ALBION  Nothing builds with 1.8 under Snow Leopard. Not gimp, not emacs, most of their dependencies fail. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling using instructions given on the web site. Still no luck. A varying handful of important ports are always broken at any given time, but 1.8 achieves new milestones in port breakage.  
(Version 1.8)

ALBION  Good idea. Any reason it can't handle 12 reps?  
(Version 1.2)

ALBION  I bought a license for this years ago... same problems. Even with all plug-ins disabled, simple edits often ended in crashes. Audacity is buggy as hell and annoying to use, but is at least free. Hopefully Amadeus and Audacity will improve with maturity, but they've both been in development for quite some time...

So many great apps for OS X these days, yet this is apparently a difficult thing to develop. Puzzling.  
(Version 1.4)

ALBION  Of course it works. This could be a sign that something else about your system needs troubleshooting.  
(Version 1.5.1)

ALBION  Installs fine, does not execute. OS X 10.5.6 with Java update 3.  
(Version 1.3.01)

ALBION  Yes, it is the best Emacs on OS X, because it's more of an Emacs than Aquamacs, the only credible competitor.

It is actually not a "port" at this point. Emacs built from source is almost exactly the same thing as Carbon Emacs. I think Carbon Emacs still bundles some elisp that isn't part of the standard distribution. Otherwise, the differences are mostly cosmetic. I wouldn't swear to his, but I seem to remember reading that the current Mac codebase, called nextstep in the cvs tree, actually uses Cocoa interfaces, not Carbon. No doubt someone else here can shed some light on that subject.

Anyway, this is the OS X Emacs of choice.  
(Version 20090104)

ALBION  Interesting how nobody seems to complain about the convenience of Apple's Software Update, or indeed about the self-update feature present in nearly every freeware and shareware program for Mac these days, yet when Google provides the same convenience feature for software it distributes, people start muttering about secret spyware, etc.

Guess what? It's FREE. Nobody is forcing you to use it. Those who are happy with iPhoto, GO USE iPhoto and enjoy it.  
(Version 3.0.1.321)

ALBION  Four stars for speed, tool and network features not found in iPhoto, and... it's FREE.  
(Version 3.0.0.310)

ALBION  Congratulations on switching.

iPhoto is bloated and slow -- agreed. While it doesn't natively support any free hosting services, Flickr does offer a plug-in for iPhoto.

I'm going to check out Picasa for Mac now. :)  
(Version 3.0.0.310)

ALBION  It can display arbitrary file paths. Not sure what more you could need.  
(Version 1.6)

ALBION  If you never a saw a green polaroid, you aren't trying hard enough.  
(Version 0.9.5r5b)

ALBION  Complainers:

Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and other GUI apps for email will never fail to disappoint, because they try to do too much. Apple Mail is the best of the lot, but like every other featureful mail client, it suffers from feature-itis, and it will eat your mail now and then, given a chance.

Google Mail, for better or worse, is the right thing for most people, and you don't need a bloated, craptacular email client to use it. Client programs are just another 100 things to wrong. You already have to use a bloated, craptacular web browser anyway, so why use another one for email...

Try Fluid or Prism if you really need to have an icon in your dock for your email application.

(No, I'm not shilling for Google. Like you, I resisted switching to web-based email for a long time. Now I wonder why I ever put myself through the pain of storing mail locally. That is all.)  
(Version 2.0.0.19)

ALBION  At long last, the clisp port is fixed! And all of my other 200+ ports are building correctly. Nice.  
(Version 1.7.0)

ALBION  As usual, MaNGOSx does not work. It downloads the script, then can't find it. It does not seem to be compatible with MAMP 1.7.1's SQL. Installation and usage instructions are vague and often wrong. Developer forums aren't much better. Goes nowhere, does nothing. Standard behavior for this app through many revisions.  
(Version 2.0)

ALBION  Agreed, support for this product is useless (and often quite surly).

It does work. Not as well as it used to, but it works. If you are having difficulty with the URL/filename insanity, try eliminating the filename portion completely, such as:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/

My listeners often have to reconnect a few times, and I often have to restart the icecast server several times before they can get any connection at all. An infinite-buffering problem is also evident. The problem is definitely Nicecast and not my firewall. But once it is finally all working, it works reasonably well. Keep trying.  
(Version 1.8.6)

ALBION  Just improvements and bug fixes? I wish other developers would focus on improvements and bug fixes, instead of introducing flashy new features every few months that they can't implement properly. As for Fire... it was always quite buggy and prone to crashing. Adium just works.

Props to the Adium team.  
(Version 1.0.2)

ALBION  Mellel is far more sane and consistent than Word, and far less bug-ridden than Nisus. Mellel and Nisus both do a fairly poor job of importing .doc format. Only NeoOffice is an even vaguely credible alternative to Word for dealing with this obfuscated propietary format.

If you need to process words on a Mac, and communicate with the rest of the world, you need them all. Well, honestly, you could probably live without Nisus.  
(Version 2.2)

ALBION  It's free. It's open source. Unhappy? Put up or shut up.  
(Version 2.7.2)

ALBION  "Version 2.2 has major GUI changes in the navigation of its text editing capabilities, including a simplified tool bar. It can also open up Gzip (.gz) files. And like BBEdit, it adds Java support for TeX and JavaScript languages."

Yes, but... has it stopped constantly crashing, and does the SFTP support actually work now?  
(Version 2.2)

ALBION  With support for regexps, projects, functions, tabs, shell commands, and bindings to FTP clients such as Cyberduck and Fugu, Smultron is simply the best free editor in Cocoa on OS X. Pay no heed to the commenters and reviewers who haven't the wherewithal to learn a different key binding or cope with page-based scrolling.

Did I mention Smultron is FREE?  
(Version 2.2.6)

ALBION  The scrolling behavior that makes Smultron "useless" for you is the same scrolling behavior in every OS X application that uses the Cocoa text widget. Maybe you'd be happier with Windows?  
(Version 2.2.6)

ALBION  The author says as much on his own web site... your point?

He should be praised for such devotion in maintaining an old favorite of many Mac users. Most others would have abandoned this project long ago.  
(Version 1.8.15)

ALBION  Notice how the developer response neatly sidestepped the glaring absence of an Intel version.  
(Version 2.0.2)

ALBION  Linden Labs has had years, literally, to get their Mac viewer up to snuff, and they've had a Mac viewer from day one. Kudos on having an OS X version, but it is absolutely dreadful compared to the Windows viewer. If you run the Windows viewer on an Intel-inside Macintosh with BootCamp or Parallels, the difference in performance is like night and day. LL can no longer fall back on excuses. Mac hardware is not gimped. The Mac viewer code base is.  
(Version 1.10.4.4)

ALBION  Come on, Blizz... as long as updates are coming out, how about flipping the Intel switch on the compiler please?  
(Version 1.20e)

ALBION  0.8 will not launch on my MBP running current version of OS X. Back to 0.71...  
(Version 0.8)

ALBION  What does this do that OS X power management doesn't do already?  
(Version 0.5)