Dropbox rocks. The more I use it, the more uses I find for it. It pretty much makes your files available everywhere and platform-agnostic, and it does a really, really good job.

I would really like to see this app get development on the fast-track. I love the concept. It's full spotlight search with the ability to manipulate files and perform other actions. It's like LaunchBar and Spotlight combined. So far, every version I've tried has simply been too buggy for regular use. I'll give this one another shot and hope for the best.

Mailsteward has an upgrade strategy that is rather…unique, to say the least. Basically, they just kind of stick new features in the application more or less at random. Periodically, they decide they want more money, bump the version number up without making any significant changes, and make you pay a substantial upgrade fee. They justify this by saying that they periodically add new features to the application without charging.

In theory, this arrangement could work, the problem is that you are really being asked to take a leap of faith with regards to paying for a new version that changes virtually nothing. It's more or less a subscription - if you want bug fixes and compatibility updates, you need to keep paying for each version bump. I might be OK with this if the developers had a history of adding highly compelling features in between paid releases. The problem is, they rarely do. Between 8.0 and 9.0, about the only improvements I noticed were those to the search feature. These were very welcome, but they were also long overdue. Search is one of the most important features of a mass archiver, and until recently, search in Mailsteward was really bad - anything beyond very basic queries involved manually entering a MySQL Search string. 9.0 offers pretty much nothing new, and I no longer have a lot of hope of seeing any significant changes in the near-future (for instance, an interface redesign is badly needed).

Basically, the standard static feature-set until a paid upgrade model provides a good incentive for developers to provide a strong host of improvements in order to entice customers to upgrade. I feel that the Mailsteward model removes this incentive, and means that improvements to the app come very slowly.

Mailsteward has proven to be a reliable app for archiving large amounts of mail, but I would highly recommend carefully considering the alternatives before putting down any money for this application, mostly due to their annoying upgrade model.

If you like the Windows 7 "snap" features, this is basically an exact copy of that. In my case, that is a good thing. This application is extremely handy, and $7 doesn't leave much to complain about.

I understand that the Camino team is small, but in the years since its debut, the browser world has changed, and it's just not clear what purpose this browser serves anymore. When Camino was released, Safari was in its infancy with a very limited feature-set and a long list of major sites that failed to render in webkit. Firefox was rough and slow and very badly integrated on the Mac OS. Camino gave you the attractive and mac-like interface of Safari with the powerful and widely compatible rendering engine of Firefox. A winning combination at the time.

Well, in the last few years Safari and Firefox have made massive strides. Safari has matured rendering and feature-wise. Webkit is now considered one of the best and most compatible rendering engines on the market and is widely used on the Desktop and mobile space. It is rare indeed to encounter a site that Safari cannot render properly. Firefox is faster, more feature-full, and integrates much better into the Mac OS features and appearance. Camino has not kept up at all. Version 2.0 adds nothing terribly compelling and is essentially just trying to play catch-up with the big players. Camino's rendering, which used to be one of its big selling points, is far behind Firefox. Camino's javascript performance is about on par with Internet Explorer 8, and Firefox and Safari leave it in the dust in this respect. I just can't find any reason to use Camino at this point. If you want a quick-launching, completely mac-like app, use Safari. If you want a large integrated feature-set and true extensibility, use Firefox.