing Mac users everywhere with a less expensive alternative to spending hundreds of dollars on commercial software. Thank you for your labor of love and your devotion to the greatest computer platform in the world. You are one of the things that defines the Macintosh computing experience, and we would never be the same without you. Thank you for providing yet another way that Macs are far superior to PCs.
Thank you!!
Mike Wallinga
mikew@mymac.com
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