Freeware/Donationware Casualty.
Today I am mourning the death of Lingon. An excellent Plist editor for OS X. I was going to write about how Zug told me that there was a dedicated plist editor in 10.6 (one of the few redeeming qualities of 10.6) and then immediately told me that it wasn’t as pretty as Lingon. I started to gather web links so I could give Peter Borg his proper credit for making arguably the best plist editor in the world only to see the following on his page:
Hi!
First of all I’d like to thank you for your interest in my applications. But I have now come to a point where I don’t have the time to spend on the applications that they deserve so I have decided to not release any more versions for the foreseeable future.
Cheers,
Peter Borg
You can download the latest version from here
I know that a lot of freeware and donationware out there is excellent. I myself never gave Peter any money as I used that program twice. I look back and think I how much time that saved me. A simple $1 or 2$ tip would have been insignificant to me and in the grand scheme a couple of bucks to Peter from a few thousand people could have kept the development alive, and even sparked new developments from him.
Next time you use freeware/donationware to save yourself time… send a couple of bones if you value the software. If you don’t have any money, send the author a thank you email telling them how their software saved you or your client time, energy and/or money. They may never respond to you, but know that they did read and appreciate the email.
