If you would contact me by email I could probably offer some suggestions to help you. One thing that comes to mind is trying UTF-16. I don't see why you have to be so rude and give the program 1 star, that's pretty silly considering you didn't even contact me for technical support. I can't spend each day monitoring the feedback provided on MacUpdate for all my products. I generally only do that when I do updates, but even then it isn't the preferred way to conduct technical support for a product. The preferred way is via email, which I usually respond to promptly.

My email address is joe@limit-point.com, if you want to give it a try. Thanks.

Sorry you took offense and chose to call me rude.

When a program doesn't work at all and crashes when I feed it reasonable data, I feel justified in giving it one star.

"Why didn't you contact me first," while admirable, is not good enough. We're all busy people. I am not your QA department. You could have called it a "beta," or asked people to help you debug it. Instead, you call those who have problems "rude."

And MacUpdate calls it "unethical" when you post star ratings for your own products.

Please excuse that last line. In looking at the comments, I thought you had given yourself stars after complaining about my one star, but I was looking at a different review.

I certainly don't expect you to be my QA department, but having worked in software development (on my own, and at other companies) for as long as I have, I am well aware that for most products a decent number of bugs, usually commensurate with the size of the program of course, are always found by the end user and not QA. There are even bugs in Mac OS X that are not found until it goes public. Why do you think 10.5.1 was probably released so soon after 10.5?

However, it isn't feasible for me to test all possible data sources for a program like nView, so its always possible some data will throw it off balance. Maybe you found a genuine bug that I need to fix. But I don't know, you didn't send me a crash log, which is something I usually request in a technical support email session. So I have no idea what caused a crash, and I don't think you do either. You didn't give me a chance. Other people do use the program with success. I'm quite confident that had you shared your data with me I could have identified the problem and solved it.

All I am saying is that just slapping a 1 star review on it and sarcastically saying you'll donate $1 in sympathy is in fact rude. It would make more sense if you asked me to look at the situation, if you had any real interest in the program working for you.

One last thought: hanging is not the same as crashing, not necessarily. I've seen many users who lack patience for a computer doing heavy computing, and they just need to wait a bit longer, and find it works. In this case it may be more of a problem with optimizing the code. But once again, in this case I really can't say because we didn't have the opportunity to discuss the problem in more detail.

I just saw your apology for accusing me of giving myself stars. Thanks; I never do that. (But actually I wasn't sure that you were accusing me of that, so I didn't even go there in my other comments.)

What I would prefer to do is solve your problem, or at least looking into it, and then you retracting your star rating, or at least being a bit more reasonable with a star rating.

Yes, I agree with you. A toolbar would be nice for all the items! I'll add that in a future update. Thanks for your feedback.

Joe