Blloyd
Downloads: 67
Posts: 78
Smile Score: +107 
About Me
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Member Since: 25 Jun 2004
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I am a Free member Visit Stats
Last Visit: Yesterday
Member Since: 25 Jun 2004
Profile Views: 1,942
Blloyd's Posts
Average Rating from Blloyd:
(15)
(15) 
Displaying 1-10 of 38
Copyright © 2012 MacUpdate LLC
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MenuTab
Blloyd rated on 24 May 2012
[Version 4.5]
+4
The Hit List
Blloyd reviewed on 26 Apr 2012
THL is beautiful, well-designed software, and the sync service is fantastic. It's noticeably faster than OmniFocus sync for me.
The main knocks at this point are a couple things:
* There's no iPad version yet. Potion Factory says it's on the way, but things often take longer than people would like
* Between releases, Andy can go kinda quiet. This is fairly well documented in the comments below.
With the large number of changes in 1.1 and the improvements, it's pretty clear to me that he's investing a lot of time in it, and it's worked reliably for me for the last couple releases so I don't have much bad to say about it. It really is nice and flexible to use, and it doesn't frustrate me like Omnifocus does.
+1
Memory Cleaner
purge(8) BSD System Manager's Manual purge(8)
NAME
purge -- force disk cache to be purged (flushed and emptied)
SYNOPSIS
purge
DESCRIPTION
Purge can be used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk
buffer cache for performance analysis. It does not affect anonymous mem-
ory that has been allocated through malloc, vm_allocate, etc.
SEE ALSO
sync(8), malloc(3)
It may LOOK in Activity Monitor like it's freeing memory, but it's just purging the disk cache, which for many things will make them SLOWER.
+4
Arq
Blloyd reviewed on 06 Jan 2011
It also uses Amazon's S3 for storage and makes it very easy to transfer files between computers (back up from one, restore to another).
I have nothing but great things to say about it. The price can end up being a bit higher than alternatives because you have to pay for your S3 storage usage, so if you have 100 GB of data you're backing up, it will be around $10/month you pay to Amazon. Still, for me, it's worth it, as I can see the backed up data and access it via any tool (e.g. Transmit or Jungle Disk) that can access S3. It's encrypted in a way that I can't pull it OUT through those tools (easily), but I can verify it's there.
Developer is extremely responsive. This is truly a 5 star app.
And I'd RATE it as such if the MacUpdate GUI didn't capture my click at 4.5 stars and stick there >:-(
+6
Alfred
Blloyd reviewed on 26 Oct 2010
But I only ever used about 5% of what LaunchBar could do. Because I could never remember things. There's a lot to learn, and a lot to remember.
So Alfred comes along, and after ignoring it for about 6 months I gave it a try. It is LIGHTNING fast, and it is simple and easy to do many things (because you type the specific command). I've found after a couple days I'm getting 80% of what Alfred can do, which is far above what I got out of LaunchBar, again because of the way I work. So it's great for me, and I like the way its search and indexing works (based on Spotlight, I believe), as I can find things on the disk in ways I never could with LaunchBar.
So for now, I have a new launcher, and it's great. For quick launch (including Internet search) and search of specific things it is much better than Spotlight.
As for Quicksilver: I used it for a few months many years ago, and never grew to like it the way that I loved LaunchBar. With the lead developer giving up on it a few years ago, and going to Google to found QSB, I don't see it really getting much new either. I don't have an issue with price, either: Alfred's PowerPack is inexpensive and I will pay for good software that I use every day.
Outspring Mail
+4
Apple Safari
Blloyd reviewed on 07 Jun 2010
I can't see the advertisers of cruddy adds and the purveyors of shoddy sites liking it… but WOW. WOW!!!!!
+1
iStat Menus
Blloyd reviewed on 28 Apr 2010
I was astonished that iStat Menus was available for free (well, it's donation requested but I, likely as most others, didn't ever get around to donating). It is a very high quality application, and I refer to it every day to see memory utilization, network utilization, and CPU utilization without having to fire up Activity Monitor.
So 3.0 comes out and it's $10 for the upgrade. Given that's less than 50 cents/month based on past usage I can afford it: It truly is something I use every single day.
+3
Quicken Essentials
Blloyd reviewed on 18 Mar 2010
OK, so that's out of the way.
Personally, I used Quicken for Mac back in the late 90's and it worked OK for me. OS 8 was pretty long in the tooth so I moved over to a PC for a number of years, and went to Quicken for Windows which always had scads of features. It kept getting MORE features, and the interface changed and morphed and got about 300 tabs, which added complexity and gave me a bunch of things I didn't need or want. But I had to upgrade so I could continue to download stock quotes.
I moved back to the Mac in 2001 and tried the Quicken Mac products at that time, which were IMO a disaster. So I kept using QFW… for a while on a dedicated PC, then in Windows in VMware Fusion. It was OK. Over the years I kept trying other options - iBank (interface just bugs me, and it's buggy… every time I tried it), Moneywell (which is really a budgeting app, and has no stock tracking). Nothing I really liked.
Then Quicken Mac Life comes along and gets delayed for years, gets functionality stripped down and gets released as Quicken Essentials. Well, you know, it's actually pretty nice! It works perfectly for my bank and credit card stuff, my 401(k), it can do budgeting, and it can track my stocks. No, it does not currently a whole lot with the stocks, it's always just a snapshot. I can't track long term performance of stocks, and I can't do lot accounting for tax purposes. The former would be nice for me, the latter I don't really care as I can use broker statements for it. I never used Quicken Bill Pay as I get that functionality for free through my bank.
So there you have it: QE for Mac is simple, but it has a very nice interface and it does some things very well. I didn't need a big, ugly Swiss Army knife, and it has sufficient parts of what I need for me to not have to boot up Fusion every day to reconcile my bank statements and check stock prices. Win!
+4
Yojimbo
Blloyd reviewed on 25 Sep 2009
There are other apps that do that -- Together, DEVONthink, EagleFiler, etc.
What Yojimbo excels at is text. And it EXCELS. It is fast -- LIGHTNING fast. Search is great, tagging is great, and it is outstanding for RTF, plain text, PDFs, Web Archives, bookmarks, serial numbers, and tags. I used DEVONthink for 6 years prior to switching to Yojimbo a month ago. And since I moved all my non-text documents to the Finder and tagged them, I can find them and sort/use them more easily (DEVONthink will export stuff to the Finder but it is impossible to figure out the results without opening them in DEVONthink as it changes their icons in summary).
I moved all my RTF documents to Yojimbo, and tagged them. Now browsing and searching are VERY fast, and I get one feature DEVONthink never had -- sync of notes across machines, automatically, via MobileMe. YAY! This is more useful to me than almost anything; given the convoluted workflow that involved DropBox I had before.
So, in summary, if you want a kitchen sink, this isn't the app for you. If you want a text-based information scalpel, that's Yojimbo. And after a month, I am happy to open and use it every day. DEVONthink, while powerful, was for the most part drudgery. I still use it when I want to OCR some documents, and that's about it. I don't miss it.