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Pity the mighty dinosaur. You were there first, you are bigger, stronger and older then those pesky little mammals scuttling around your feet, but it seems like all anyone wants to talk about is how cool it is to give birth to live young and how exciting that new lactation feature is. The world of computer software is not quite as red in tooth and claw as the Jurassic, but software (no matter how “intelligently designed”) evolves as surely as does natural life, and many ancient dinosaurs of Mac-kind continue to plod on in a world that is several ice ages and a comet impact different from the world in which they were initially released a decade or more ago.

“Dinosaur” Mac applications are not “abandonware” or useless. All the applications I will discuss are professional applications that are still supported and developed, and have many thousands of loyal users. Each one of them is still a real-world solution. Still, they all have seen their moment in the sun pass, as the changing nature of the Mac market, new competitors, OS upgrades, and the cruel passage of time have knocked many of these grand old applications from their former pre-eminence. Among these grandfathers of Macdom are Qualcomm’s Eudora, Extensis’s Portfolio, Bare Bones’ BBEdit, Netopia’s Timbuktu, and EMC’s Retrospect.

Each of these products is still actively developed. All of them run on OS X, and several are already Universal Binaries, running natively on Intel Macs. They all have engineers fixing bugs and working on new versions, and each product can be purchased right now. Every one of these applications was once the undisputed champion (and in some cases founder) of entire Mac software genres with life-spans well over a decade and heritages dating back to the old “classic” MacOS days.

Although these Mac applications all do different tasks, ranging from remote control to data backup, they all share many features in common (scaly skin, anyone?) “Dinosaur” apps generally feature very “old-school” user interfaces that pre-date OS X, have very powerful but complex feature sets, can be intimidating for beginners, and enjoy a rabidly loyal (if declining) user base. These apps also tend to be priced somewhat higher then their competitors, often as a legacy of the “old days” when they could claim a premium price as the founder of a new market segment.

Qualcomm’s Eudora is one of the grandfathers of email on the Mac. The first version came out in the early 1990s and Eudora has evolved through many revisions since. Geeks love it for its very powerful customization features; you can literally tweak hundreds of obscure options. Eudora is also very fast and has a powerful filtering mechanism. Yet Eudora is missing many modern email features. It doesn’t handle HTML email, has poor built-in SPAM filtering, and doesn’t take advantage of any modern MacOS features such as Spotlight. In spite of these flaws, Eudora still has a loyal cadre of users who are sticking with this mature product in the hope of upgrades to come. In an era when the capable Mail.app is free with every copy of the OS, Eudora has some major work ahead of it in order to stay relevant in the modern age.

The Mac has always been the favorite of creative users such as photographers and designers. Extensis’s media asset application, Portfolio, was one of the first products of its type, allowing users to catalog their collection of digital assets such as photos, illustrations, and clip art. Stuffed with an amazing and powerful suite of image categorizations tools and output options, Portfolio has managed to maintain a loyal user base and continue with a steady upgrade cycle through the years. Extensis will have to maintain this innovation in the future, as (in a common scenario for all the applications covered here) Apple has muscled in on their user base, with programs like Aperture, designed specifically for pro photographers. Still, Extensis is fighting back, with new features and a Universal version that may keep this dinosaur alive even as the mammals take over.

BBEdit is a humble text editor, beloved by programmers, scripters, and HTML jockeys everywhere. It has the level of power you expect in professional application and a feature list to match. BBEdit is renown for its extensive library of text manipulation tools and support for many common scripting and programing languages, but it has faced some serious competition in recent years from both a new generation of powerful OS X shareware applications such as TextMate and free editors. In addition, like many of it dinosaur peers, BBEdit’s user interface is very “old school” and doesn’t take advantage of much of the modern look and feel of OS X. Still, BBEdit has fought back, with aggressive support for some new OS X technologies, and Bare Bones has created a stripped-down free version (called Text Wrangler) to both head off the more inexpensive competition and addict a new generation of text fiends. BBEdit’s future looks good, and its legion of fans will likely be happy for years to come.

Netopia’s Timbuktu was the very first application that let you take control of a faraway Mac from the comfort of your local desktop. Over the years, Timbuktu has gathered a loyal base of users including system administrators, consultants, and road warriors. Although Timbuktu has been kept up-to-date (the latest version is a universal binary and features optional integration with the popular Skype application) it has faced some new and stiff competition over the years, and its powerful features are wrapped in a somewhat dated user interface. In a familiar refrain, Apple itself has taken a bite out of Timbuktu by offering its own remote control program, and several smaller, more inexpensive competitors (including the free open-source VNC) are busy scurrying around Timbuktu’s large scaly feet. Timbuktu has kept fresh by adding new speed and security features that its competitors have not matched, and has hung on to a solid user base, but as Apple and others continue to make remote controlling another computer ubiquitous, Timbuktu will need to evolve right along with them.

Backing up has always been a necessity of computing, and EMC’s Retrospect is one of the longest-lived Mac backup applications. It remains the only enterprise-class Mac backup option, and its ability to do cumulative backups to a wide variety of media types is unparalleled. Still (and stop if this sounds familiar) they are threatened by both a slew of new OS X-only competitors, and Apple themselves has added backup to the MacOS, reducing Retrospect’s market even further. Retrospect also suffers from a very complex user interface, and has been somewhat slow to support new OS technology, such as modern file metadata. Nonetheless, Retrospect is pretty secure for a big old reptile, given that its enterprise-level support (such as being apple to back up to tape drives) is not matched by any other native Mac software. With a Universal version on its way, this dinosaur should be roaming the Earth for a while to come.

There are more dinosaur applications around then these five. Roxio’s Toast used to be the only way to burn optical media on a Mac, something that the Finder and most Apple applications can now do themselves. Extensis’s Fusion (previously Suitcase) was an essential font manager, until the OS began to come with built-in font management. Equilibrium’s DeBebelizer once was the only way to convert graphics between different formats, a function now handled by Preview. As we’ve seen, no matter what ecosystem a dino has evolved in, several things are working against it, including competition for mindshare and marketshare from Apple and others, as well as expensive price points and dated user interfaces. Nonetheless, all these dinosaurs, unlike their biological counterparts, are likely to survive. Loyal user bases and ongoing engineering efforts will likely keep all of these applications going for years to come as they hopefully find new users in the fast-changing world of the Macintosh.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Software Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.