Backtrack is a REALLY useful keylogger (it also captures images, but I don't use it for that). It does catch the 'un-versionable' in Lion: comments, typed tweets from Twitter.app, etc. Despite the somewhat clunky UI it's very usable. I was able to find texts from hours before that would not have been saved. All in all it's a better solution than the free logkext that I had (occasionally) been using.

I haven't run into any memory problems or slowdowns yet. EXCEPT for.. read on.

BacktrackBA takes about 40 megs of Ram, and runs in 64-bit. It HAS to run in the background.. else how would it capture your keystrokes? Even in typed comments in twitter or some web form? That's not the beef I have with the dev. This is-

Backtrack's demo mode it is REALLY obnoxious, and in some cases may even wedge your machine as it did with me on Lion.

Let me explain: Every 15 minutes the dev will throw a nuisance dialog to try and get you to register your machine. Fine. Throw the dialog. But then the author overrides your 'Text to Speech' settings and your machine will try to use the default system voice & announce 'Excuse me, Backtrack needs your attention'. BIG NO-NO. Every 15 minutes.

The first time this happened, while I had a number of things open, and I had my system voice set to japanese but OFF. Guess what? My machine froze while Backtrack tried to do the English dialog in Japanese. I have since switched back to English, so now every 15 minutes when the menu item is on it blares in English. Even tho' I have TTS set to OFF.

In another case, by the 3rd or so nuisance dialog the demo can't invoke the system voice, so your Lion machine may freeze. I had this happen WHILE I was writing this review! Fans on, total freeze. I had to ssh into my own MacBook Pro and kill things from the Terminal. This is TOTALLY unforgivable.

So while I find Backtrack very useful, the Dev's obnoxious 'per machine' licensing plus this obnoxious Demo 'feature' left a bad taste in my mouth.

The Dev should DEFINITELY not be using TTS against the users' wishes, and I told him this in email.

I'll leave it to everyone else as to whether it's worth the grief. The features are great. The Dev's licensing terms and demo? He almost lost a sale (while I typed this up, 15 minutes went by: *BEEP* 'Excuse me, Backtrack needs your attention').. if I hadn't already got it via MacZot, I'd probably be trashing it right now. It's THAT obnoxious.

3-4 stars for the features (I'm sure this rating will go up after I lose some typing)

1-2 stars for probably the most obnoxious demo I've ever had to endure. I say this as someone who works in software.

I originally had Stuf 1.0.. It was dark HUDlike (yuck), it's network clipboards were cranky if they worked at all, and the overall UI was confusing. I think I would have given Stuf 1.x three stars.

Stuf 2.0x, however is a joy to use if you have DropBox. After making a /Stuf/{ComputerName}/ directory per machine, BOTH of my Macs are happily sharing clipboards back and forth.

Yes, you need to use Dropbox.app, but if you have iPhones & iPads sharing texts back and forth.. you're already doing this.

The new UI might need a LITTLE polish, but at this point the only quibble for 'new' users is the price.

Oh, and THANK YOU to The Escapers for making this a FREE upgrade to old Stuf users. Can't thank you guys enough.

No one should have a problem with handing the dev 5 measely dollars.

As an aside, there are apps like HTML & blog editors that do not fit with the Mac App Store model (the dev cannot push quick updates).

But every update of Smultron has been very well thought out and stable. Maybe if Apple had more folks like Peter Borg with his mapped & judicious updates, the Mac App Store would be more successful.

Regardless, if you get ONE Mac App Store app... let it be this one.

I especially like how MacUpdate has (at this writing) the only valid download link. Going to the Microsoft downloads page here:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads

Is guaranteed to get you some good laughs as you attempt to download, and get a broken link that first dumps in Microsoft Search (with the entire busted link filled in).. and then.. wait for it...

5 seconds later, Microsoft then dumps you in Bing. Searching the SAME BUSTED URL.

Let's hope the web team doesn't test Office 11 in their spare time.

SPlayerX looks to be a fork of the MPlayerX project. It allows you to (easily) set subtitle delays. It also purports to 'smart parse' subs from movie files.

The project seems to be a bit 'young'... I had it crash once. That being said, the project home here:

http://hg.splayer.org/splayerx/downloads

Seems to have a vibrant community and the dev is fixing bugs. Can't fault him for putting this in the AppStore, and if you want/need this type of movie player, you can do far worse.

Dev says on his front page that the AppStore version is more stable.

3.5 stars as a whole...

Arg. Two iPhoto6 updates and I'm back in 'compatibility mode'. Uck.

Sorry to write YA-comment. For those having trouble compiling this, you must do it manually from inside the Dict folder using Terminal. Please read the readme inside the aspell-en-6.0 folder... you need to do:

1/ ./configure
2/ make
3/ make install

Then it should work. Kind of.