Want more Mac freeware? Get FreewarePub KidiFree
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Review, Software Wednesday Apr 30, 2008Just a heads up on a new release of a program called FreewarePub KidiFree (page is in French, but you can use Google for an English translation), which apparently attempts to keep track of the available Mac freeware out there. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s probably because this software was previously only available in a French language version. Now, when you initially install the program, you can select English as your desired language, but we warn you upfront that not everything has been translated. In particular, certain menu options seem to have been missed in the translation process. It’s not a big deal, since the program seems pretty intuitive.
The search feature could be better - it appears to only search software titles, not descriptions, which could make it less than useful if you don’t have some idea what you’re looking for. But if you just feel like browsing through a collection of available freeware, this will let you do it. One interesting feature (which we did not try) was that apparently it will let you save a collection of freeware in a designated directory, then burn the whole mess to a CD or DVD. What might be a good feature is that it lets you designate certain programs as favorites - but there’s a definite problem here. We designated “Bean” (a freeware word processing program) as a favorite, and look what happened when we went back into favorites and clicked on it:
Yes, that’s the wrong program, and the description is in French. This apparently happened because we still had some text in the search field, but when we removed that text and tried again, it then showed the correct program - but the description was still in French! Clearly, FreewarePub KidiFree needs some additional work. But, if you simply want to be able to browse available Mac freeware (the way you would browse, say, used CD’s in a thrift shop) then this program should at least work well enough to allow that. Hopefully they’ll fix the bugs and complete the English translation soon. If you know of a better free program to browse Mac freeware, please let us know in a comment!
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