Installer is used to install Mac OS X applications. I'm not too sure what that is supposed to mean as the Help topic is rather brief. I think it's for installing PKM formatted files. Key Caps is the usual application from Mac OS 9, spiffied up to look nice. It's the only application I've seen where the About box explains what it does. All of the other applications have brief about boxes with an image, the name of the application, the version number and copyright. Not that I've done About this Application much. There is still a Keychain Access utility and support in the OS. Hopefully the new Mac OS X applications will use the Keychain database so I don't have to type alll the passwords constantly.

Netinfo Manager defaults to modifying the local Netinfo database. It's very reminiscent of going through the Windows Registry, though with a nicer interface. There is a Network Utility which has such popular TCP/IP utilities as Netstat, Ping, nslookup, Traceroute, Whois, Finger, and a port scan. Nothing earth-shattering but nice to have. Print Center lets you configure printers, nothing complicated there. Process Viewer shows a list of running processes. It includes the name, user, status and CPU/memory usage. You can get the process id of a process and that's it. Can't kill anything or send it a signal or whatever.

Almost done. SetupAssistant doesn't do anything. It runs the first time the system is booted so that you can configure your computer with a wizard. But after that it just says you should change things via System Preferences. Stuffit Expander is a full Mac OS X version, minus the ability to mount disk images (not yet supported). Terminal is a nice vt-something emulator. It automatically starts up a shell to your local account and from there you can use the regular BSD command line utilities. You can change the default shell, it has definable scrollback buffer, and you can have it run a file on startup. It's the easiest way to access the BSD layer.

So those are the included Mac OS X utilities. In general the usefulness of these are better than the Mac OS X applications. I'm sure though, that since I'm not a sysadmin the utilities could be better and I just don't know. As long as I have a bit of space left, I might as well write about upgrading software.

The problem with commercial software is that you have to upgrade it, and they are often paid upgrades. Especially when the System software is upgraded, that tends to break applications which must then either be patched or replaced with a new version. And of course since the new version has more "features" it will therefore be a paid upgrade. And the costs mount, in a sort of a neverending treadmill. New OS, new application, have to learn both, have to pay for both. System software I can live with paying, that's sort of necessary in my mind.

So unless I want to stop upgrading the system software I sometimes have to upgrade the other software. Like for Mac OS X, which breaks so many apps (even with the Classic layer) that I will be replacing a lot of applications. I want to go native, lots of companies did not prepare native software to coincide with the release of Mac OS X, therefore I'm probably going to drop a few applications in favor of new ones. If I'm going to pay for an upgrade (and lets face it, I don't buy upgrades, I buy full versions of the programs) I might as well pay for something better.

There's some annoying software that I should drop just on principle. Quicken keeps bugging me about my taxes and upgrading the software. Virtual PC keeps bugging me to register. Those are the only two that I haven't been able to shut up. Mac OS X is that way too, but it only asked me once. I in general do not want to register software because too many companies use that to generate a marketing list. So I really hate having to register. Oh well.

To a certain extent the last three paragraphs also apply to shareware, except that shareware tends to die quicker and be upgraded slower. So with a Unix- based OS, it's time to look at Open Source and other freeware software to replace some old standbys. I'll be addressing these needs in future articles. My aim is to fulfill 80% of my needs (which would be 100% of my essential needs) without paying too much for new software.