DANA SUTTON  By the way, Mr. Developer, I know your Help page invites us to suggest new apps. for your list via your Wiki, but your server is down, so this is the only way I have of (maybe) getting your attention. It would be helpful if you'd fix this.  
(Version 1.3.9)

DANA SUTTON  Aw nuts, Dreamweaver CS-3, my workhorse application, is not one of the thirty programs for which this app. will open specific documents, so I don't have any particular use for it. Add that one to the list, Mister Developer, and I'll snap this up.  
(Version 1.3.9)

DANA SUTTON  Let me also add that I chose iDrive primarily because I had checked out several such services, and downloaded the software of each one for evaluation. By comparison, the software offered by some competitors was very crude and un-Mac-like, but iDrive's is polished and has a sophisticated yet easily comprehensible interface.  
(Version 1.1.6)

DANA SUTTON  (I use iDrive not iBackup, but this comment applies to them both equally, and in fact to any other similar off-site backup scheme). This works exactly as advertised, I've used it for maybe 6 months, entirely hassle-free. But be warned: if you are going to back up many gb. of data, it's going to take a long time, maybe up to a week, and your broadband connection is going to take a serious hit (sure, you can apply the throttle control to cut back on its bandwidth use, but this means your upload takes even longer). Personally, if I were going to start all over with one of these services, I'd put it off until the next time I was about to take a long vacation.   
(Version 1.1.6)

DANA SUTTON  The thing that strikes me most about Firefox 3.5 is that, unlike Safari's Top Sites, Fast Dial actually works and is useful: it only shows sites you want it to use rather than loading all sorts of crap by tracking and displaying your History, and you can set it as your start page (just write "about:blank" in the Home Page box). Also, if try to resize Top Sites thumbnails to a smaller size, the next time you quit/launch there are those damn big ones again. The Fast Dial thumbnails are too big, I'd like to a figure out a way to make them smaller so I can see more sites on a single screen. Other than that, it's everything I'd like Top Sites to be that it isn't.  
(Version 3.5)

DANA SUTTON  It is very easy to knock Web2 Delight as being a "pretty face" but not being worth the somewhat steep cost, since there are plenty of other and less costly utilities that allow you to download video from iTube and probably other sources as well. True, but Web2 Delight also gives you a filing system for your videos not wholly unlike the way you use iTunes for your music and iPhoto for your pictures, and i. m. h. o. this by itself justifies the price of admission if you have a lot of video clips on your h. d. and need a tool for riding herd on them. It does have some rough edges. For ex., if you download music videos from iTube you might very well want to be able to set up playlists, but these aren't implemented And iTube is the only source where you can simply type in the URL of the video in question to initiate a download. Other sources get a bit more clumsy. I'd like a program that could download videos from any Web source where you specify the URL. Also, you can either have Quick Time run your videos or run them within the program. If you do the latter, there's no way to control the size of the window so lo-res. videos look horrible So there's plenty of room for improvement. But Web2 Delight is off to a good start. Let's hope the developers keep working to improve it.  
(Version 1.7.119)

DANA SUTTON  I realize that almost every browser out there has its fans, and that what I am about to say will bring down the wrath of some readers, but I personally think the great profusion of broswers is silly (and, incidentally, makes life unduly hard for us poor Web designers). If all the brainpower invested in developing them were focused on smaller number, and if all the available knowledge about browser design were pooled, it is not difficult to imagine that the results would be better for everybody.   
(Version 1.6.8)

DANA SUTTON  Way too problematic. At least one of my apps. refused to open with CCI installed. So I tried to add it to the Exclude list (repeatedly) both by navigation and by dragging the icon to the box. Every time I did this, System Preferences crashed. Who needs the hassles? (Also I found the idea of transparent windows disconcerting and confusing).  
(Version 2.1)

DANA SUTTON  One minor annoyance: BOINC has both a menu icon and a Dock icon, which is a redundant space-waster (I use Dock Dodger to conceal the Dock icon, but I shouldn't have to take the time to do this). Can't the developers fix this?  
(Version 6.6.36)

DANA SUTTON  Question: does iDefrag work with RAID arrays?   
(Version 1.6.9)

DANA SUTTON  Thanks, Misha. I want to be absolutely clear about what I'm saying. I have absoluteliy nothing against Glims or MacHangout, its developer, and I admire their up-front honesty about what they're doing. My objection is, in a nutshell, that a technology that allows third parties to alter the links I click on, in the wrong hands, seems to have the potential of being employed as a new kind of Trojan Horse. I believe I have the right to experct that the links I click on to function precisely as intended by the site developer.  
(Version 1.0b17)

DANA SUTTON  Sorry, I hear you but I still don't buy it. I think it's that I don't like the idea of the technology they're using, even if they are using it for a completely benign purpose. Dammit, I don't want the links I click on to be altered in any way. Even if what they do is quite okay and understandable, the next guy to use the same link-modification might do it for a much more sinister purpose, and i. m. h. o. it ought to be against the law If they simply asked me for a few bucks, I'd happily pay to use it, it's a good product. Or, if they insist on making their money this way, I think it would be more ethical for them to include some sort of opt-out choice, so that people share my view could continue to use GLIMS in a totally worry-free way.  
(Version 1.0b17)

DANA SUTTON  I only want to make one small comment. Hit List is no doubt a fine product, I don't question that. But I don't like the idea of being charged money for software when the version number is less than 1.0. This would appear to indicate that in the author's mind the item in question is still under development and in the "use at your own risk" stage, so the user is being asked to pay (and in this case, being asked to pay a significant sum) for the privilege of being a beta tester and run the risks associated with running software at that stage. Wouldn't it be a fairer practice to distribute it for free with some kind of built-in time limitation on how long it can be used, and then start charging when v.1.0 is released?  
(Version 0.9.3.14)

DANA SUTTON  Refuses to launch on my 1st gen. Mac Pro  
(Version 0.9.0)

DANA SUTTON  When you launch the installer on this version, you get a screen which says, in part, "When you use our plugin and click on an Amazon or eBay result that we formatted, you support our project. Amazon and eBay gives us a small percentage in referral fees on all qualifying revenue made through their links. Please note that this only happens on our formatted links. Other websites or links are not reformatted. Also your privacy is protected through Amazon's privacy policy. In other words what happens on Amazon stays in Amazon." I'm not so sure I care for this. What exactly is "an Amazon or eBay link that we formatted?" How can I tell when I'm looking at one? For some time, I have been using Glims, but having read this I de-installed the version I've been running, and I'm certainly not going to install this one.  
(Version 1.0b17)

DANA SUTTON   I have only one possible doubt about running this. I launch Activities Monitor, set it to Processor History, let BOINC run a couple of minutes, stop it, and I can see that it has had all four of my processing cores continually running balls-out I can't help wondering what kind of heat that creates. Is there any risk of shortening the life of my processors? One of my cores gets up to 175 degrees, which doesn't seem like a good idea. Anybody have any thoughts about this issue?  
(Version 6.6.29)

DANA SUTTON  I started using Time Machine when it first came out, and I've always wanted some way of seeing logs so as I could understand what it's actually doing. So I'm very glad indeed to have this utility available. I have only one problem -- the author charges 0.90 Euros (using Paypal) and I'm afraid the cost of currency conversion might turn out to be more than the cost of the software. I've written to him suggesting that he charge his American customers $1.00 instead.  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Let me add something else. Both Dialectic and Phone Valet add relevant items to the often-neglected Services menu. Since it is very easy to assign keyboard commands for such items, it's a snap to set up a system where they dial a highlighted number, or one stored on the clipboard, by such a command (go System Preferences > Keyboards/Mouse > Keyboard shortcuts, hit +, in this case keep All Applicaitons, type in the exact name of menu item, assign a keyboard command combo not used in any applicaiton you run). Try it, it's sweet.  
(Version 1.4.1)

DANA SUTTON  But (I just found out) once you have installed OSX.5.7, you can access an upgrade of Safari 4 beta from Software Update.  
(Version 3.2.3)

DANA SUTTON  Let me add that I checked, and the new OS X.5.7 upgrade does not contain any new version of Safari beta 4.  
(Version 3.2.3)

DANA SUTTON  For those who don't want to use Safari 4 beta or can't use it (for example because they needs some plug-in it doesn't support) this will be welcome. By the way, the compaint that Safari 4 beta becomes a memory or processor hog if you open multiple windows simply doesn't match my experience (I have a first-generation Mac Pro desktop).  
(Version 3.2.3)

DANA SUTTON  I installed this upgrade without incident. Another satisfied customer :)  
(Version 10.5.7)

DANA SUTTON  I rarely criticize the good people who manage the MU site, but here I have a bone to pick. Why describe Skim as a "PDF Reader and note-taker for scientific papers," which makes it sound like some kind of specialized app. meant only for four-eyed nerds in lab coats? This is a full-blown alternative to Adobe Acrobat, and i. m. h. o. it blows it away.  
(Version 1.2.2)

DANA SUTTON  Yes, Dock Gone works as advertised, and yes, it performs a valuable function, so I'll almost certainly purchase it. But it's not the solution I want. The problem is the Dock's "hair trigger" responsiveness: if your cursor grazes the edge of your screen for even a millisecond while you have the Dock hidden, up it comes, I deal with this nuisance a dozen times a day. But I think there's a potentially a better solution than Dock Gone. Back in the OS9 days I used A-Dock, which has a feature where the cursor has to stay in touch for a user-defined period (say, a half a second) before its dock would pop up. Rather than being forced to remember yet more hot-key command and have one more icon in my dock (with Dock Gone running I currently have 17), I'd rather have a Preference panel which made Apple's Dock behave like A-Dock in this respect.  
(Version 1.0b2)

DANA SUTTON  I wound up not buying v. 1 because of the problem I mentioned here: the annoyingly exaggerated treble was driving me nuts. I complained about this to the developer and thought I'd hold off paying the not inconsiderable price he is asking until I saw how he responded to this complaint the next version. So, when this was released, I downloaded it and then was informed that it would not work because the trial period for v. 1 had expired. Sorry, developer, but I'm not buying a pig in a poke. If I can't make a separate evalution of vl. 2, then the hell with it. There are other similar products on the market, I guess I'll try one of them.  
(Version 2.0)

DANA SUTTON  Works for me, no problem (I am getting a bit tired of daily updates, however. Unless there's a blazing emergency, couldn't the developer hold off a little while?)  
(Version 0.5.1)

DANA SUTTON  This is a good applicaiton that works as advertised (and the price certainly is right), and unlike some similar applications, it doesn't take up any space in the Dock. All to the good. What's not so good is the interface, in two ways. 1.) The stations in any particular Web service are displayed in alphabetical order (rather than being grouped together by categories in the manner of iTunes and the AOL Radio application), and are displayed in a rather small window, and when you are addressing a service which offers a large number of choices this makes it too difficult to browse stations. 2.) It doesn't have a Favorites or Return to Last Station Played feature, so if you have a favorite station you have to re-access it manually every time you launch Radium. To be sure, the Search feature makes this easier, but it's still not as good as an auto play-on-launch option.  
(Version 2.0.3.2)

DANA SUTTON  This is a neat idea. But I have another one, if the developer reads these comments. If you are using multiple monitors, it's kind of a bummer that the dock and menubar only appear on a single "blessed" one (so if you are working on Monitor B you keep having to make trips back to Monitor A to access these). If you could develop an app. that would put mirrors of the dock (and hopefully the menubar as well) on all running monitors, this would be a real boon.  
(Version 2.20b)

DANA SUTTON  Funny, the Version Tracker blurb says 900 features. I haven't counted the items listed on the developer's Features page, but they don't look like they add up to more than 100 at most.  
(Version 3.2.9)

DANA SUTTON  I have been wanting offsite backup, and investigated several options. Finally I selected iDrive, mostly because their software is vastly better than that of any competitor. Yet I have one serious reservation. Since iDrive only permits archived backups, and since it limits you to 150 GB, sooner or later I'm going to use up my quota, and I haven't a clue what's going to happen then. I e-mailed their support asking about this, and never received an answer, which suggests to me that they don't have a clue either. So if by the time I hit my limit they haven't come up with a solution to this problem, I'll probably just walk away from this service and look for another one. And I bet this is going to be the reaction of a large part of their customer base. So it is really in their own best interest to face up to the fact they have a problem on their hands. There are two ways of fixing it, both of which I would find acceptable: a.) give us the option of simple mirrored backup with no archiving, or b.) use the Time Machine "first in first out" scheme, whereby old archives are automatically cleaned out to preserve space for new backups. Let's hope the developers wake up and smell the coffee over this one. (Better security protection would be very welcome too).

Also, anybody with a fairly large body of data that needs to be backed up should be aware that the initial upload is going to take a long time (mine took over five days). If you aren't very cool about using the bandwidth throttle you're internet performance is going to take a massive hit.  
(Version 1.3.1)

DANA SUTTON  I guess I'm the reverse of most people who have written reviews about MacJournal lately. I. m. h. o., what started out as a simple, straightforward and clean journal app. has morhed into a monster (and a rather expensive monster at that) by trying to be all things to all people, acquiring a gazillion extraneous bells and whistles. And some folks in this thread are begging for yet more of the same. I'm sticking to v. 3, and I'm certainly not forking out money for an upgrade, which only encourages the developer, who ought to have known how to quit when he was ahead.  
(Version 5.1.3)

DANA SUTTON  I use DropCopy to get around the fact that Apple's Screen Sharing has no provision for drag-and-drop transfers of files and folders. After installing it on both my Macs I can pass files back and forth with ease, and it's never given me any trouble at all.  
(Version 1.5)

DANA SUTTON  You use Address Book to store your phone numbers, right? So doesn't it make sense to use Address Book to dial them as well? And you use your Mac as a communications center in so many other ways that it would probably make sense to use it as a center for yoiur telephony as well, no? You have two ways to go, which aren't necessarily mutually exclusive: use Dialectic as a dialer, or use Phone Valet turn your Mac into a dialer/answering machine. Both access Address Book. Both add a Services item which can be assigned a keyboard equivalent, and both add a Contextual Menu item, so they are extremely handy. Dialectic is especially useful for road warriors' laptops, whereas Phone Valet is relevant to desktops (but if you are using it with multiple Macs on a LAN you will want Dialectic to enhance the power of the satellite program they give you to run on other networked machines). It's strange that Apple, which pioneered the Smart Telephone, is otherwise so indifferent to telephony and doesn't include any telephone-relevant capability in the OS package. These two programs make up for this omission.  
(Version 1.4)

DANA SUTTON  This a welcome utility: it allows me to remove the Screen Sharing icon from my Dock, and the fewer Dock items the better. I have only one niggling little complaint: I already have several other dock items (Overflow, Camouflage, Spaces) which are screen-shaped rectangles, and this creates a potential for confusion. So I'd be a litle happier if this Menulet had a more distinctive icon.  
(Version 1.2)

DANA SUTTON  My understanding was that Omni was making OmniWeb free because they were ceasing its development, and I am very pleased to see that they are going ahead with it and haven't broken up the development team. Good work, guys.   
(Version 5.9.2)

DANA SUTTON  I'm watching this one very closely because it's potenrtially so attractive. In view of customer complaints about its present shortcoming, it's a shame that the developers aren't more explicit about what's new in this version. In case the developer reads this, it's clear that it needs a.) mirrored backups, so that deletions, name changes, etc., made on the user's local computer are reflected on the remote site, b.) a cast-iron guarantee that the user's data cannot be accessed by the developer's employees, and I hope that a new version will address these concerns in the near future. As soon as these issues are fixed it's very likely that I'll become a happy subscriber. But right at the moment I'm a little hesitant to entrust my sensitive data to this product's safekeeping.  
(Version 1.2.8)

DANA SUTTON  The statement that this version is "Snow Leopard-ready" is interesting, because this is the first such claim I have seen. It is a very lucky shareware developer who can get his hands on a developer's beta, and a very plucky one to make this claim since Snow Leopard is no doubt going to go through several more iterations before the GM version is released and what works on the current one may not work on future ones.  
(Version 3.2)

DANA SUTTON  This, no doubt, iks a good and worthy product. But I do object to its name, which is way toomuch like ScreenShot Plus, the name of a shareware app. that has been available for quite a number of years. How many people are going to appreciate the subtle difference between "Screenshot" and "ScreenShot"? The developer of this product ought to Do The Right Thing and display more originality in naming it.   
(Version 3.1)

DANA SUTTON  I've been running this as a demo on my MacPro for several days without encountering any stability problems. Maybe that's exclusively an iMac issue? This pretty much works as advertised, my only concern is that pretty obviously at least part of the way this works its magic is by tweaking equalization and, at least for my taste, given the kind of music I listen to (classical) and my particular loudspeakers, the sound is excessively bright unless I throttle its intensity slider all the way down to Minimum, thereby losing a lot of the benefits of its other sound-improving routines. So I wish there were some way of introducing my own equalization profile so I could run it at any intensity I wanted while reining in the treble. Another point: potential users should be aware of this item from the document that accompanies the download: "If you use Apple iTunes, turn off iTunes Sound Enhancer. From within the iTunes Preferences, select the Playback category. Uncheck the Sound Enhancer option." I don't understand why they say this, I use it with iTunes with no problem, but your results might vary.  
(Version 1.2)

DANA SUTTON  I caught that, but what I can't figure out how to do -- and this is the thing most important to me -- is how to add sites of my own choice to this page.  
(Version 4.0b1)

DANA SUTTON  I can't comment on the speed of this new version: so many factors go into determining how fast a page loads (server speed, carrier bandwidth, etc.) that I have no idea how to isolate the single factor of browser speed. The thing that does impress me as most strikingly different is Top View, which is very easy on the eyeballs and has a lot of potential. But I have a problem with the fact that I can't have full control of precisely what sites it contains. In the first place, I haven't discovered any way of ensuring that pages I do want actually appear in it. In the second, it insists on loading a bunch of pages I haven't ever visited in my life and have no desire to visit, for me they're just clutter. Apple ought to let me have full control of the contents of this page, in accordance with my personal viewing habits, rather than having some guy in Cupertino second-guessing for me. (Or am I missing something about its controls? If I can manage this page, the method certainly isn't very intuitive!)  
(Version 4.0b1)

DANA SUTTON  Bingo! Worked like a charm, thanks for the tip.  
(Version 4.0b1)

DANA SUTTON  Won't launch for me either (first generation MacPro). Well, it's a beta and it's doubtless no accident that Apple included an uninstaller.   
(Version 4.0b1)

DANA SUTTON  In fact, this app. is so useful that I'd like to challenge the developer to bring out a sequel. I'd really like an app. that produces detailed logs of Time Machine uploads so that I can have an understanding of what it is actually doing (for inst., to explain mysterious jumps in disk space consumption). For this I'd be very happy to pay a little money.  
(Version 1.1)

DANA SUTTON  Let me add my thanks: I had no paranoid feelings about the folder in the root Applications folder, but I do prefer to store apps like this in Home>Apps>Utities (that way, if I ever have to do a clean reinstall, I don't have to worry about downloading a new copy)  
(Version 1.1)

DANA SUTTON  This is a great boon for people who back up networked Macs to a central device, as it can be used to prevent individual Macs from backing up simultaneously, which can overload a network.  
(Version 2.0.3)

DANA SUTTON  I'll probably try this but I'm not sure that it's worth paying for since there are free utilities that do some of this stuff. But (if you are reading this, dear developer), there's a feature for which I'd gladly pay. I hate the "hair trigger" speed with which the hidden Dock pops up if I graze the edge of my screen for even a millisecond with my cursor, this happens to me dozens of times a day, and I remember the old utility A-Dock, which let me set a minimum time the cursor had to be in touch with the screen edge before popping up. If you could reproduce this feature I'd gladly fork over ten bucks and then some.  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Same problem here.  
(Version 3.0.3)

DANA SUTTON  What Frodo writes about lack of security bothers me. Otherwise, I might be interested in in subscribing to this service but I won't consider it until the developers can offer me a higher level of security. I also want to be assured that the issue of permissions doesn't interfere with successful uploading and backing up.  
(Version 1.2.4)

DANA SUTTON  It lets you rebuild your desktop???? Wow, that's a blast from the past!   
(Version 3.5)

DANA SUTTON  As for the suggestion that Bento could be used as a substitute, you should be aware that, although Bento has many good features, it has no kind of security feature. It is therefore entirely inappropriate for storing confidential information  
(Version 1.5.8)

DANA SUTTON  I only have one criticism of this app. It should have available from the very first day OSX came out. since, like such other features as the old Apple Menu, managing F-keys was a feature of OS9 that Apple was wrong to deep-six in OSX. So when users upgraded to OSX they found they had to pay money to third-party developers to retain functions they had previously enjoyed for free. Now at last we have a free solution. Thankyouthankyouthankyou!!  
(Version 3.0b9)

DANA SUTTON  I agree with Driezhas. It's not all that useful to know why a volume refuses to unmount (or why, for that matter if you're unable to do anything about it. On the other hand, a utility that would be a real boon.  
(Version 0.3)

DANA SUTTON  Well, if you were a CS3 Dreamweaver customer you'd feel you'd been badly bit! But my point is that they seem to devote much more time and energy to updating the updater than to updating the products, at least judging by frequency of releases.  
(Version 6.0.2)

DANA SUTTON  I don't get the point of these very frequent Auto Updater releases, since Adobe doesn't do very much (or, in the case of Dreamweaver CS3, anything at all) to update their CS software.  
(Version 6.0.2)

DANA SUTTON  I do not need the improved features of Dreamweaver CS4. I do need fixes for the many serious and annoying bugs in CS3. Adobe has never released a single bugfix upgrade for CS3 (with the exception of one upgrade for localized language versions). Instead, they have delayed fixing the bugs pending the release of CS4. From my point of view, therefore, I am being asked to pay a huge price for fixing the problems inherent in CS3. The normal assumption in the software industry is that the cost of fixing bugs and issuing corrected versions is rolled into the purchase price of the software, and that a software developer has a responsibility to exercise due diligence in issuing such upgrades promptly so that the product functions as advertised. Despite the very high price of the various items in the CS suite and the high price of upgrades, Adobe does not adhere to this industry-standard way of fair dealing with its customers, and I can confidently predict that any bugs that come to light in CS4 will not be fixed until CS5. I. m. h. o., therefore, Adobe is an unethical company that mistreats its customer base. This is an intolerable situation and I, refuse to fork over any more money to these people.   
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  The downloaded installer worked fine for me. Curiousliy, however, the Microsoft Updater refused to see the availability of this upgrade.  
(Version 12.1.5)

DANA SUTTON  I'm sure that plenty of people will find this useful, but the CS4 suite is now current. I hope the author gives us a CS4 one too.  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Shortly after writing this review I stumbled across a great gadget utility called Dock Dodger (free), which modifies a program so it doesn't display a Dock icon. Once you have used Space Suit to get your desktops the way you want, just use Dodger to eliminate the Dock icon (you can bring it back when you want to change your backgrounds).   
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Originally I didn't like Spaces because you could only organize desktops on a program by program basis. Then Apple improved it: now you can put different windows from any one program on different desktops, and this allows you to organize yourself on a project-by-project basis, much nicer. But it still has one problem, that all desktops have the same background, so that in the absence of a distinctive visual cue for each desktop it is too easy for the user to become disoriented. Space Suit addresses this problem, for which I am very grateful. Nevertheless I have two problems with it. First I wish that it were not implemented so that it uses a Dock icon. Especially on a small screen -- think of a 13" laptop -- Dock space is too valuable to be chewed up by background utilities. Second, unlike You Control Desktops, it doesn't work in tandem with the nifty background utility Camouflage, which I have been using to keep my desktop nice and neat. If the author would address these two issues, I'd be very willing to pay money for a future version (hint, hint).  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  I haven't downloaded and tried this out yet, but I suspect you guys are being a little too rough. This does seem to have a few tricks up its sleeve (such as opening files within TM backups) which I don't think Leopard can do. If I'm right, it's very much up to the individual customer to decide whether they are useful enough to justify the (admittedly rather high) cost of the program.  
(Version 1.0b81117)

DANA SUTTON  I wouldn't touch a program like this. Mucking around with programs' code sounds like a great way of inviting trouble. And what's the benefit of shrinking programs' sizes in a day and age when disk space is so cheap and plentiful?  
(Version 1.6.1)

DANA SUTTON  I agree that the lack of an upgrade policy is a slap in the face for v.1 purchasers (and doesn't bode well for anybody who purchases v.2 and hopes that FileMaker will adopt such a policy next time around). This has some new features I don't especially want and lacks features for which early adopters have been screaming ever since the first release, of which some kind of encryption feature stands at the top of the list. If you read the Bento BB, you'll quickly get the idea that the developers simply aren't listening to their customers. Sure, I'd pay ten or fifteen bucks for this upgrade, and probably figure out some way to put some of these features to good use, but that's about as far as I'd be willing to go and I can manage to live without these "improvements."  
(Version 2.0v2)

DANA SUTTON  What seems like decades ago (maybe it was!) I was a beta tester for AOL software. Although I and many other testers kept complaining about the hideous interface and how absolutely un-Maclike it was, their software engineers never got the point. It's like the chapter on "Human Engineering" had been ripped out of their textbooks. All I need is a quick glance at the screenshot to see that they still utterly fail to get it. I physically flinch when my poor eyes are confronted with AOL Desktop. I can easily see the point of having an all-in-one piece of software for those folks who aren't very computer-savvy and don't especially want to become so, and these days this is probably the single selling-point of AOL . But people like that are precisely the kind of people who will no doubt be thrown off -- or more likely scared off -- by such a cluttered, complex and confusing interface. AOL desperately needs to be ruthless and simplify, simplify, simplify.  
(Version 1.5b4)

DANA SUTTON  Seventy five bucks for a bunch of scripts?? You can buy Bento, which talks to both Address Book and iCal, and have twenty five bucks left in your jeans. Assuming it works, this would be a great $10 utility, but that's about it.  
(Version 2.0.3.2)

DANA SUTTON  On the other hand (now that I've used this a while) what's not quite so cool are the bright and chipper (and LOUD) institutional promos they put on every now and then. I understand that it's necessary to take care of business, but do they need to use people with voices that sound like chipmunks on speed, and do they have to crank up the volume quite so annoyingly? These can be real mood-breakers.  
(Version 2.0b)

DANA SUTTON  Works fine for me, and an interesting alternative to the iTunes streaming radio feature. The only way it suffers by comparison is that the number of stations available for at least some genres (Blues, Classical, for ex.), isn't as large. Hopefully this is something that will improve in time. B.t.w., its trick of putting album covers in the Dock is waaay cool.  
(Version 2.0b)

DANA SUTTON  Text Wrangler is a text editor, not an html editor. Not so?  
(Version 9.0)

DANA SUTTON  BBEdit is a great program. It is also an expensive one. Am I the only person who mourns the passing of BBEdit Light, which was quite sufficient for my purposes?  
(Version 9.0)

DANA SUTTON  Launch KM. Select Macros panel. Click the + square at the foot of the page. This brings up the Macro Editor window. Click record. Navigate to the menu item of your choice (if this involves recording extra steps as KM observes you, you can manually remove them from the list). Choose "Save" Then go to "New Trigger > Hot Key" and select a keyboard command, one that doesn't conflict with one you already have. Save that too, give your Macro a name, and you're good to go. As far as I know, this feature works with all versions of KM so you don't need the latest and the greatest to achieve . Note: this allows you to create new keyboard equivalents for menu commands, but it doesn't allow you to assign new keyboard equivalents for existing ones or remove preexisting ones (although you can do these things from within programs with such ones as Office and Dreamweaver).   
(Version 1.4.3b4)

DANA SUTTON  I used to depend on Menu Master. Then it broke under Leopard and it has taken, what is it, ten months for the developer even to produce a beta? Since I had relied on MM for my work, I was forced to look around for a substitute,and I discovered that the recorded Macro feature of Keyboard Maestro allowed me to assign new keyboard equivalents to menu commands. Keyboard Maestro is a program, not a system-modifying hack, so it's a lot more benign, and I don't have to worry about going through this hassle again because of Menu Master possibly breaking with Snow Leopard or some other future version of OSX. I've found a very satisfactory substitute for Fruit Menu, too, so I don't think I'll be having any more to do with Haxies.  
(Version 1.4.3b4)

DANA SUTTON  No, nothing happens (although my Time Machine otherwise works quite well). If you want to continue this discussion, maybe it's better to do so by e-mail and not bore the lurkers. E-mail: danasutton@mac.com.  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Sorry, but I've had TM Buddy installed for about 8 hours, When I have it displayed, the message box remains blank, it simply isn't loading information. I click the Refresh icon, nothing happens. So far,anyway, it is remaining stubbornly and completely inert. How can I get it to come to life. Reload it? Reboot?   
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Developer's site says "The widget will poll the system logs for backups every 15 minutes. If a backup is active it will poll every 5 seconds until completed. If the Dashboard is closed all polling is stopped. You can manually trigger a refresh by mouse clicking the refresh button." In the first place, this means that the usefulness of this widget is very limited: it won't log the operation of Time Machine in the background, which is after all what Time Machine is all about. In the second place, when I do bring up the Dashboard layer and click the refresh button absolutely nothing happens. So instead of being largely useless, this widget is totally useless. If the developer will post a version that works as advertised, I'll be glad to try it. If he will post a version that works alongside Time Machine in the background and logs all its activity (probably with a Clear Log option to keep things from getting ridiculous), then he will have done us all a big favor. But this version isn't it.  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Does anybody else but me think "11.0.0.465" is a totally absurd designation? Exactly how many decimal points does Adobe need??  
(Version 11.0.0.465)

DANA SUTTON  What does it do? Looking at the screenshot, one gets the idea that it mostly shows you a whole bunch of ads, and that this was foremost in its designers' minds. One of the many, many reasons I got out of AOL many years ago is that I wanted an interface that showed me what I wanted to look at, not what they wanted me to look at (and were aggressively pushing all the time). AOL may imagine this ruthless onslaught of clutter generates profit, but it's such a massive turnoff that no doubt it's cost them a lot more than it's made them.  
(Version 1.5b2)

DANA SUTTON  This last comment is hard-hitting and true. Bento's been out for quite a little while now. Bento's developers have been accumulating a rich harvest of user feedback from their Forums, and their boilerplate reply to any suggested change or improvement posted on that site is "we'll forward this to our development team," and one would think that by now all this would have resulted in a good solid upgrade that addresses a lot of user concerns. Bento is already an extremely good program, but it could be made a lot better and the developers ought to be eager to make this happen. I keep waiting for some sign that they are.  
(Version 1.0v2)

DANA SUTTON  Thinking a bit more about your reply, I don't think your sparseimage solution is feasible. Bento saves its data to a file in User>Library>Application Support. How are you gonna put that on a sparseimage???  
(Version 1.0v2)

DANA SUTTON  Ahhh, that's better. This new version works fine, it's its usual self and better than ever. But I do have one small niggle: this version adds a menu icon and there doesn't seem to be any Preference option for turning this icon off t I resent software authors who clutter my menu with their icons without my permission. I'm assembling quite a collection of these unwanted icons, and personally I think this practice is unethical.  
(Version 3.3)

DANA SUTTON  I have to agree that it's a shame UnSanity seems to have crashed and burned. Based on my experience with some of their other offerings, I'm not going to install any more of their betas. By the time their complete line of products finally runs stable under Leopard, Snow Leopard will probably have been released!  
(Version 1.5.1b4)

DANA SUTTON  (This review is for the current version, v. 3.3 only). Won't launch properly.  
(Version 3.3)

DANA SUTTON  What's ambiguous is, as I said earlier, in software descriptions the word Requirements typically means something very different (it specifies the minimum you need to run the software in question). This really is no substitute for an explicit stateme that this item is not necessary if you install OSX.5.4.  
(Version )

DANA SUTTON  In all probability you're right, but in the case of most software what "requirements" means "this is the minimum you need to run this software." I still don't think there's any substitute for explicitly being told what this security update is. (By the way, I'm not knocking MU's staffers, this is most likely an Apple problem)  
(Version )

DANA SUTTON  This showed up on MacUpdate about an hour after OSX.5.4, and I wish either Apple or the good people at MU could clarify the relation of the two releases. Is this a security update in addition to the security improvements in X.5.4 (that should be used by everybody) or only to be used by people who, for whatever reason, do not care to make the upgrade? Or is this for Tiger? The fact that Software Upgrade ignores this suggests the latter, but it would be nice to be told.  
(Version )

DANA SUTTON  I think some of these guys are too hard on Reader, it works fine on my first-generation Mac Pro. But I must say, I am surprised that Adobe released this picayune maintenance upgrade on the very same day that they announced the availability of Acrobat v. 9. I would have thought they'd have put out a coordinated Reader 9 instead.  
(Version 8.1.2)

DANA SUTTON  A-Dock has some features (such as delayed-action activation) that the Apple Dock ought to have. But something important is missing. It ought to supply some instructions, or something like an Apple-Script, that would allow the user to turn off the Apple Dock. I have no idea how to do that, and I bet a lot of other users don't either. And yet if I am going to use A-Dock this is a very obvious need I'm going to have.  
(Version 1.4.7b3)

DANA SUTTON  Great app., there are several that more or less do the same thing, but SuperDocker is clearly the best. I'd suggest one change. The worst feature of the Dock is its "hair trigger" behavior when it is hidden: you just have to graze the edge of your screen for a millisecond with your cursor and up it comes. I accidentally do this dozens of times a day, a real annoyance. I remember the old application A-Dock which required the cursor to be in contact with the screen edge for a minimum amount of time (defined by the user) before the dock would come up. I sure wish a third-party application like SuperDocker would include a modification feature that would make Apple's dock behave the same way. Could this be added to a future version, please?  
(Version 2.4)

DANA SUTTON  When the author says that "we can" continue using v.1 for several weeks, what does this mean? Is there some way that he is going to disable v.1? Or just declare the licence void. Either way, especially since he has accepted donations from some users, I think he had better check with a good lawyer before trying to do this. Since v.1 was originally disributed as freeware I propose going on using it as long as it is technically feasible, and will only pay for v.2 if I have no choice (and if there is no alternative product available)  
(Version 2.0.1)

DANA SUTTON  Yes, that is one possible solution. I suppose the reason that it didn't occur to me is that I was thinking more about the possibility of encrypting individual Libraries rather than the entire shebang at once. I like to keep Bento open at all times so I can quickly bring up or enter address, calendar info. etc., and only want to be able to encrypt libraries containing private information (for ex., a list of passwords and serial numbers).  
(Version 1.0v2)

DANA SUTTON  You write of "other than automatic scheduling" what does Cocktail have that Onyx doesn't? as if scheduling's no big deal. Sorry to disagree, but I think that's a very big deal indeed. For a Mac user, there ought to be no dirtier word in the English language than "manually" and I wish more software developers (the authors of Transmit, for example) would get this through their thick skulls. In this case, it's very comforting to know that once a week Cocktail is doing its stuff after I've gone sleepy-bye, and I don't have to worry about the possibility of forgetting to run it periodically.  
(Version 4.1)

DANA SUTTON  I'll still stand by the glowing review of v.1 I've already written. But I agree. Shimo v.1 does just what I want it to, and I don't see a reason in the world to pay twenty dollars for a bunch of bells and whistles I don't really need. So as long as the price stays that high I'll probably stick with v.1.  
(Version 2.0)

DANA SUTTON  This is of course one isolated incident, but the other day I needed to change permissions on a folder and its contents. BatChmod failed to do the job, but I did it with TinkerTool Sysem.  
(Version 1.51)

DANA SUTTON  If, like me, just about the only graphics manipulation you ever to need to do is to make images transparent in connection with designing Web pages (and maybe to hack up the occasional icon), making backgrounds transparent is about the only job you'll ever need to do, and using a serious graphics program for that purpose is like using a howitzer to kill a mosquito. This little utility works just fine and it's a freebie. Thanks to the author.  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  No, you're absolutely right, at least as far as Apple goes (I don't know enough to talk about Intel). Apple follows a deliberate corporate policy of "constant beta," where it puts out an OS much sooner than it otherwise could and follows that up with a steady stream of bugfixes, security patches, and versioned upgrades to fix and improve the original release. That puts each and every Mac user into position of being a beta tester. You, my friend, are squawking about the downside, and it is a real one, my heart goes out to you. But think about the upside: we get to offer our input into the evolving product (think of the translucent menu bar and Stacks). Still don't like it? Then consider the alternative, the "get it perfect the first time around" strategy. That's the Microsoft way. But a.) things work very much slower in the Windows world and b.) this being an imperfect world, they never can get it quite right anyway and then it takes them far longer to put out a fix. I don't know about you, but personally I vote for the Apple way, even if I admit we all get bit by it every now and then.   
(Version 1.7)

DANA SUTTON  There is room in the Mac world for a wysiwyg Web page creation program that is cheaper than Dreamweaver, has an easier learning curve, and is a LOT less buggy. Such a program would stand in about the same relation to Dreamweaver as Pages does to MS Word. But l you can get the entire iWorks suite for approx. a hundred bucks, which places it in reach of "the rest of us." But look at the high price of Freeway Pro. Surely this is a case of developer's self-foot-shoot. A lot of potential customers probably conclude "ah heck, I might as well put another hundred bucks on top of this and go for Dreamweaver." How clear are the developers about what market they're aiming their product at? Greedy, greedy.  
(Version 5.0.2)

DANA SUTTON  Well, for better or worse it works as advertised. Use it, you get significantly more free memory. But nearly twenty bucks for a gizmo like this is i. m. h. o. unacceptably steep. I'd spring for about five, tops. If you have so little memory that you really need it, you probably would be better advised to start saving your pennies and buy more RAM.  
(Version 2.5)

DANA SUTTON  Since AirPort Express contains an ethernet switch and multiple ports, it is possible to use it as a router for a hard-wired ethernet LAN (and this is one option supported by AirPort Utility) Since the MacUpdate page says AirPort Flow "monitors traffic flow," somebody might do as I did and assume this could be used to measure traffic (and speed?) of ethernet traffic handled by APE. But it doesn't,if you try it only reports "No SNMP response," and shows no data, so I guess it only monitors traffic flow handled by APE when used as a wireless device. Or am I missing something?  
(Version 1.3)

DANA SUTTON  Now I've bought Bento and started using it, I'm realizing what a sweet program it is, at least potentially. But (in addition to the interface issues I mentioned after first trying it out) it has one drawback that seriously cripples its usefulness. Bento is promoted a "personal database," and the problem lies in the word "personal." I have a lot of information for which Bento is useless because I'm unwilling to entrust it to a program without any encryption feature. Every time you create a new Library a dialogue box should appear, and if you check the Encrypt box it should ask you to assign it a password (or apply a pre-stored master password to that Library).   
(Version 1.0v2)

DANA SUTTON  Somehow this reminds me of the woman who allegedly called Apple support to complain that her Mac's cup holder was broken. Turned out that she thought that's what her optical drive was for.  
(Version 1.0.1)

DANA SUTTON  When you removed Aperture did you take the time to remove all associated files (Preference, etc.)? It may be the case that Software Update looks around for one of these files rather than Aperture itself.  
(Version 1.1)

DANA SUTTON  Note that this updater is only for Macs with Aperture installed. If you don't have Aperture, Software Update will tell you your software is up to dae.  
(Version 1.1)

DANA SUTTON  The next major file transfer program? Not for pros. If you are responsible for managing a Web site that requires frequent updating, you quickly find that you need a FTP client that has the capacity to execute prescheduled uploads (for a Mac user, "manually" is one of the dirtiest words in the English language). A client without this feature just doesn't cut it, any more than would a piece of backup software that had to be operated manually. ForkLift has a lot of great features, but until it acquires this capacity it isn't in any shape to challenge the competition.  
(Version 1.5.1)

DANA SUTTON  Let me be a little more specific about my problem (in case the author reads this and wants to respond). This is based on GrandPerspective, a program that graphically represents disk usage. But disk usage doesn't directly equate with file/folder change, which is what causes a Time Machine update. So it doesn't immediately help me spot the kind of files/folders that I need to be excluding from TM updates in order to keep it from eating up excessive disk space. At best it might give me a couple of broad hints, but it puts all the responsibility for identifying such items exclusively on me. I think what we really need, if somebody could write one, is an application that would somehow intercept the backup process in order to create a verbose log that would let me see exactly what is getting uploaded (or that would modify TM so that I could select the files/folders that I DO want to have backed up rather than excluding the ones that I DON'T).   
(Version 0.9.10)

DANA SUTTON  The premise of this software is a great one. Yes, Time Machine is a space-hog because it backs up EVERYTHING including a bunch of stuff like caches that no sane user would want to archive. But the way this is implemented leaves a lot to be desired: the interface may be good-looking, if your taste runs that way, but the poor user is given no help in deciphering or interpreting the data it produces, and that's whole point of interface design, right? If the developer can't or doesn't want to give us an interface that's easier to decipher, he at least owes us some kind of documentation to help us make more sense out of the present one. I'd love a program like this and would enthusiastically give it five stars across the board (or even - gulp - pay money for it) if I could figure out how to put it to good use in managing Time Machine. But I need some help here.  
(Version 0.9.10)

DANA SUTTON  Since FriutMenu broke under Leopard and it has taken Unsanity so long to develop even a buggy beta, I've shopped around for a replacement. After trying various alternatives, I settled on XMenu as the best, largely because it runs as an application rather than any kind of a system mod., and so is completely non-invasive. In the XMenu folder in User>Library I I've set up a bunch of folders (utilities, applications, documents, a nested folder containng my URLs, one for my current work project, etc.) so I have a fantastic amount of stuff at my fingertips. Then, just to make things even better, I used KeyboardMaestro to assign an F-key to the XMenu folder, now I can access all my stuff either by pulling down the menu or from my keyboard. All this took a couple of hours of creating and storing aliases, but in the end I had set up an insanely great storage/navigation system with no worries about destabilizing my system or surviving future major OS upgrades. This, as I say, involved some work, but it didn't cost me a penny.  
(Version 1.8.1)

DANA SUTTON  This Devon giveaway is a terrific application (now all I need is to figure out how to disable Spotlight). Only one suggestion for improvement: it would be great to have a menu icon so the user wouldn't have to dig around to launch EasyFind (but if you are using Devon's equally great XMenu that's not so much of a problem).  
(Version 4.0.1)

DANA SUTTON  The simple truth is that NO corporation freely admits its mistakes, and for a very good reason: if it did, it would open a floodgate of lawsuits. In Apple's case, if it were to admit that such-and-such a bug or security weakness had been present in its OS, you could bet next month's mortgage money that somebody somewhere would file a suit claiming that this had caused him damages. On some occasions, a litigant might have a legitimate beef, although most these would no doubt be frivolous suits without any merit. But Apple would have to spend a huge amount of time and money defending itself against them all, and the associated negative public relations fallout would be equally huge. So don't expect Apple's descriptions of its security patches and bugfixes to enter into specifics, that' s never going to happen.  
(Version 2008-002)

DANA SUTTON  This is no doubt a fine and useful tool for the great majority who use AirPort Extreme (and also Time Capsule?) as a wireless router. Those no doubt few of us who use it exclusively as an ethernet routerneed not bother downloading it.  
(Version 1.2)

DANA SUTTON  I don't meant to rain on the parade of a great utility (which I use myself) but it should be noted that in Leopard PDFs can be combined using Preview itself; see MacWorld April 2008, p. 83.  
(Version 3.0)

DANA SUTTON  This is a great utility that allows very flexible use of Kensington mice and trackballs, but now that Leopard has been released it is very much in need of an upgrade to take Leopard's new features into consideration (example of what I mean: one click option could now be to cycle through Spaces desktops)  
(Version 3.0r1)

DANA SUTTON  Shimo is a real winner. My university distributes a pre-configured version of Cisco VPN (for such purpose as off-campus access to restricted library resources), and I've recommended to our computer people that they post a link to Shimo on their computer resources site.  
(Version 1.0.6)

DANA SUTTON  Hedy Lamarr invented a system (ignored at the time, now widely used) of hopscotching radio transmissions between a number of frequencies to avoid detection. How are you going to imitate that on a computer??   
(Version 1.2.4)

DANA SUTTON  Because it has taken Unsanity so long to come up with Leopard-friendly haxies, I've been scrambling around for other and less invasive utilities that do the same thing. For ex., I've found that the Macro feature on Keyboard Maestro works every bit as well as Menu Master. But until now I've not found a really satisfactory substitute for Fruit Menu. But this is it! It can be made to do pretty much every important thing that FM can do (on his blog Maury explains how you can use aliases to make FP give you a menu of individual System Preference panels). It's easy to install and use, and at least so far seems to be rock-solid.  
(Version 2.1)

DANA SUTTON  Okay, now it works as advertised (but why not simply revert to the 1.3 authentication routine pure and simple). There's another kind of Dock-mod. I'd like ot see. Towards the end of the OS 9 era I started using A-Dock to accustom myself to using the dock interface, and one of its nicest features was a user-definable time delay option so that a hidden dock didn't come popping up every time your cursor accidentally grazed the edge of the screen. To get the dock you had to keep it in contact for, say, half a second. Very nice, and I wish that the Apple Dock had the same feature rather than being such a "hair trigger" thing. I'm accidentally bringing it up all the time, which gets to be a nuisance. It would be great if somebody could write a mod. program that would add this time delay feature to the Apple Dock.  
(Version 1.4.2)

DANA SUTTON  Still not right. I type in name and password, hit Okay...nothing happens, this time it doesn't crash, it just sits there.  
(Version 1.4.1)

DANA SUTTON  I've played with this a bit, and, yes, I can duplicate this bug. In my limited poking and prodding, FM works just fine as long every other running app. is hidden, problems only happen if you have something other than the Finder running in the foreground (but I wouldn't bet next month's mortgage money on the truth of this observation)  
(Version 3.7b1)

DANA SUTTON  I'm going to ask a question that presumes you're stupid, which in all probability you're not. But just to put it on the public record as part of your complaint, after installing FM you did follow the advice to do a log out/in cycle, didn't you?  
(Version 3.7b1)

DANA SUTTON  Excuse me, I don't want to sound rude or disparage the author and the hard work he no doubt put into Demeter. But why exactly do we need yet another new new browser? I visited the developer's page and read its features list, which doesn't help me understand this.  
(Version 1.0.8)

DANA SUTTON  I realize that Bento is a database. Nevertheless, it is also a front end for Calendar and Address Book. My point is this: if you've bought Bento, you should never have to open either of those apps. again, Bento should be at least as functional as those apps. themselves, and might even add some refinements of its own (such as phone dialing). So, with the issue of setting alarms in Calendar, it's very disappointing that it omits such an important feature. So it seems as if the designers were more interested in eye candy than function.  
(Version 1.0v2)

DANA SUTTON  Out of curiosity I downloaded the demo a while back. I was blown away by the graphics, and was especially interested by the fact this seems to be the first piece of commercial software that takes advantage of Core Animation. That being said, I wasn't quite sure what it was actually for or why I was supposed to need it. No doubt I'm missing something. But, for example, while the idea of bringing Address Book and Calendar together and giving them a neat-looking front end is a good one, I kept looking around for features that weren't there. It is possible to use it, for example, to set up a Calendar appointment. But if you want to set up a reminder for that appointment you still have to go to Calendar itself. Using this as a front end, you just shouldn't have to do that. And while it may be neat to use it as Address Book's front end, wouldn't it be a lot neater if it added the feature that's been glaringly absent in Address Book all along, a phone dialer? I'm sure people will jump all over me and say I'm missing the whole point, and you'll probably be right, but save for the pretty face I don't see any compelling reason to shell out the money they're asking.  
(Version 1.0v2)

DANA SUTTON  At least for me, there's a problem. The DMG downloads and mounts, but the app. icon isn't visible and if I click on the window the Finder crashes.   
(Version 1.21)

DANA SUTTON  I've been using Dreamweaver on a daily basis for years, it's not "the bastard child you never wanted and never really cared for." It's more like a disreputable uncle who keeps going off on disgusting binges and has to be bailed out of the drunk tank, always at my expense. Each and every time he swears he'll never do it again, but next Saturday night there he is again. I know him all too well, and I'd really like to get that s. o. b. out of my life and trade him in for another uncle with nicer habits.  
(Version 2.0.3)

DANA SUTTON  Sorry, I'm familiar with both of these and neither is what the heart yearns for. I want something where I can design pages the way I need to, and not be limited to anybody's prefab templates, that rules out RapidWeaver. Composer is admittedly better but it has the massive problem that there's no documentation for it, and I can't figure out a reasonably easy way to do certain moves I need to make, like linking to a specific anchor in a page. In Composer that seems horribly difficult although it is a pretty basic operation that page designers need to do. All in all, although Composer has been around for years, my verdict is that it is STILL not ready for prime time, evidently because it's traditionally been a pretty low-priority item for the Netscape development team. I could perhaps be convinced otherwise if somebody would produce halfway decent documentation.  
(Version 2.0.3)

DANA SUTTON  I've made comments like this before, but let me get this off my chest once again. On the one hand we have these dumbed-down apps that can let a newbie post pictures of the new kid to share with the folks back in Peoria. On the other we have the expensive, hard-to-learn, bloated and ever-buggy Dreamweaver. Why for the love of God can't we have something in between, a fairly simple and reasonably inexpensive full-service WYSIWG Web page creation tool. Why does no software developer get the point that here's an important ecological niche to be filled, that, if done right, could make a ton of money?  
(Version 2.0.3)

DANA SUTTON  Here's a guy who really needs Time Machine (and even his laptop needs periodic backing up).  
(Version 1.02)

DANA SUTTON  The days seem to be over when Limewire was releasing a new version every couple of weeks, seemingly just to maintain constant visibility on sites like MacUpdate. But its developers have retained one nasty habit from the bad old days -- releasing new versions without giving users any information about what's been changed. A lot of us like to have some understanding of what we're getting, otherwise trashing our old version and adopting a new one can be an unnecesary gamble.  
(Version 4.15.2b)

DANA SUTTON  I've been using TM Managber for about a month to allow Time Machine backups to a shared server on a LAN, it works fine and has caused absolutely no problem for anybody on my network (all both of us). I understand that at the last moment before Leopard's release Apple disabled wireless sharing for TM because of some security issue, and evidently they disabled the ability to backup over a network at the same time. Probably there is a hidden option to turn it back on that can accomplished by a Terminal command, but nobody seems to know what that command is, so TM Manager is currently the only way to go. Highly recommended for those users who have the need.  
(Version 1.0b)

DANA SUTTON  Truly great graphics, a real pleasure to watch. Having said that, and throwing in a good word about the e-mail notification scheme, I'm not so impressed with the application as a whole. Plenty of the information this provides is available either with resources that comes with OSX (Application Monitor, About This Mac) or can be downloaded for free (e. g. temperature monitoring utilities, utilities that generate SMART reports). I wouldn't be half so harsh if the price point were lower, but an introductory price of $29 (and Lord knows what the full price is going to be) is very steep for the convenience of having this stuff bundled in one package and given some handsome eye candy. At $10 I'd probably spring for a a copy myself, but I suspect the developer will find he's pricing himself out of the market.  
(Version 0.9.5)

DANA SUTTON  Your comment would be valid if Web advertisers woud adhere to a code of standards: no popup windows, no attention-distracting animation, no collection of information from the user's computer, and so forth. Maybe what some advertisers do is unethical (by somebody's reasonable standard of ethics), and a lot of it just plain crass. Of course responsible Web sites should not give space to such crap, but it's a sad fact of life that plenty do. So don't tell us poor end users that we don't have every right to defend ourselves against this crap. If this happens to hurt more responsible advertisers, your beef ought to be against your not-so-responsible colleagues, not against authors of software like this or the end users who decide to use them.  
(Version 0.2)

DANA SUTTON  A very good app. has gotten a lot better, and i. m. h. o. is well worth the price. Version 3 does MUCH more than v. 2 did. The only problem: the author unwisely chose to eliminate the ability to customize System icons for such things as URL and FTP locations because he imagined they are no longer necessary. I think this was a serioius mistake (Candy Bar should be able to customize all System icons that appear on the desktop). I've written to complain, and if another other users do I bet he can persuaded to change his mind.  
(Version 3.0)

DANA SUTTON  Since the author has no e-mail link on his Web site, let me ask the question here in the hope he will answer. From the documentation it is not clear to me whether I am just to run this application once to set a desired interval, or whether I have to launch and use this every time I reboot my Mac. Please advise.  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Let's revisit this app. and compare it with Leopard's Spaces. In two ways, I think YCD is still better. 1.) Although it is not entirely stable, as I have already noted, it DOES let you place different windows created by the same application on different desktops, which can be very useful if you have several projects going at the same time which require the same applications. 2.) It lets you put different desktop backgrounds on different virtual desktops, which is a very effective visual cue to help keep you oriented about where you are (by contrast, in Spaces it's very easy to get disoriented). Also, of course, the different Keynote-like transition effects have an undeniable cool factor.  
(Version 1.3b4)

DANA SUTTON  Yes, yes, I know you can do this from the Terminal, but pleeeze, all you technotwerps who like to trash utilities that substitute for Terminal commands for the benefit of people not as geeky as you are, for once keep your rude little thoughts to yourselves.  
(Version 1.0)

DANA SUTTON  Works great for me. As far as I'm concerned, this is a winner.  
(Version 1.14)

DANA SUTTON  No, sorry. Since Fruit Menu is currently broken under Leopard, I'm shopping around for an alternative. This isn't it. I want a Classic-style Apple Menu where I can access my own stuff IN ADDITION to the stuff you can access from the OSX Apple Menu, not INSTEAD OF that stuff. With this, I would lose as much as I would gain.  
(Version 2.7.6)

DANA SUTTON  All is bright and. But that nasty old Classic icon has to go!!!  
(Version 13.1)

DANA SUTTON  Yes, the speed on my Mac Pro is much better, this alone would be worth the price of the upgrade. Time Machine looks like a real winner. I don't mind the looks of the menu bar or the dock (and anyway I'm sure a lot of third-party mods. will be available to alter these). I was amazed how little of my software breaks with Leopard (Haxies being the notable exception). But for my purposes Spaces is a loser: since I use the same software for different work projects, I'd like to be able to assign a virtual desktop to each project, with (for inst.) some Safari windows in open in Desktop ! and others in Desktop 2. This seems impossible. To get much use out of Spaces I'd need to have this (preferably with an ability to remember window placement across boots).Some third-party v. d. software is more flexible since you can drag specific windows to specific desktops (although I've yet to encounter one that doesn't have stability problems in respect to keeping them where you want them).   
(Version 10.5)

DANA SUTTON  This combines some great features (scheduling, Growl or e-mail notification, WebDav support for .Mac) in a way no other currently available FTP client does. But I won't buy it. Why? Because they charge for upgrades (the most you can do is buy 1 year's worth of so-called "upgrade insurance"). Competing clients like Transmit and Yummy provide free upgrades.  
(Version 5.1)

DANA SUTTON  I agree with Blee. This is like being contacted by some chick I hung out with ten years ago in Boston who wants to see me, only now I'm got a wife and two kids and am living in Jersey.   
(Version 9.0)

DANA SUTTON  Since I've been using Growl for a couple of years, this looks interesting. But I need more information than this notice or the developer's site provides about what it does and how to use it.  
(Version 1.2)

DANA SUTTON  Okay, I took everybody's advice and made sure there was a folder in my Application (computer, not Home Directory) folder entitled "iWork 'O8" containing the three apps. The updaters for Numbers and Keynote worked fine. The one for Pages still refused to recognize an elibile program. So I trashed the updater and downloaded a fresh copy. That one finally worked (I mention this because somebody else may need to do the same thing).  
(Version 3.0.1)

DANA SUTTON  (This review pertains only to the updater). Although I have a legal copy of the current iWork installed in my Applications folder, this installer informs me I don't have an eligible copy of Pages for updating. Same for Numbers and Keynote. There seems to be something wrong with the installer.  
(Version 3.0.1)

DANA SUTTON  Wow, just yesterday I had a mysterious wind tunnel episode on my Mac Pro (for the first time, solved by rebooting) and today we have a fix!  
(Version 1.2)

DANA SUTTON  Chrysogonus: If that's your situation you need to jump down the throat of your university's computer support people and have them put out an up-to-date version, as they should. If your university is like mine, the version they hand out is pre-configured to work with their system, and I doubt that if you downloaded your own version you could get it to work properly, at least without a lot of hassle. And these guys of yours are supposedly being paid to deal with the hassle, so you don't have to.  
(Version 4.9.01.0080)

DANA SUTTON  This would have been a very welcome product if it had hit the market a few years ago. At that time there was a crying need for a reasonably sophisticated Cocoa word processor that could serve as a viable alternative to Word. But Nisus' author did not exactly rush his product to market: progress was so slow that by the time Nisus came to maturity there were several other similar products available (Mellel, Pages, etc.). If Nisus had made faster progress, its author would cornered the market and made Big Bucks. Now it seems that he is trying to reimburse himself for his sluggishness by adopting a cheesy and cynical pricing policy, taking his profit out of the hides of his relatively small fan base.   
(Version 1.0.1)

DANA SUTTON  "Appears to overwrite existing files with same name without any remark" Yes, and if you have multiple folders on your remote site containing files of the same name, this can land you in the proverbial world of pain. At least this was true in a previous version, and so I abruptly stopped using this app. and shifted to another one.  
(Version 8.5.3)

DANA SUTTON  I've reviewed earlier versions, so won't again (I gave it five stars across the board). Let me just repeat, if you are looking for a FTP client, this is the one. Go no further. Transmit doesn't have scheduled uploads, isn't Growl friendly, InterArchy's very idiosyncratic mirroring system managed to screw up my remote site but good, so I walked away from it real fast. I've stuck with Yummy, and the only time I ran into a problem the author was very patient and cooperative in working with me to solve it, which I greatly appreciate. Only drawback: unlike Transmit and Interarchy, Yummy can't handle WebDav so you can't use it if you have a .Mac account. Since Apple has recently upped its basic storage to 10 gb., .Mac begins to look attractive as a serious possibility for offsite backups, so it is getting rather urgent that the author address this issue in a future release, which would greatly increase Yummy's usefulness.  
(Version 1.6.1)

DANA SUTTON  I want to correct my original criticism. It turns out you can create and save your own user-defined sets of authors to search. I missed this because the availability of this option is not clearly indicated in the list of Features on the Diogenes website. On the first page, go Action > Manage user-defined corpora, a page will come up with instructions.

Note, too, you can save search results as html files

My other criticism stands. Being Mozilla/Firefox-based, it's hard (for a non-programmer, anyway) to see why Diogenes should not be Universal. If it were, I'd give Diogenes fives across the board.

Still and all, for those Classicsts who use Intel Macs this is a fine research tool for addressing TLG, PHI, etc. We are very indebted to Peter Heslin.  
(Version 3.0.10)

DANA SUTTON  I've tried some other multi-screen apps., including some freeware ones. I. m. h. o. this is the best and most stable. And yet it continues to lack a feature I really like, the ability to open windows created by a single given application in various desktops and to accurately remember and maintain the position of those windows on the desktop where the user wants them. That would be a more accurate and more useful virtualization of the experience of having multiple monitors. Unless some undocumented improvements have been made (like all other such virtualization apps.) really isn't entirely good or entirely stable about remembering this kind of window placement.  
(Version 1.3b2)