AmberV has a point: You can't ask for donations and then complain that people don't feel obligated to pay.

Peter Maurer, why don't you just sell your apps as shareware instead of handing them over to a distributor who adds his own hefty share to the price?

Is it because you think distributors like SmileOnMyMac are better at marketing? If they are, they have yet to prove it. I don't doubt that the people behind SOMM are dedicated to making their latest acquisition a success, but all they did so far with regard to marketing was slap a $30 price-tag on Textpander, which wasn't exactly a publicity stunt.

Text(ex)pander is a neat little utility, but it's simply not worth $30. For this price one can buy sophisticated productivity apps like CopyWrite or Hog Bay Notebook/Mori. It was the same story with the first app you sold to another company, MenuCalendar. As a convenient menu shortcut to iCal, it was nice, but was it worth the $19 the new owners decided to charge for it? I didn't think so.

Your apps are so handy and popular that they would be a healthy foundation for your own shareware business. I'd rather pay my money directly to you than to a company with no involvement in the original development process who just rename the app they acquired from you and make it an overpriced piece of nagware.

When it comes to spending money, I have a very simple set of rules: 1) I don't pay when I don't have to, and 2) I don't buy stuff that doesn't seem to be worth the price. Which means that 1) I didn't donate for Textpander, and 2) I won't buy it from SOMM for the price they want. Yet I spend hundreds of bucks on shareware and commercial software every year. Charge a reasonable price for your remaining apps or bundle them as "PM's great utilites pack", and I'll be your best customer.

The current situation is unsatisfying for both you and the users of your software: You think that you don't get enough money because the donations-based distribution system doesn't work, and users don't know if donations are obligatory or not. Maybe I should quickly PayPal you 5 bucks for Butler as a cheap insurance against the possibility that PainInMyA$$ Inc. acquires it tomorrow and resells it as Buttler for $50?

I'd rather base my purchase decisions on hard facts like: this app costs $20 and expires after 30 days but is obviously great value for the price, and my money will go to the guy who made this program. These are facts that prompt simpletons and cheapskates like me to get their credit card out. But when I'm confronted with free programs that are actually not free and could become very expensive all of a sudden, I don't look for my credit card but for a headache tablet.

Quicksilver gets many recommendations as a free - and arguably more powerful - alternative to LaunchBar. I can only encourage you to try QS before buying LaunchBar - it's a fascinating program with many great features and a huge community of fans and plug-in developers.

Both programs share the same basic features, but in many ways, QS is the exact opposite of LaunchBar. QS is a geek tool, an application that demands attention and a willingness to explore its potential and tweak its settings. It is as much as time-waster as it is a time-saver, and that's why it appeals to geeks.

LauchBar, on the other hand, is just there. It just works. It is very customizable, but the default settings are good enough for most people. Install it, use it, and never think about it. Over the years it has been refined to a point where it's almost invisible, and that's a great achievement. If you install it, it will instantly become a natural and integral part of your system. It doesn't give you much to play with, and it's not much to look at either (no shiny bezel interface, no visual effects). It's just a file and program launcher in the most unobtrusive and efficient way possible. It has some nifty tricks up its sleeve, but it doesn't show them off.

I usually prefer freeware programs over shareware if they have a comparable set of features, but in this case I happily made an exception and paid the bucks. QS is great, but I found LaunchBar's "less is more" design more useful and more appealing.

Compared to QS and Butler (which, among many other things, is also a file launcher), LaunchBar also has the most intelligent and accurate shortcut algorithm. The only point where LaunchBar could need improvement is that it still takes too long to index newly added files, even if it is set to rescan the containing folders automatically. (Spotlight will find these files instantly.)

And then there's the major downside of becoming accustomed to LaunchBar: Macs that don't have it installed will drive you nuts.

It does what it says on the tin, and does it fast and well. The only problem is the astronomically high price. It's hard to believe, but this program costs $20 more than Toast Titanium 7, a complete CD/DVD authoring suite that can also compress and burn decrypted or un-encrypted DVDs. Now that Roxio has integrated Popcorn into Toast, Toast 7 does everything DVD2One does plus so much more that you would be out of your mind if you bought this one-trick pony for a higher price. Toast's compression algorithm produces excellent results; the quality of DVDs compressed with DVD2One is in no way superior.

If the developer lowered the price to $25 or less, DVD2One might still have a future as an efficient, low-budget DVD backup tool, but at $100, it simply has no right to exist. I'm really sorry to say that, I'd rather support an independent programmer than a company like Roxio. But the price is too far beyond reality.

In its earlier days, SD was advertised as a tool to accelerate download speed (hence the name), and there was much debate among users whether or not these claims were true. To put it short: SD does not accelerate your downloads, and it never has. So it's good to see that the dev has toned down his misleading sales pitch and is now marketing SD mainly as a program to _manage_ downloads.
Because that's what it is: a download manager, and a very sophisticated one. If you just want to grab a file from Macupdate one in a while, SD will be overkill and a waste of set-up time, but if you're a hardcore downloader/uploader, this is the smartest and most powerful program on the market. Nice interface, too, and a reasonable price. Definitely a product to be taken seriously. Who would have foreseen this evolution from scam to power tool back in the day when it claimed to give your 56K a DSL boost .. :)