Manpower

Get Bwana from MacUpdate. Runs in Safari (and Firefox too, I believe, though I haven't tried it.) It's free. It's fast. It's reliable. You want the text bigger, use Safari's standard display control tools. With Bwana installed, type in Safari's location field (where you'd type http://...) man:whatever, e.g. man:ls, and if it has a man page it'll be presented in a standard Safari window, nicely typeset and scrollable. Links in the man page to man pages for other UNIX resource are clickable, especially handy for See Also items and getting to config file man pages. If you run the Bwana application itself, you can request it display an index of all man pages for browsing (takes a few minutes, so patience required; the next time you request the index, it'll be quite fast).

I just bough Manpower version 4.0 and I can't tell you how much disappointed I am. The application takes ages to start, before the main window appears several UI glitches occur. Once the main window finally stabilizes and the content is rendered the app is non responsive, menus are not accessible. It just freezes. The only way out is to use Force Quit! I've uninstalled and installed the app several times. the problem persists. I initiated the process at Mac App Store Support to get refunded of the 19.99 euros I spent. I'm using MAC OS X 10.6.7 in the most recent MacBook Air 13''.

I originally posted this in the troubleshooting tab, but figured most people don't browse that. I'm always interested to read if an application is one of those crash or lockup on run affairs: Downloaded this from the developer's website and couldn't get it to work. It briefly brought up a couple small malformed windows before yielding the main screen, and then a sheet was produced explaining that a demo period was in effect and it had a couple buttons for yes/no asking to buy it. I clicked on No because I wanted to try it and it didn't respond! It needed force quitting. Tried again, same deal. This is not ready for prime time yet...

Downloaded this from the developer's website and couldn't get it to work. It briefly brought up a couple small malformed windows before yielding the main screen, and then a sheet was produced explaining that a demo period was in effect and it had a couple buttons for yes/no asking to buy it. I clicked on No because I wanted to try it and it didn't respond! It needed force quitting. Tried again, same deal. This is not ready for prime time yet...

This is a significant update for Manpower, which incorporates all the fully-native integration I've been adding to my apps: native Cocoa toolbar, native printing, clickable links in the data display, and more. This release also allow you to set Manpower as the default viewer for man pages on the Mac. All in all, it's a worthy upgrade, and a good app to check out if you're interested in seeing just how much documentation is available under the Mac's Unix hood.

Never have been able to get it to run on iMac aluminum under 10.6 through 10.6.4; it silently quits on launch (no report).

First impression: I get a little "AppMain.tcl" window next to the window asking if I want to buy a license. Fair enough, since this is shareware, but NOT good when the next thing (after clicking "No") is a "Manpower" window that briefly freezes and resizes. Took me a good 5 seconds to get into the app, on a 2.16GHz C2D. This is required on every launch unless you pay the developer to let you display the man pages that Apple includes for free with OS X. Inside the app: there are 2 panes. There are visually 3 panes; however, they're arranged as the man section as the first part, then the man page short name and description as two more panes that line up with each other. The single potentially useful feature I see is bookmarks. However, I ran into bugs adding bookmarks, and there are also no shortcuts set for adding/removing/displaying bookmarks. The one category that I give this app anything other than a 1 (worst) for is in stability, since it hasn't crashed on me, frozen up, or anything else. Thus it gets an automatic 3 there. Not that that means much, since 90% of "Hello World" apps would get a 3 or better. Really, anyone using this app knows how to run 'man.' These man pages are obviously not useful if you don't know about Unix programming, and if you do, you would not be using this program. *IF* the bookmarks section worked well (and that means things like cross-referencing with other manpages, etc), I might find this software to be worth $5 or less. But $20? Yeah, umm...no.

this 3.1 crashes on launch MBP Snow Leopard 64-bit

Getting tired of posting comments on this obviously greedy developer's "tools." Enough people have posted how to do this for free, in less time than it would take you to even read this page. Man pages for pretty much all of these tools are on the web, as well.

To convert the man page with title 'fubar' to publication-quality PDF: Open a Terminal window. Enter "man -t fubar | open -a -f Preview" (without the quotes.) Yes, it involves some text entry, but if you're reading man pages you need to do that anyway. Besides ManOpen, another free alternative to be aware of is Bwana.

I've tried out VuMan (which is now open source) by this developer and this is certainly better. At least it has an uncluttered UI and it does just what it says. Very simple and it allows you to save man pages. I really can't see too many people shelling out $20 for man page viewer when there are better alternatives. Sorry, there's just nothing groundbreaking here.

Whenever I see a for pay application that has a solid, free alternative I feel like I should point out the alternative. If you need a man viewer this app may be perfect but you also owe it to yourself to check out the free ManOpen ( http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/6408/manopen )