PathFinder - Finder how it should be

nav... said:
Because someone has gone to the trouble of putting their time and resources into building it. This is not an apple product, I believe it has been developed by one person, and you know I think he might want to make a living from his efforts.
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What I meant was, it's one of those apps that "tack onto" functionality of a previous app. And charge you a lot for it.

For example, take Firefox against IE. You're there, sat at your Windows PC (shock :p ) and imagine you are faced with using IE or paying $40 to buy and download Firefox. Most people wouldn't bother, and Firefox would be stuck at a low market share like Opera has never recovered from.

On the other hand, I was in need of an imaging editing app for Mac OS X. There is nothing like image editing on the Mac by default apart from the basic things in iPhoto. I neither wanted or needed Photoshop, but something that could provide me what I needed in a cheaper and perhaps faster package. If you've seen Paint.NET for Windows that's all I needed, and that was free :D Anything free like Seashore was pretty bad though and so I tried Pixelmator. This was a great app, and I paid $60 (even after the Pound started tanking) for it since it provided me with so much new functionality for the price.

Pathfinder looks great, and it would certainly speed up some common tasks. But for $40, no.
 
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I think it's all question of Mac developers gaining some perspective to "new Apple market". The market price (as in, what you pay for new, sealed soft on the net - forest shop or otherwise) of iLife package is $49-59. The market price of iWork package is $49. That's the market values of two most popular software packages currently made for mac.

So with all due respect - a single app that does unzipping, or some minor photo editing stuff, or some moving of files around, or, for gods sake - simple tasks like NNTP news reader CAN NOT cost $40, $50, $60 in this day and age. It's just not on. There is great, great need for proper, working, thought through applications on mac. We all know most basic bundled apps could do with improvement or are missing. But the after market solutions are priced like it was still 20th century and macs were proprietary platform from top to bottom. If it continues, Apple consumer market will be either full of pirates and die like Amiga, or full of people constantly peed off by rip off and die like SGI.
 
http://mainframe.macheist.com/

The MacHeist bundles are always great value, but I agree with the point v0n made. Single task or simple software cannot be released at the current high price. PathFinder is great but should be more like $25.

iBank is great but is $60 and that's too much! $30 would be much better.
 
nav... said:
Because someone has gone to the trouble of putting their time and resources into building it. This is not an apple product, I believe it has been developed by one person, and you know I think he might want to make a living from his efforts.
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That's all fine and well but $40 is too high, a packaged copy of OS X costs only three time that much. Around $20 would be more reasonable in my opinion, and probably make more money for the developers.
 
$40, $50, $60 is sod-all for a high quality product you're going to use often.

You're not entitled to make any demands of the developers. The price/sales balance must be working out fine for them else they'd change the price.
 
wush said:
$40, $50, $60 is sod-all for a high quality product you're going to use often.

You're not entitled to make any demands of the developers. The price/sales balance must be working out fine for them else they'd change the price.
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We're not demanding anything. We're not buying anything either...

A large proportion of Apple developers take the **** with price since, well, Apple slighty do and get away with it. The difference is for most of us in this sub-forum paying the so-called "Apple tax" is worth it. We get an awesome computer, (from my experience) awesome customer support in an Apple Store, awesome OS and awesome software by default. Path Finder may be worth it to some people, but for a lot in this thread it simply isn't.

Why do you think Microsoft have Office 2007 Ultimate for a bit less than £40 for students? They know when you charge £100 for the Student/Home version most students will either download it illegally or just use OpenOffice. Moving it into a price point generates money for Microsoft, further people gaining "dependence" on Office (therefore, in theory, more sales in the future) and keeps the purchaser legal. Which is why I have Office 2007 Ultimate.
 
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It's a file manager! I don't think a utility could be much simpler.

I'm not saying it's not the bestest, superest file manager, or that the developers don't deserve to get paid, just pricing this kinda thing lower they would get way more sales.
 
Ok, was just joshing.

Yes, I believe they would make more money. Less pirating, less swaying potential customers, greater interest through snowballing of sales in particular the huge student market. It's really a utility that no body actually needs, though a lot of people might like and for that it's just not priced well.

I'm sure they thought plenty before deciding to sell a shareware alternative to OS X's file manager for a third of the price of OS X.
 
Believe it or not I bought it :)

I've found it a bit of a godsend to be honest. It's fast, easy to manipulate and in my opinion superior to Finder. I don't use it as a replacement for finder as such, but I do find myself using it more and more.

Ah, and when I say I bought it, what I mean is my company bought it :cool:
 
Played around with demo and it's pretty good, has a unforgivable flow however:

While I work I sort all my files by "Date modified". Always. It's just easier for me. What I hate about Pathfinder is the fact that every time you switch between folders view defaults back to Sort by Name. Every time. And I can't find option to disable it or to make it remember than I want everything sorted by Date Modified, not reset every time I change folders. Even Finder remembers what you set your view option to. It's infuriating, it's unforgivable, if I paid $40 for this I would be chasing developer with fire axe right now.
 
I've just got Path Finder (demo!) and I cannot see the fuss. I'll give it some more playing with before I make my final decision.

Still don't think it's worth the money so I'll probably uninstall it.
 
I used it a while ago and I just don't get the fuss. It seems to integrate FTP and SFTP (MacFusion - free!), Terminal (Terminal - free!) and Finder (Finder - free!). I couldn't justify dumping $40 on something like that. The only thing it does that I'd like Finder to do is tabs, but that ain't worth $40. I'd much rather put that cash towards Pixelmator or the Macheist bundles or something.

Some indie Mac developers have an odd habit of pricing their products quite highly - I don't know whether it's to imply quality or what, but it doesn't fool me!
 
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