Stephen Pollak
Downloads: 638
Posts: 75
Smile Score: +113 
About Me
I am a MacUpdate Desktop user
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Member Since: 04 Jan 2010
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I am a MacUpdate Desktop user Visit Stats
Last Visit: 4 days ago
Member Since: 04 Jan 2010
Profile Views: 1,765
Stephen Pollak's Posts
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Copyright © 2012 MacUpdate LLC
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+1
Quicken 2007
Quicken 2007 has terrific reporting capabilities and flexibility that should be in Quicken Essentials (or a big brother product).
But the underlying Quicken 2007 platform is way out of date.
I see you steer new Intuit customers away from Quicken 2007 for Lion towards Quicken Essentials. I certainly hope that is a sign of change at Intuit. That Essentials will become the platform it should have been, a fully functional and useful financial management app.
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Daylite
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Apple Messages
iChat is an excellent application. It is essential to my work, and that of my colleagues worldwide. So is Apple about to completely ruin iChat in its forthcoming Mountain Lion OSX update? Please no ...!
iChat's video conferencing, unimproved for some time, remain the best in any case. Bar none. And the integral file sharing and iChat Theatre, coupled with the multi-way video are essential for collaborative efforts. iChat's clear superiority is one reason we all standardized on the Mac platform.
The current FaceTime app is awful (I cannot say this enough), and largely useless to us. We wish it were not the case. The application is not well though through, an uncharacteristically poor Apple effort.
Apple Messages now appears as a separate app. Okay. But how will it integrate with video, presentations, audio, and file transfer as does iChat today? Such integration is the key to a collaborative platform.
There are many unanswered questions going forward. But we will now prepare for the worst: migrating to Skype.
So let us hope some clarification will emerge soon ...
As a 25+ year Mac veteran, who uses Macs, iPhones and iPads, for work and play, I may be an old fogey. But my focus is productivity and getting work done. Form without the proper function is useless.
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Apple uses software (including OSX) to drive hardware sales ... it is not a software company, and has never been one. It is now also trying to use the Cloud to drive hardware sales.
Thus it may be iChat as we know it has run its course ... time will tell.
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+113
Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are great apps. But they could use some further improvement and features. MS-Office is simply awful, a terrible alternative.
I have iWorks on the iPad too. But I never use these.
Has Apple abandoned iWorks for the Mac?
Perhaps not, or perhaps so. The last iWorks for the Mac update was in 2008.
Also, I meant to praise iChat's excellent screen sharing capabilities in the original post. The screen sharing feature with the audio overlay is terrific.
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Can one install Messages today, and then go back to iChat without hassle?
+1
Microsoft Office 2011
A nightmare.
I upgraded to a new Mac, and migrated my files and applications. But the Microsoft online and via phone activation process did not work. It said I had too many registered machines. In fact, I have one new machine, and two other family machines with Office installed. Three in all, as allowed by the license. But alas, Microsoft has no way to note that I deactivated the old machine.
So, many phone calls later, and a great deal of wasted time, I solved the problem. It took a human being in Canada at the other end of the line to solve the issue. Finding such a breathing and knowledgable creature took an hour. Grief ...
She apologized, and acknowledge the process is flawed.
Daylite
+1
Livescribe Desktop
Xco reviewed on 04 Sep 2011
There is no systematic way to code or add meta data to notebook entries (by page or group of related pages). The data entries, when stored online, are in effect a database after all.
But, as I collect hundreds of pages of notes, I cannot systematically look for al notes on a particular topic, date, location, etc; or meetings related to a particular client.
One must rely entirely on the handwriting recognition of what was written in the note (in the notepad) at the time of note-taking. Thus I stopped using the product.
It's great to be able to input my handwritten notes into the computer. Paper becomes a mere data entry medium, but not necessarily the storage medium. That's good in principle.
But if I cannot systematically retrieve archived notes, from hundreds of entries, the value of the approach is lot entirely.
So many products emphasize the ease of getting data into the computer. Fine. But, for me, the real value lies with whether I can readily get the data out in a cogent and meaningful form.
That's not the case with Livescribe, at least for me.
Mindjet MindManager
+113
It's a download from Oracle.
+3
iA Writer
Xco reviewed on 28 May 2011
On the Mac, with it's very different form factor, iA Writer simply does not shine.
The Mac form factor, especially with a large screen, requires more flexibility. For example, I would like to sometimes view the text in a larger size (my eyes are getting old). I can't. Further, with a large screen, I would like to adjust the margin sizes, top, bottom and sides. I can't.
But, on a MacBook Air iA Writer will no doubt shine pretty well. The smaller the screen the better. But I use 24-27" monitors, quite different animals.
Frankly, Pages in full screen mode is pretty terrific. It provides all the flexibility (simple or sophisticated) I need, albeit without one or two nice features found in iA Writer. But the flexibility afforded by Pages makes it the winner on the Mac, not iA Writer. iA Writer seems a big waste. I use Pages, TextWrangler, and (rarely these days) Mellel. Word I ditched a long time ago - though I still own the latest MS-Office (also prefer Numbers to Excel, and Keynote to PowerPoint).
I will stick with iA Writer on the iPad, and right-off the Mac version purchase as a bum investment. Sorry guys.
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DEVONagent Express
+4
FileMaker Pro
If Filemaker is to re-position Filemaker and Filemaker iOS as a rapid application development tool, then maybe folks at its parent company need to assist. The user interface capabilities are increasingly oh so important.
What Filemaker needs: a fundamental re-think, and re-build.
Meteorologist
+113