As regards calendars, Fantastical, in conjunction with Busycal, is about as good as your going to get on the Mac. However, with this update, I was hoping for more. The developers have been advising for a while now that to-do functionality will be available and we're still waiting. This is not a complaint, just me (and I dare say a few others) hoping that we don't have to wait too much longer as this much needed feature will make Fantastical a 5 star app.

I'm no professional photographer or developer, but still, this is unbelievably good for 99 cents. I must admit, seeing the start up screen with no tools, instructing me to drag and drop an image into the app, I wasn't expecting much, but I was wrong. Once you do that, a reassuring number of tools and options then pop up enabling you to fine tune your image in a number of ways. The end result is, I have to say, very good.

I have so many of these quality one trick ponies in the hope of achieving a cheaper and faster replacement for Photoshop - its apps like this that justify that belief. The general quality of the end result is such that I even go to his type of software before Pixelmator, due to the amount of time it saves.

Seeing as its the only place you can purchase Big Aperture, the App Store is evidently relevant to this software. I'm not an App Store "believer" and for me it will never replace purchasing software through Macupdate or from the developer direct, but considering that software like this is now available when it wasn't before (well, not for 99 cents) as a result of the App Store, I can now for the first time, start to see the App Store's value.

Love it.

I've had my eye on this for some time and have now had a proper tryout. Its available on both windows and Mac and has a multitude of backup/ sync options. It's apparent that the GUI is windows-like. Not the end of the world for me; with backup apps, its the power and capability of the software that's more important than the GUI and for me, the key feature of SFFS compared to other backup software is how it backs up part of a changed file instead of the whole file that's been changed - that really does cut down backup time and is a key feature. Just as important, the file metadata copying is first class as well. It seems like a superior Jungledisk alternative. Arq is the best online backup app for you own HD, but SFFS can easily be configured to be used for other backup/sync tasks to Amazon S3.

Despite these plus points however, there are a number of things which aren't quite there yet. For example, after preparing the app for a bootable backup to one partition of an external drive with archiving to the other partition of the same external drive, the following was apparent:

*High CPU/ RAM usage.

*The long length of time it took to complete the backup, almost 3 times the length of time of other apps (5 hours for just 110GB of data on my drive). I was surprised at this and was hoping that SFFS's ability to dynamically detect changed files would quicken up the process. Not so.

*The fact that it didn't properly compete a bootable backup.

*The log file for this backup was nearly 1GB in size. I imagine subsequent incremental backup logs will be smaller, but that still seems unreasonably large.

The software continues to be actively developed, so it could well be that these issues will be addressed in the forthcoming version 6. For the time being then, whilst it is clearly proficient at certain tasks, I'd suggest a wait and see policy before splashing out and using this as a primary backup tool.

Apologies for sounding naive, but is there any practical difference between using this and the tools freely available in OS X? Just asking as my DVD's are currently ripped by inserting a DVD movie into the Mac's DVD player and just imaging it to a DVD/CD Master Disk Image which, once opened, plays fine the Mac DVD player.

This outfit have taken my money, supplied a serial, only for me to be told that "Registration Failed!". An email to support has also been returned by the recipient domain. I appear to have thrown my money down the toilet. In the name of fairness, I shall update Macupdate immediately if this matter is resolved. Until then...

DO *NOT* BUY THIS PRODUCT.