The Microsoft product activation process is a nightmare.

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.

The software is useful. But, for me, there is a glaring omission.

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.

I am a big supporter of iA Writer on the iPad, and bought the Mac product. That was a (big) mistake at the price.

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.

Sadly, Filemaker has not been brought into the modern Mac age. It is looking long in the tooth, a legacy from its past. Too bad, the Mac really needs a reasonably powered, yet easy to use, customizable database environment. In some ways, Bento exhibits some nice needed features, such as Smart Folders. But Bento is incredibly limited even for layout design.

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.

Paperless 2.x is a worthy paid upgrade. So far, it has worked as advertised and tech support responded quickly to my early queries and bug reports. I upgraded from Paperless 1.x, and used its precursor ReceiptWallet. I use Paperless for tracking receipts, whereas I still use EagleFiler for storing other PDF file types. I also use the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M with both applications.

Can't get the new version 1.5.0 to open, even after deleting the prior preference file.