I’ve been using Free!Ship and Free!Ship Plus for 15+ years now, having designed and built myself 7 small kayaks and canoes, with just this “outdated piece of software” which ran on Windows (I’d preferred WinXP for it’s lightweight). But since most of the time I’m on Mac, and it’s very inconvenient to install a Windows dual boot, so I’ve tried using VirtualBox, then tried Wine emulator to run the app!
Both VirtualBox and Wine offer miserable performance. Then came Mac Silicon, and Wine stopped working, though it could still work on older Intel Mac. So I grabbed the FreeShip Plus source (Delphi, the code base bears quite a “mental state” of a late Soviet Union period…) fixed some bugs, managed to quickly build 2 binaries, 1 Intel, 1 Silicon: all native Mac apps! As a software developer, yes I know…
The app has a crappy UI with lots of bugs (its rendering performance has been improved, very good now, Metal – backed OpenGL!) But as a boat builder, I can’t wait for those bugs to be fixed. Just a tool to get the job done, build that boat, get out on the water. FreeShip Plus could be hard to maintain, but with some cares, it could still be built cross-platform: Win, Mac, Linux. Download link on the left!
