Been controlling the Freedoms via a Heath Robinson setup for about a year now (see photo)
Attachment 18690
What we have there is a USB dongle which is being fed by LightKeyApp on the MacBook, straight into the DiFi unit and then out to a WiFi transceiver to the fixtures. It's a complicated mess of wires which works, and works well (but requires two power adapters to work....one for the transceiver, one for the DiFi unit).
When the LightRider dongle arrives, it' a case of plugging the wireless transceiver into that, which will then be picked up wirelessly by everything else via battery dongles....simples :)
As for programming the Freedom sticks....yes it's a lot of effort but it's well worth it.
I've done mine to pretty much mirror my wash lighting, and have programmes which chase along and up and down the sticks. You can also (depending on the DMX software you use) just tell the sticks to use any of the built-in programs. My main reason for wanting to program them however was because I'm always losing remote controls/having batteries in the damned things going flat, and it's one less thing to have to control during the evening when everything else is already through DMX.