I might take a lot of flack for this review, because Adium is universally loved by Mac users, but… well, it's just my opinion, and nobody has to agree with me.

For me, though, Adium is kind of redundant. When I first switched from OS9 to OSX, back in those heady Jaguar days, Adium was the ONLY IM client I would use. AIM, ICQ and Yahoo were bad Carbon ports, MSN was indescribable, and iChat was, er... weird. In addition, Skype was barely a glimmer in anybody's eyes and, though Gizmo was cool, only three people worldwide seemed to ever use it.

At that point, Adium -- and, to a lesser extent, the now defunct Fire and the husk of what was once Proteus -- was a breath of fresh air. It was a convenient, solid, feature-rich application that easily blew away any of the official offerings. It was also extremely customizable and, well... it was very "Mac".

Time marches on, though, and the official clients have gotten better. While this has occurred, it has seemed to me as if Adium continues to tread water, a bit. It is still a very solid application and it is still a very convenient way to keep all your contacts in one list, but it doesn't have video or audio conferencing -- which even MSN has now -- and it falls short in some very basic areas as compared to the official offerings. I have rarely been able to get file transfers to work and, at times, it can act just plain goofy.

Now, that said, I am absolutely not trying to disparage this application. I still love Adium to death and I keep installing updates, but... to be honest, I just don't find myself using it very often anymore. Maybe if I needed to be logged into eight different IM clients, or several different screen names, then I'll start it up, but... for the most part, it sits there looking at me, and just doesn't get used. Which is kind of a shame, because it still has what it has had since day one, back in those OSX 10.2 days -- loads upon loads of amazing potential that it just... doesn't... ever... quite seem... to reach.

AJH

For years, I've used Canon's PhotoStitch app, which came with a printer I'd bought long ago, to create panoramas and stitch pictures together. Despite the increasing age of PhotoStitch, it has served relatively well.

Relatively well, that is, until recently when I was scanning some sheet music for my roommate's father. The music was written on large pieces of paper and I had to scan each document in sections. PhotoStitch got hopelessly confused trying to deal with all the horizontal lines on the page. A quick search lead me to DoubleTake, which I installed and immediately, I was able to combine the sections of each scan to make a perfect picture.

Since then, I've used it to redo some older panoramas and so forth I had made, and to finish some that I'd never been able to complete due to PhotoStitch being unable to handle it. The software has performed flawlessly in nearly all of my attempts, and gives you a wealth of control over how each image is processed without making it seem overly complicated.

This software is entirely worth the $25, and then some, for what it does.

At one time, iStill was a useful program for taking pictures with the external iSight camera. Because the iSight had a pretty limited resolution of 640x480, taking pictures larger than that could be problematic; iStill, however, through the use of some clever tricks similar to image stacking, managed to make higher resolution pictures taken with the iSight look much nicer and sharper, while also giving you picture setting and focus controls.

Time marches on, though, and webcam resolutions have gotten much higher than that of the old iSight. Though iStill could continue to conceivably be a useful tool, if given the chance, it doesn't seem to be compatible with Intel Macs. I base this on the fact that iStill continues to run perfectly well with my PowerMac G4 running OSX 10.5.8 with a FireWire iSight, but can't access the built-in iSight on my Core 2 Duo-based MacBook, nor can it access the external iSight when plugged into the MacBook. The developer does not appear to be in any rush to fix these issues: the last developer comment was in 2005.

The bottom line is that iStill has potential to be a good, useful application, but lack of support has seriously hampered its usefulness. If you have a PowerPC Mac with an external iSight, give it a try... otherwise, move along.

AJH

FaceTime is an interesting animal, though it feels somewhat... unfinished. This could be due to its resemblance to the iOS version. Also, there is a dearth of people who are currently using it. When Apple released iChat, it was a windfall for Mac users because there were already so many AIM users with video capability but with FaceTime, you're limited talking with those few people running it on the Mac or on an iPhone/iPod touch, of which I know... two.

THAT SAID, when I DO get to use it, it is a solid application that does what it's supposed to do and does it well. The video quality is excellent -- better than that of Skype and iChat -- and, even with wonky internet connections, has never succumbed to the lag of iChat or the robot-techno-stutter of lagging Skype.

I don't know why they're suddenly charging a dollar for it when it was free before and other solutions like Skype and iChat are also free, but if this is the sort of thing you're likely to use regularly, then it can entirely be worth the buck.

D.

Everyone complaining about how it's still a Carbon version or hasn't been updated or whatever, but really... if you're anything like me, you got stuck on this game centuries ago. I first saw it when I saw my friend, with her then-new purple iMac, playing it under OS 8.6. Lo and behold, I too had it on my install disc and Eric's Solitaire Sampler became my time-waster of choice.

Moving to OSX, I tried a variety of other solitaire games but I couldn't get used to them quite the same way as I got used to this one. I ultimately bit the bullet and bought the OSX version.

While I agree that it could be better, or at least more modern, and maybe could be priced less... the fact that it's a Carbon application doesn't impede my ability to consistently lose at Klondike, and I haven't had any problems with the stability of the thing at all. Sure, it hasn't been updated, but it's as functional a solitaire as it was back when it was a Classic application... and that's all I was really looking for.