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Sig Software > Fun, Utilities, and Productivity

Words by Bill Troop

April 2008

Gideon Greenspan's Sig Software is the source of some of some truly useful Mac software that most people don't know about. These inexpensive little gems of programs may not be used every day but they are lifesavers to have on hand when you need them.

NameCleaner

There is excellent interchange of _file content_ between Mac, Windows, and other platforms. The problem is that _file names_ are still often incompatible. For example, if you want to store Mac files on a network drive, perhaps using one of the excellent, inexpensive NAS units we have reviewed in the past, you will quickly and painfully discover that some of the files won't copy over because of incompatible names.

NameCleaner extremely quickly lets you select bunches of files and folders, and then globally change their names so that stubborn characters that make cross-platform network drives choke won't give you any problems. Characters often used in Mac file names that cause trouble include the forward slash (which will often appear in legacy Mac file names), the asterisk, question mark, and several others.

The interface of NameCleaner is not the simplest and Mac-like. This is not a disadvantage. Changing file names globally is a serious operation, and you ought to spend a minute or two thinking about it before you do it, especially given that NameCleaner allows almost infinite control over the process. That said, if all you want to do is change all names to make them Windows-compatible, NameCleaner will let you do it with two or three button presses.

I often receive or download files onto my Mac that can't be stored on my NAS or shipped over to my Dell laptop. Spending a few seconds running NameCleaner beforehand gracefully solves this problem. I have been using the program for 18 months, and have renamed and filtered tens of thousands of files without encountering a single hitch. This is well-thought out, solid software -- rather a rarity today!

NameCleaner is $35; bundled with its companion program Cross Platform, which offers further help and analysis in moving files between Windows and Mac, it costs $45. Both products are available for both OS X and OS 7/8/9. The bundle is particularly useful if you have an Intel-based Mac and will be running Mac OS and Windows simultaneously.

Email Merge

Email Merge at $39 is a full-featured wizard for creating personalized email messages from FileMaker files, the clipboard or text files. Powerful yet simple, it is an ideal tool for increasing small business productivity and revenue. It is compatible with all major Mac email programs.

TableText

One of the most ingenious of Sig Software's tools is TableText, $20. Unlike any contemporary word processing software, this nifty utility lets you easily convert tables in text form (which you might have acquired through a scan, for example) into true tabular rows and columns. Anyone who has to do a lot of text processing and formatting will know how valuable such a tool can be and how much time and aggravation it can save. To my knowledge, only XyWrite, the powerful old DOS-based word processor (still used by many under DOS emulation on Windows, OS X and Linux), ever offered anything like this functionality before. But TableText goes much further than XyWrite ever did in allowing you easily to manipulate and convert plain text columns into tables that can then be easily imported into nearly any contemporary database, spreadsheet, word processing or page layout program.

Sig Software has several other useful, fairly priced programs. Visit the company at sigsoftware.com, and for fun, visit the companion site websudoku.com, the Web's most popular online Sudoku site. Sig Software shows, in this era of buggy bloatware, how much we still need intelligent, individual programmers to solve the intractable problems the larger companies won't tackle. What impresses me about Gideon Greenspan is both his ability to identify problems that need to be solved, and his ability to write programs that do what they are supposed to do without bugs.