Blast from the Past > Anniversary of PowerPC

It’s still strange to me that this small blog is actually celebrating 7 years of anniversary.  The original idea was only to post a couple of posts/apps that worked on the PowerPC, but we kept finding more and more out there… I already have many bookmarked for future testing, because there are more to come for the PowerPC community.

We did take some time off, because we got busy with our standard jobs and at the end of the day I just wanted to come home and watch Survivor and Amazing Race and go to bed.  I kept procrastinating to login and write a new post, putting it off for “tomorrow” which ended up turning to weeks and months….

Now we are back, and I recently purchased a mint condition PowerBook G4 (15”/1.66GHz/1.5GB).  I’m very proud of it, it’s a great machine and I’m bringing this blog back to life one more time, and breathing life into my stainless steel PowerPC!

So, if you find yourself like me, coming into possession of a brand new “old” Mac – wondering what the top 5 essential apps you need to have on your computer…then read on!  Listed below are the Essential 5 apps for you (in my opinion):

TenFourFox – Yes, a trusted browser is a must for any PowerPC user.  TenFourFox is putting in great effort and keeping us updated! – http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

iWork 09’ – This office suite it’s fantastic, still very up to date and you can pull off great results using Keynote, Number and Pages.  Before I was using AppleWorks due to a nostalgic feeling, but iWork works amazing!  Also deserving of a mention here is LibreOffice 5 (but still under development > http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/manulix/other/libreoffice/). iWork 09′ you can find for a great price at https://www.ebay.com/ or https://www.craigslist.com/about/sites

VLC – If you choose to keep your Mac PowerPC free of excessive software, embracing the minimalist movement – then just install this app for your media player, because it will play any type of media movie format.  Super powerful! – https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html

Gimp – A Classic of the classics – everybody needs to have this app because before the internet you would have a computer to play with apps like Gimp. – https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

AppDelete – They say you only need to drag your app to the garbage bin, but I personally do prefer to use an app to take care of that. – http://www.reggieashworth.com/appdelete

Now my friends, you are ready to start!

Since we are an independent blog and there is an annual cost for running this blog any support/donation would be highly appreciated.

Thank you 😀

iScroll2 + Scroll Reverser for MacPowerPC

I found these great apps that it may help someone out there having the same issue that I was couple of weeks ago.

Some of my browsers were really out of date and I found out that TenFourFox seems to be the one to use as default.

Browsing in an iBook it’s not a easy task if you don’t have a mouse plugged in. My trackpad doesn’t have features like scrolling so I found an app that it does the job for me.

iScroll2 – can be download here > http://iscroll2.sourceforge.net/

Second app is Scroll Reverser, well long short story it does reverse the scrolling.
Scroll Reverse – can be download here > https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

And if you are wondering TenFourFox > http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

QuickTime Enabler for TenFourFox

The TenFourFox QuickTime Enabler allows you to play selected HTML5 video and audio files and YouTube videos in QuickTime, outside of the browser. You can even play H.264 content with the QTE. This gives you a safer alternative to Flash for many videos.

* Quick Time Enabler – http://adf.ly/hyVkN

If you especially need YouTube support, you may also benefit from installing the MacTubesEnabler.

* MacTubes Enabler – http://adf.ly/hyWIT

Top 3 Browsers + PowerPC

Firefox PowerPC 6 is a web browser optimized for PowerPC Macs, has been created from Firefox 5 official sources

The project is aimed to port Firefox 5 to glorious Power Macintosh machines.

Firefox PowerPC 6 has been customized and compiled on a G4 PowerBook with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8.

* Firefox PowerPC 6.0.2 – Leopard 10.5.+ PowerPC – http://www.xabaras.it/firefox-powerpc/

Sharing here what we do have available because someone might think is very interesting, but I still recommend TenFourFox, SeaMonkey and Leopard WebKit.

* TenFourFox – http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

* SeaMonkey 2.25 – http://sourceforge.net/projects/seamonkey-for-ppc/

* Leopard Webkit – https://code.google.com/p/leopard-webkit/

2 Minutes to Update (Browsers PowerPC)

This is catch up with your favorite PowerPC Browsers and the clicks goes to:

TenFourFox – 17.0.4 – http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

AuroraFox – 20.0a2 – http://aurorafox.wordpress.com/

SeaMonkey – 2.16.1 – https://code.google.com/p/seamonkey-ppc/downloads/list 

Leopard WebKit – 144371 – http://code.google.com/p/leopard-webkit/

OmniWeb – 5.11.2 – http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniweb/ (updated Jan/2012)

These are my favorite 5 web browsers.

 

Browsers Update on PowerPC

A while ago we mentioned Browsers for PowerPC in few of our posts.  We also mentioned a few updates from those Browsers, because we believe it is important to have applications updated as much as possible.  Here is our list of recently updated Browsers, which are probably the Big Four for PowerPC, these days.

* TenFourFox – 17.0 – http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com or https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/37761/tenfourfox 

* AuroraFox – 19.0a2 – http://aurorafox.wordpress.com/ or https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/43362/aurorafox 

* SeaMonkey – 2.14_1 – https://code.google.com/p/seamonkey-ppc/

* Leopard WebKit – 129056 – http://code.google.com/p/leopard-webkit/ or http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/43456/leopard-webkit

Browser for Mac PowerPC (revisited)

NagaraBrowser / Stainless Browser for Mac PowerPC

It’s really hard to say which browser is the best option for PowerPC these days, it’s a never ending forum.  Today we can not complain about it anymore because we have  some great options.  I believe TenFourFox (http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/) is installed in 11 of 10 PowerPC Macs around the world and it’s probably one of the most powerful and updated options today and runs in G5/G4/G3.  Also Aurora, that just came out for PowerPC,  seems to be the promised one.  I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and I always have 4 tabs + google and it didn’t crash once!  So far it seems to be a very stable browser.  We can not forget to mention Camino, which is another good option and before this list starts growing (thumbs up) let’s mention some names that are not quite as popular but they deserve to own a place in your hard drive.

NagaraBrowser (1.0.1) (PowerPC 10.2 [way to go Jaguar] or later) – http://www6.plala.or.jp/lingo/contents/software/nagarabrowser.html   The nicest thing about NagaraBrowser is the full screen view mode.  You also have your entire desktop to work as a browser and you still have all access to your docks.   Also, you can open any search web site like GOOGLE for example and leave it as a wallpaper in case you need to do some fast research,  you just press the short cut (command + tab) and bingo, it is ready for you!  Having all your research as wallpaper makes your life really easy when you are reading and writing at the same time!

Stainless (0.8) (PowerPC 10.5) – http://www.stainlessapp.com/  I like to use Stainless because it’s very fast, very stable and it has a very nice layout.  It kind of looks like Firefox but the Bookmarks are in the left side (vertical).  I’m not quite sure how long they will keep updating this software for PowerPC compliance, but let’s hope that our community gets bigger and bigger not only for those that already have a PowerPC Mac but also for those that own an Intel and want to have a second machine running side by side.  I also enjoyed parallel sessions which allow you to log in using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time, that’s awesome new feature, not even Google Chrome has something similar.

Browsers For Mac PowerPC

Here is the thing there are good choices for PowerPC but there are much more for Intel. It’s unbelievable why they stopping doing browsers for our old PPC. Anyway, I think the most sad thing for a PPC user is not be able to use Google Chrome. But follow a list of good Browsers:

* TenFourFox (the only one that support HTML5):                                                             http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox

* Camino (one of the best)                                                                                                         http://www.caminobrowser.org

* FireFox (3.6)                                                                                                                              http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html#languages

* Safari (there is no link because is already on your computer, sadly Apple don’t update anymore)

* Opera (10.63)                                                                          http://www.opera.com/browser/download/?os=mac&ver=10.63&local=y

* OminiWeb (this is a great browser)                                                                                http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniweb/download/

*SeaMonkey                                                                                                              http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

* Flock (2.0) Was really good too, but they discontinued

* NetScape                                                                                                                                      http://browser.netscape.com/releases

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