> sorry - you'll need the advice of the Mac users for that answer. Many of > my customers have swung to PC's for the plethora of programs available to > do tasks ..the Mac software writers don't seem to be keeping up in that > regard Karl It's simply the economics of scale, and the fact that most amateur dabblers use PCs. The plethora of excellent freeware for the PC (often better functionality at the price of a less glossy GUI) is testimony to many things. For all the (my) bitching about M$ their API is fairly well documented and the tools are widely available. For instance, VBA (part of Word, Excel, Powerpoint) is perfectly adequate to extract meta-information from TIFFs. Heck, it's a cinch to do basic image processing/analysis straight from a spreadsheet. Some of this only works with PCs (API calls needed) but most of it should work equally well on a Mac. The biggest threat to freeware is data encryption (read "Protection racket"). Technically it could be illegal to reverse engineer encryption schemes. This brings two sources of un-earned cash for the manufacturers: 1) You are forced to use their bloated, overpriced inefficient software 2) You are forced to pay a licence to use the SDK to decode the information that didn't need encrypting in the first place. Either way: you lose and they win. Bob
