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User Reviews
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Your argument would be more compelling if "design" had nothing to do with implementation. Where I work, the folks like you doing design hand me a Photoshop file and I do the dirty work of turning the design into a web page. I have yet to find a "front-end" application that can produce intelligently designed, collapsible HTML that adheres to accessibility guidelines and all web standards. This is compounded by people who do not know what they are doing when they click on buttons---making changes which have ugly interpretations in code. The analogy with publishing is flawed, and akin to saying that anyone can design television graphics with the right programs to make it easy. Someone without a good working knowledge of the actual technology involved in output will end up creating horrible broadcast graphics if they apply standard design philosophies. The insidious thing is that most people just make a web page using these tools, test it in their browser and if it looks good call it done. If you aren't testing on a battery of different platforms and browser applications and versions of those applications---you have no idea what the web site actually looks like. What will their site look like in a Braille reader or digital text-to-voice reading? Can it be navigated using a tongue joystick? What does it look like on a smart-phone, or a regular cellular phone? If the user requires their font to be set to 48pt for legibility, will your site allow it? Will the design completely self-destruct? |
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I've been using TaskPaper for a while now, and this is an exceptional way to keep track of things you need to do. It doesn't impose any doctrines on you, in fact with the exception of a few *very* simple and intuitive formatting rules, you can work however you want with it. It is just a text file. Great price for something that is sure to evolve over time. Developer is very active and enjoys customer response. |
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Looks good from what I've seen of the demo. It does everything you would expect, and even though it is a Java application, to me it feel more responsive than NovaMInd, and definitely more powerful than Inspiration. |
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I love how people keep posting that, because you can zoom the entire interface, you don't need a tool that only shows part of the screen magnified. Oi. Universal Access zooming is not a developer tool. It *interpolates* which means it is worthless for getting pixel accurate views of your work. You cannot do any real work with it, because your development applications are zoomed as well (and probably ten miles to the left off-screen). Anyway, this is a nice little tool. Does just what it needs to do. It could probably use a little refinement, but for the most part a good tool. If you don't like circles for some reason, there is a preference to use a rectangle. Finally, it is free, further making the "just use Tiger's Zoom" people look even more dense. |
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Or you could just use a proper backup tool like Retrospect that does incrementals. I run Retrospect every night, and if a file shows up bad, where the last clean copy was months ago, I can still get it from an old snapshot. Agree with you if the person is just doing a full drive copy every night though. That is not very safe, and it might duplicate non-filesystem errors too. You might wake up one morning to find that your Mac doesn't boot, and since the problem got backed up to the second boot drive---that one won't work either. |
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Have you tried using the mouse in conjunction with the keyboard? This is my preferred way of playing. I use the keyboard to enact bonuses, and the mouse for all placement. You can zip right to the correct spot in one click. If you turn centre clicking on, you can skip pieces that cannot be played. |
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Um, guys? That is part of the strategy. You are rating a game down because your strategy needs work? Figuring out how to keep as many spots open as possible while getting bonuses is the game. If you fail at keeping spots open, don't blame the software! That's part of the challenge. It is like fussing that the dice are random in Monopoly. |
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Why not just use Skim in conjunction with Scrivener? Assuming it is your default PDF viewer, just right-click on the PDF in Scrivener, choose Open in External Editor, and when you are done, save and close the file. It will be updated in the Scrivener project. Why duplicate the efforts of hundreds of media editing packages, when you can just use the management program (Scrivener) as a hub for them all? |
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Not a problem, and hopefully in the next development cycle this will be addressed. The issue of having capture hotkeys and/or bookmarklets is something that has been brought up in the forums. The developer is interested in adding the feature, but does not wish to consider it for 1.x, while he works on his novel. |
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The original URL will indeed get lost; if that is an important piece of information then this method would be useless. |
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Ah, yes I see what you are getting at now. You know, the way I would approach this is to just save web archives into a special folder, right out of Safari. It's a matter of pressing Cmd-S;Enter and move on. Then, after I've collected a batch of files I can bulk drag the whole folder into Scrivener. That reduces the dragging action to one, and everything else is keyboard hotkeys. Of course, if you do not use Safari you can just substitute webarchives for whatever other "complete" save the browser supports, and Scrivener will convert them to webarchives itself. |
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I might not be understanding what you want to accomplish, but Scrivener already does capture web archives just fine. Select the "Research" folder in the Binder, and go to the File menu, under Import...Web Page. Or you can just drag the link right into the Binder from your web browser (note that dragging from the URL browser does not work in every browser, but dragging a link from within a page works universally). |
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Yes, in fact it is the opposite. Express does not have all of the features that version 1 had, such as Aperture integration and custom exports. This is in fact explained on the site, granted in very fine print. Makes you wonder about the whole "Pro" thing, eh? Usually the line is that the pro features took longer to make and so the pro version is more expensive. Maybe they are hoping that everyone will forget that these removed features already existed before. Ha. |
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If this uses Adobe Camera to generate TIFF files, then that is a huge handicap. AC produces the nastiest quality images from RAW files that I've seen from any professional product. Aperture is actually not bad. It's on par with Nikon's own Capture -- if not a little better in some respects, and definitely in league with Capture One and Raw Developer. Camera, on the other hand, makes my Nikon D100 look like a Canon Powershoot S300. Flat, flat, flat dynamic range, lost shadows, and no detail. |
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I don't get it, do you have your left hand stuck in your mouth or something? When I use the mouse, generally my other hand stays on the keyboard. It is already there! The keys that it needs to press are already right under it! What I don't understand are people so uncoordinated that they cannot use two hands at once to manipulate their environment. |
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Never mind, just saw the answer to that in the FAQ. |
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Thanks, I'll check that out. Also, while you are looking, it seems that the EarthDesk Engine is using 120 megabytes of RAM, right after execution (just restarted from the crash I mentioned). That seems a bit high. Does that changing depending on how many monitors you have? |
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I really like the quality of the image that EarthDesk puts out. It feels a lot nicer than the competition. However, this last "upgrade" seems, well, pointless? I'm not so sure I dig the move to a preference pane. What is the rationalisation for this? It isn't a system level task. If they merely wanted to get it out of the dock, a menu controller would have sufficed. So, I've got one more thing cluttering up system preferences. Meanwhile, now that it is no longer a regular application, if it crashes I have to load up Activity Monitor to fix it. There is no way I would have paid for this upgrade. As it is, I got it because I *just* bought a 3.x license a week ago. Now, I wish I had kept the DMG for the 3.x version, because I rather liked it better. There is nothing -- nothing -- upgraded except for where it runs from. Everything else as far as I can see is feature for feature identical. |
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Every once in a while you come across an application that changes the way you think about the integration between creativity and software. For many years, creative people have been shackled to technological solutions which, for various reasons over the decades, have forced us to work in ways that are constricting to inspiration. The past five or so years have seen a great boom in creative software, across all doctrines of expression. Artists can now sculpt in a manner not too far from sitting at the clay, and they can paint right onto that sculpture with pressure sensitive digital pens. Musicians can go from inspiration to publishing using a few pieces of integrated equipment and a computer. Until a few years ago, writer's had a lot of tools that they could combine together, but precious few that really understood the process of taking something from start to finish. Scrivener is one of those seminal applications that changes the way you perceive the process of digital/mental integration. You might think you have a pretty good system already, but give this application a few weeks and you just might suddenly see a whole world of possibility open up! § Writing, especially the authoring of books, is unlike many other creative trades in that it involves a great quantity of organisation. Without a smart system, it can be impossible to stand back and see the big picture, while being able to get right into the details a moment later. An effective writing tool needs to be on top of organisation for you. Gone should be the days of synchronising overviews and summaries, cover sheets and sticky labels on manilla envelopes, or searching through directories with hundreds of text files. Scrivener features a rich, intuitive interface for organisation that lets you drill down into the minute detail while still grasping a conceptual hold on the big picture, via its innovative use of synopsis visualisation. And explorations are not where it ends. Those inclined to keep things tidy via tags or keywords, networks of cross-referenced documents, saved searches, chronology, or many other of the organisational doctrines, will find that Scrivener has a way to intelligently handle the method you prefer. § The environment should be transparent and adaptive. For many years, writing tools became a glut of features, all presented in toolbars and cluttered palettes. Getting things done became a task of squinting at icons and searching through menus. Around three or four years ago, the writing market underwent a renaissance of minimalisation. For a while, applications practically boasted on how many features they *did not* have. Many great ideas came out of this phase, and most of these applications have themselves since evolved into more complete ideas in their own right. Scrivener builds upon the many Good Things that came out of this era, and even manages to throw in a few completely new ideas while its at it. You will find all of the staples of a modern Mac writing application: Full screen; slick interface; short cut keys for mouseless usage; simultaneous document viewing; and so on. Everything amped up just a bit more than before -- just a little bit more integration between concepts to make for a more cohesive tool. You will also find some things that nobody else does. Archive full web pages for research; play and pause audio dictation files as you type; select a range of documents and edit them all together in a single window as if they were one file; and access important notes and ideas from within a full screen environment. I've only scratched the surface. In summary, Scrivener offers a wide range of *tools*, not systems. You bring the system with you; whatever type of writer you are, whatever methods you prefer, Scrivener is there to take up the tasks that you need done. It isn't the type of application that tells you how to write a book, it is the type of application that lets you forgot about all the grunt-work that goes into writing a book. It is, in a way, the peerless secretary. § The application should be adept at the three important phases of writing: Planning, authoring, and editing. There are many applications out there that focus on one or two of these phases, and some that try to focus on all three, but in my opinion Scrivener is the first that gets them all right. When it comes to those initial exciting phases where everything is fluid and ideas are forever changing the entire structure of a book -- Scrivener's rapid outlining and synopsis handling are superb. Research from a wide variety of media can be collected, annotated, and sorted. As this process gradually evolves into the seemingly endless crush of writing, the application gracefully transitions into a stable platform for your ideas. It helps you open up by disappearing. All of that power is still there, just below the surface, but you can completely ignore it and let inspiration take you. There are a few apps out there that excel at this phase, but not many. Finally, editing, where the need to be able to find anything you wrote comes into play. A whole new set of features come in to use. Snapshots, the ability to tuck away a version for safe keeping, giving you the freedom to edit all you please, and easily revert if you do not please; inline annotation puts your thoughts right into the text, making it easy to search for them and act upon them; split window editing letting you reference old versions right beside the current version; and a set of meta-data oriented tools that help you keep track of what you have and have not fixed. Work through your book in as many phases and stages as you please. Work-flows can be split and merged. View your book along artificial axis that you establish, such as being able to collect every scene including a certain character, and edit all of those scenes as a single document regardless of their position in the novel -- then close the session and everything snaps back to where it should be in the book -- all of your edits retained. When it comes to editing with the power Scrivener affords, there are very few programs out there, even those costing hundreds of dollars, that can approach its ease and strength. § There is perhaps a fourth important phase of writing that is coming into prominence these days, and that is publishing. It used to be that handing off a stack of papers was all you needed to do, and then as time went on, a document file on a disk. Times are changing, just as they are for the musician, and people are finding that distribution of their own work can be a fun and affordable alternative to formalised publishing. While Scrivener was originally intended to address only the *writing* process itself, during its lengthy development, it evolved a set of tools that make it one of the more powerful publishing applications on the market. Besides the usual rich text exporting, it allows you export using entirely different visual expressions than what you used to input. The advantage here is that you needn't work in a constricted format that is optimised for a publisher's manuscript demands, or even book formats if publishing on demand -- you can work in whatever fonts you please. And that is only the half of it. Scrivener has integrated support for the simple to learn text format, Markdown, via the MultiMarkdown export system. Using this, you can export to nearly any text based format in existence, and through that, many binary solutions as well, such as PDF. Want to print your own books using LaTeX? No problem, Scrivener does that right out of the box. Publishing manuals for UNIX tools? No problem, the export interface is scriptable and expandable using easy XSLT transforms and Perl. In short, Scrivener can export a drop-dead simple manuscript with very minimal configuration, all the way to extremely complicated exporting. Whether you are handing someone a stack of papers, publishing a book yourself, or distributing high quality PDFs on the Internet, Scrivener can handle it. There is much more that could be said, but I have gone on long enough. I have had the privilege of seeing this application develop over the past year and a half, from private beta, to freeware, to re-invention, to public beta, and now final release. The developer has put years of work and thought into every aspect of this program, from the menu arrangements to the way things react when you click on them. He's always there to give a detailed answer to any support problem or question; is open to suggestion, but firm to his vision of what a writing program should be. This is, as they say, a lean mean writing machine. You'll find no bloat or kludge here, but you won't find a featureless application pawning itself off as "simple being better," either. If you are a writer of any creed, I suggest you download the trial and give it the generous thirty days to see how it works for you. You just might find that, like me, you'll see a whole world of possibility open up that you never even knew existed. Scrivener embodies the Macintosh ethos of efficiency, simplicity, and strength, oftentimes in ways that even Apple seems to misunderstand. Best of all, being designed and executed by a writer, the application has a fundamental knowledge of a writer's needs. In this varied world, it would probably be impossible to a create a tool for everyone, but I dare say Scrivener comes awfully close to that grail. This is, I feel, one of those software gems that people will be fondly remembering and using for decades. |
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We definitely have a lot of "fluff over stuff" folks rating this application poorly for whatever reason. Some people prefer a full featured client over some toy that does little more than download torrents when you plug in a tracker address. There is definitely a place for that, and there is a place for more. Currently none of the suggestions offered here come near Azureus/BitTyrant in features. Further, to post suggestions to applications with normal download algorithms in an area for a specialised client only further reveals your ignorance. Fortunately, while BitTyrant may not be as "pretty" as some of these other gutless clients, it is very easy to use. Don't let the "Delicious Crowd" fool you. |
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Which, I might add, lumps BitTyrant together with one of the very leech clients that it was developed to thwart! |
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Just to clarify the post made about BitTyrant being "greedy;" the poster of this comment (and the author of the blog they link to) lacks an understanding of issues at hand. Yes, BitTyrant prioritises its bandwidth usage to move data as rapidly as possible amongst the fastest peers. If one were to disconnect the moment they got the file, that would be a bad thing, but if you leave your client on as you should, the net effect on the swarm is *positive*. It increases the number of active seeds much more quickly. It does this by actually ignoring the real leech clients that upload very little or none at all. The question is really this: Is it more or less fair to distribute your bandwidth thinly during the download phase, or to highly optimise it during the download phase and then open the filters once you are seeding? The standard route results in everyone slowly acquiring seed status. The second option means broadband users will hit seed status in less than half the time, increasing the availability of the data, and potentially the longevity in smaller swarms where the risk of losing all of your seeds increases. As long as you are an ethical torrent user and only disconnect once your ratio is favourable, BitTyrant is a good thing, possibly better than most clients which waste their time in the download phase with leech clients. We'll see. As someone posted in the comments to the linked blog, BitTyrant is experimental technology. It remains to be seen whether or not its net effect will be positive. Divorced from the social aspect, as a technology there is nothing wrong with it. The term "selfish" or "greedy," is a technical term not to be confused with the ethical common usages. This is no different than a creationist getting confused over the usage of the word "theory," in evolution science. Anyway, if you want to see the theory behind the application, take a look at their whitepaper: It is a great deal more thought out than this blog post. |
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This indeed does seem to work as advertised when compared to a well tuned Azureus client. Of course, being as volatile as the Bittorrent system is, it will require more than a few tests to determine if it is consistently faster, but I just downloaded two files of around 1 gigabyte each. The first was well established and I probably averaged around 320kB/s the entire time -- start-up was amazingly rapid. This is rare for my connexion particulars. The second download was on a very small swarm with only 4 seeds and a couple peers. Despite, I probably averaged around 100-130kB/s, which is generally what I average on a well established torrent. Not bad. The one drawback that I've seen so far is that it is very spare when uploading. It probably just uploads the minimum required for a maximum download rate. This is fine, it means I get the download quicker, but it does mean that I have to (at least in the karma sense) keep the file seeding a long time after the initial download. It appears to be typical to finish a download with a ratio of only .05 or so, where as stock Azureus usually finishes with close to 1.0 for me. I haven't put a stopwatch to it or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if the total download+seed time is similar to Azureus in the end -- you just get your download way faster. |
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$15 dollars for this -- and a bible verse? Hmm. No thank you. |
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I really meant to give it five stars, oh my. I forgot to mention two other things that would be nice -- but maybe impossible. Some menus, such as those in Firefox, come up impossibly bright. And I think this is possible to fix because I've seen applications get around it, like DragThing -- but making the shading element not fly off the screen when using Expose would be fantastic. |
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Brilliant! --Or the sweet lack of brilliance, in this case. I am extremely photosensitive, but I dislike using the controls on the LCD because I also am a photographer (I suppose that is only fitting; perhaps I have 3200 ISO retinas) and need the full power of my screen when messing with pictures. This lets me flip to comfortable levels with the mouse wheel. Love it. One thing that might be neat is to have a second setting which it uses whenever the computer wakes from sleep. That way I do not have to remember to set it nice and dim before I go off to bed. |
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Many thanks for the MacAppADay version! PTHPasteboard standard was already a favourite, but being able to sample the "pro" features has got me hooked. You'll be seeing an upgrade from me one of these days. |
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Many apologies. This application has a very nice trial period that lets you use the entire application for 30 days. If you don't like it -- well then you just have a bunch of files on your system to tend to. No messy exports, et cetera. My three day angst was entirely unfounded and probably based on my lack of trying the application out the first time I downloaded it with the intentions of doing so. |
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I responded to this, but the response seems to have disappeared. The notice that stated 3 days or 3 launches was in version 1.0, and came up the first time I tried to use the application. I just tried 1.1, and the notice has been fixed, and removed the 3 launches bit too it seems. Anyway, now I will give this application a try! |
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A THREE DAY demo period? I'd burst out laughing if it wasn't so pathetic. Not everyone has 72 conjoined hours to devote to an application. |
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Normally I don't rate software that is so infantile in the release cycle, but this seems to merit one because it is being offered as a 0.9.7 beta which, in most circles means something pretty close if not already a release candidate. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. This program sits somewhere between prototype and alpha in my opinion. There is a *lot* of user interface in place which seems to hook into nothing; like half of this program is just a nib file. It crashed within minutes after clicking different views, not even *doing* anything. And to top it all off, it already has a trial limitation in place. You'll only be able to use it for two weeks! Not only that -- it appears to be on sale! The sad thing is that it looks like it has a lot of potential. The author has a clear understanding of GTD, and a better than average eye for aesthetics. So, I'll definitely keep my eyes on it for a while. |
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I have not tried this application, so this is a comment not a review. In case you are unfamiliar with the TiddlyWiki community, this is simply a TW file wrapped up in an AppKit display with some shortcut buttons, as far as I can see. If you are unhappy with the specific features in the wiki itself, you are probably going to be out of luck, as this looks like it is just stock TiddlyWiki GTD. In reality, there are around half a dozen GTD implementations of the TiddlyWiki framework. I am, myself, most fond of d-cubed, but the next version of MonkeyGTD looks promising. If you are quite fine with TiddlyWiki GTD in this app, then it might be handy not having to mess with a web browser. |
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Things in the public domain do not cost anything, but yes. :) To the original poster, it is all about maximum efficiency. How big is that title bar, how big is that little re-size paddle in the bottom right corner. Using the entire window as a target instead of these small elements lets you throw windows around faster. For those of us that make money using a Mac fast, it lets us make more money. $7 is really not that much to ask for when you look at it that way. |
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Obviously, you have never had the pleasure of eating wild strawberries. |
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I like Multidash better. You can arrange things using the Dashboard itself, rather than a list. Plus, Multidash is a free widget. |
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While I am only one person, I have dozens of projects which range from complex to insanely complex. Tracking them from the ground up has always been a nightmare for me, where most of the project has to be contained somewhere in my brain due to lacking good software for tracking it. I understand that while many of these apps are targetting at the types of things you listed, that does not mean they can be abused into a system completely orthogonal to what they are meant to do. It might seem a little weird to do things that way, but when your alternative is to just track it in your brain, or force your concepts into an unreasonably restrictive software package, it gets tough. So something like this with more variables and data-types coming in at different data vectors -- I can see a lot of room for implementation. Anyway. I've heard rumours of your next project! Indeed I do wait anxiously for it. I already have a fairly powerful system built using Tinderbox, so that is what I will be comparing your software against once it debuts. Given Omni's belief in AppleScript, I have no doubt that while yours may not be as "flexible" as Tinderbox, it will certainly be extensible, which is important in the area of project tracking, where each person has individual needs. Thanks for the response. I understand where you are coming from. You charge what the market will pay, why not. Fancy restaurants get away with charging high prices dollars for bottled water, because their clientelle will pay for it. |
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I hadn't mean to imply that they were price equivalent. I am talking more of price ranges and how they effect the type of people who can afford them. For the non-business user who would need something along the lines of MS Standard, $150 would be too expensive to justify the cost, and thus anything higher than that is also too expensive, and just how much more expensive becomes irrelevant if you cannot afford the entire range. Whether Photoshop were $250 or $700 does not really matter to the hobbiest photography who wants to do a little re-touching. Both are prohibitively priced for someone who does not make money using it. Does that make more sense? Apps that are generally targeted at businesses are jacked up because businesses will pay that price -- when there are individuals out there who could actually use these feature-sets, but never justify paying what a business would pay to use it. It would be nice if you had "personal" license or something that was priced more like your non-"pro" products. |
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I think you would be surprised at just how inefficient Microsoft is. I have read quite a bit about their development process, based on ex-employees from developer to vice president in ranking, and they have so much red tape that it takes ages to do the most simple of tasks. Many things that should be done to be more efficient, never do get done for fear of upsetting the status quo. This is part of what I was factoring in to the price of development for a Microsoft product. I'm not sure it would be fair to say that a small company cannot work as fast as MS. It would not surprise me at all if a 50 developer team at MS took as long to code OmniPlan as the few Omni has. Paying 50 people (and paying them rather well, it should be remembered), for the same duration is going to make a more expensive product. Secondly, the "everyone else is doing it" argument is kind of tired. This statement only becomes relevant when the degree of program complexity becomes such that cheap development on a reasonable time-scale becomes impossible. High-end video editing software, for instance, is incredibly complicated. As a result, there are no (good) open-source equivalents, and pretty much every decent non-linear editor out there costs more than a computer. Another example is highly specialised software. Programs which keep track of the seating reservations on commercial airplanes, for instance. OmniPlan is nothing out of the ordinary. Project planning is a nearly universal need. The basic implementation and concept are fairly simple -- this isn't arctic weather system modelling or high-end speech recognition. R&D is thus very low, the need for a team of doctorate level scientists is non-existent, it could be sold to tens of thousands, not 15 institutions. Granted, it is not priced in that league, but it is priced far and above what it needs to be. They are going to find themselves running into the Ulysses barrier with their products, I think. Everyone will want them, but few will be able to justify the cost. It is a pity, as I state before. They make some of the best stuff out there for certain applications, but that in itself does not justify price bloat unless you are just a greedy capitalist. When I heard they might be working on a GTD implementation, I was pretty excited, but this release has brought me back down to earth. I'll be shocked if they charge any less than $40 for it, and less surprised at anything less than $50. |
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Omni used to be pretty neat when they made powerful software for affordable prices. A clean, simple outliner for the price of a CD. A clean, simple diagram designer for the price of a DVD. I guess it all went to their head, though. They've started charging ludicrious prices. The prices creep up every year it seems, and with hardly any basis in reality. It reminds me a lot of Second Life, where designers will just slap some arbitrary price tag on their product. There is no cost of fabrication, no supply concerns, no inventory. A sale is simply a small change in a database somewhere. Accordingly, some designers charge a few bucks (in equivalent), where others get their ego involved and charge ten or twenty dollars for a pseudo dress in a pseudo world. Now, I know the software world is different. They have mouths to feed, and servers to run. There are costs. But it seems a little "off" to me, in basis with what much surely be reality. Unless they moved into some swank, expensive San Fran office and hired a few extra employees, why the massive boost in sales price? Anyway, I'm not really reviewing this product, which is why I have not tagged this as a review. It is just a comment on Omni, and what I feel is a sad trend in the company. I used to recommend them to everyone, and hold licenses to everything they made. Lately, I never recommend, and I haven't bought a license in years. When you get down to it. $150 is something Microsoft would charge for this. I have a hard time believing that Omni's operating expenses are even remotely in the same league as a software division at Microsoft. And you know that Microsoft is jacking up prices to make a profit -- what does that tell you about a small operation with a fraction of Microsoft's overhead? |
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Forget about it. Horrible demo, bad customer service. There is no reason to put with that in today's Mac world. |
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Except that Textexpander costs $30. |
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If you have an image 3,000 pixels wide, and you are reducing it to 400 pixels wide, you are throwing ata 2,600 pixels! How, under any definition, is that not a reduction of quality? It is a generally accepted fact in the photographic and graphic art community that a file can only be safely resized to 80% or 120% of its size before it becomes too difficult to work with on a professional level. There are various ways to get around this, such as resizing an image twenty times in small increments instead of one large step; or utilising a quasi-vector trace to introduce fractal detail when upscaling. Generally, though, you are always going to be losing quality when you change an image from its original size. This is why you should always capture for your purpose. Shooting images for a website? Shoot as close to web resolution as possible, not 6megapixels. The only exception to this rule of thumb is when scanning images which have been printed using the process method. Then, scanning at an obscene DPI and then dramatically descreasing its size is one of the best ways to get rid of visible dots -- of course, at the expense of image clarity. |
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What are you up to now, $40 with the cost of "upgrading" to the new one? |
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This application has some serious flaws. The first is that you cannot save your settings. Spent half an hour making an elaborate set of filters, and forty-five minutes crawling your site applying them? Too bad, next time you need to make a sitemap, you have to start all over. Second serious error, you create a few obvious filters, crawl the site and go get some coffee -- take a lunch if you maintain a huge site like I do. Then get back and smack your forehead at a missed filter. No problem, you think, I'll just add it and -- Oh ... you realise as the screen pops back to step two that you'll now have to re-crawl the whole site just to add a filter. Never mind that a filter is something that programmatically is extremely simple to run against an extant list! We have to crawl again -- and I hope you did not just hit "add another filter" in a reactionary manner without taking exhaustive notes on every single idea for a filter that you might have had, because you list of results is Gone. That pretty much sums it up. I guess if you have a 70 page web site where 95% is just static literature, this tool might be Really Awesome, but for anyone that has to maintain a constantly shifting, 10,000+ page website. Ha. Go find another tool. You should not be charging $30. Period. |
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There are many people who write about annoying software out there, but *trust* me, people pointing it out and writing about annoying people being annoying are *way* more annoying than the former being more annoying than the latter is annoying to the annoying people who find annoying more people with annoying comments more annoying than reading annoying comments about annoying people. So please, give us all a break. |
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If 1.1 was stable, you whiners might have a point. Fact is, it is still in feature development. That means new features are still being actively developed. Until there is a feature freeze and a few bug releases go by, there is no way any responsible developer could utter the word "stable." If you don't want to beta test, then stop whimpering about the beta development process and go back to using the old stable version. You are like two spoiled children waiting for dinner, and having gone into the kitchen, are whining and bleating about the cook's method of mixing ingredients together. |
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I have tried all of the alternatives, and out of them all, Typinator probably suits me the most. But they are all fairly limited in comparison to what Textpander could do, and I suppose Textexpander has even more features. Still, not worth $30, but it is the best of breed. So, I am going to be using my old free version until it falls apart, and then I'll switch over to one of the alternatives. Be sure to back up your copy of the free one some place safe, because it looks like you can no longer download it anywhere. Peter, at least do like Dan did with MacJournal and allow us access to the freeware version somewhere on your site. It is the least you can do when you ditch all your users. The new ratings are based on the $30 price. Since that is what is being charge, I shall be more exacting with the analysis. A five start feature for free is not a five star feature at $30. Then it must be compared to similar $30 applications, such as DEVONnote, VoodoPad, TAO, Copywrite, et cetera. |
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Jesus Christ. Crawl out of your little capitalist bunker already. You do realise that the vast majority of the Internet, from the superstructure holding itself together, to the servers that you computer talks with, to the browsers that make it look pretty -- are "freeware," right? And that is just one facet of computing. There are entire operating systems with many hundreds of thousands of applications, all "freeware." Wake the hell up. Once you see what real developers do, with no chance of recompensation, you'll see just how very little and pathetic devs like MacJournal's are. Selling out their users and their work to some two-bit money factory. |
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What ship did you just step off of? That is precisely the way it works -- precisely the way it should work. Look at the development rate of MacJournal before and after the buy-out. It used to have a steady flow of creative, unique feature. Now it just pumps out dull, marketing apt features that are easy to hype -- bottom line. |
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Eh, you are describing shareware, I think. There is no obligation to donate. It wouldn't be a donation if there was an obligation. Look it up in a dictionary or something. Setting out the tip jar and then threatening to throw anying out who doesn't tip is foolish. Just raise the price already (and they did). To those that did not use it enough (like me), or just didn't feel the need to lavish praise in the form of currency, my message was a simple warning to not upgrade. I am a little tired of developers being surprised when only a small percentage donate. Charge for it if you want to live off of it. It is even more depressing that so many feel the urge to sell out. Now if that no-name company (SmileOnWhatever) goes bankrupt, Textpander is gone forever. Lost in the legal red tape of debtors. I've done my share of donation in the past. But I am always a bit wary of doing it for precisely the above reason. There is no rule that says the purchasing company has to honour donations. Sometimes they are nice, like this time. Othertimes, as in the case of MacJournal -- they charged donators an upgrade fee for half a dozen features and a new icon! Who knows what SmileOneForever is going to charge in the future. Who knows if they are going to get bought out by somebody and then discontinued. Textexpander is a *product* now, and suffers the same risks and fate that any other products do, which, I have found are considerably more risky than devoted developers and open source projects. |
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From the FAQ, "We are considering IMAP support for a future release of Mailsmith, though we regret that, per our standard policy, we cannot speculate on the timing for this." Whatever the time may be, it will be years too late; probably closer to a decade too late. Anyway, not a big fan of software companies that revel in keeping their user base in the dark about things so basic as the intention of their software. |
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Alas, confirmed via multiple news sources. Here is the developer: "This situation is the culmination of a series of events that has taken place over the last few months," wrote owner Cyrus Daboo. "Sadly this situation pretty much means the end of Mulberry. Its now almost ten years since I wrote the first code of the Macintosh IMAP email client that would become Mulberry. It has been a labor of love and much personal sacrifice, and despite this disheartening outcome, I do maintain a certain amount of pride of what was achieved with limited resources." |
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I recommend a simple little utility called Emailchemy. It does cost a little, but if you deal with email a lot, it might be worth it just to have it around. I regularly use it to export large swaths of my email directly into text files, which I then import into my long-term archival application. |
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Nice little program. I use DOY as my standard personal timestamp. I found that Tiger's ability to show DOY system-wide was very useful, but not all programs play along with it, especially Carbon applications which default to standard US format; a format I cannot stand. So having something like this to do quick conversions is nice. Some things could be done to make it more useful. For instance, I'd like to be able to jump to a DOY. Say a dialog where you type 2005 192 and it the calender jumps right to that day. Or the other way around if you need to go that way. There does seem to be a basic skeleton for this, but I could figure out no way to configure the jump menu, or do one-time jumps. |
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As warned by the rest. Do Not Upgrade unless you actually want to pay $30 for this utility. If you honestly feel that it is worth that price, then go right ahead. For me, it was a nice shortcut while it was free -- but I'll spend my money where it has more impact. Not "donating" results in a periodic annoying spam message. GripeWare is what I call it. |
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The twenty dollar upgrade fee is pretty unsubstantiated. I went through the change list, and the apps side-by-side. This update should have been a 4.2 or something -Not- an entire point leap! Seems most commercial developers do not understand the philosophy of version numbers at all. Anyway. Save your money for version 10 (4.8). Or just wait until you buy a new Mac. |
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Five words to the developer: Learn to write a demo! Oh, and putting a dot in front of the name is just about the most insecure way to hide something that I've ever heard of. You know, UNIX just had that system to keep non-essential files out of the way when you scan a directory. It's just one flag away from being revealed. |
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It never ceases to amaze me. People throwing together an extremely rudimentary set of buttons against some system calls, and then charging money for it. Even more distasteful is that the app is working with free software, most of it GPL. Here are vast projects, highly complex, stable, and respected in the computing world -- free. And this doink comes along and charges $15 bucks or whatever to run a few system calls on them. Don't support these leeches. |
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You so do not have to click on each and every blah blah... Cmd-a Have a nice day. |
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Maintenance for this product has slipped woefully in the past year. They built the features up to a really great set, but then decided to let a few really major bugs slide -- seemingly for good. It has been many, many months where this app just doesn't work that well with Tiger. They seem to be doing very little to rectify this situation. Look at the latest update -- fixing a graphic in the help file (?!) That's the kind of dumb stuff that doesn't even get mentioned in a Real update. Here, it is a major feature! |
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Anyone ever notice that web developers think every text editor that hits the market should have DreamWeaver level features? Heh. Man, that is so 1995. |
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Before using this application, I was a die-hard NCFTP user. I never saw the point of slapping a GUI on an FTP client, but this one works well enough to use it on a regular basis. I still use NCFTP for some things, like command line automation, but CyberDuck is a very nice complement to the Mac. Especially nice is if you have QuickSilver installed with the CyberDuck plug-in. You can access bookmarks with a few keystrokes. |
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If half of what you need is batch renaming, there are plenty of super cheap or even free tools for batch renaming files. Any files; they don't have to be media. Check out File List, or File Wrangler if you need more power. |
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Sorry about the over-spill on that comment. Only the last, larger, section is relevant. Oh well, it is a humorous statement on immutability! That is what I meant, yes. |
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