JOHN NOWAK  I seem to have much better luck with the latest nightly build...  
(Version 2.1(3761))

JOHN NOWAK  Can't even get it to add an SILC server in the latest version (2.1). The join room button seems broken as well... manually joining in the console seems okay. Had to delete preferences twice so far as it crashes on start. Same experience on two different computers on Leopard.

Someone, please write a STABLE SILC client! I'll pay for it!  
(Version 2.1(3761))

JOHN NOWAK  The interface is nice, but fussy. It's not exactly mac-like in some ways. It carries over a lot of annoyances from similar products. I feel like the thing most "new" about it is the fact that I can see through the window.

I've run into some annoying UI issues (on 1.01), namely general layer awkwardness. More work needs to be put into figuring out better ways to approach things, not simply doing the same as other packages with a bit more flair. The several crashes I had didn't help.  
(Version 1.0.1)

JOHN NOWAK  And Shmups too!  
(Version 1.0.1)

JOHN NOWAK  As the other reviewer said, the graphics are simple as they should be, and VERY nice. Great audio integration. The weapon combination selection is a nice treat. But yes, this game is hard. I've not yet made it past the second stage. It seems well-balanced however, so I'm sure I'll get it eventually.

Always great to see more shumps on the mac!  
(Version 1.0.1)

JOHN NOWAK  Oh I've let you off easy!  
(Version 1.0.4)

JOHN NOWAK  Well that would be a bit different then, wouldn't it.  
(Version 1.0.4)

JOHN NOWAK  I found it insulting that you would seek money for this. If it were free, I'd not have said anything.  
(Version 1.0.4)

JOHN NOWAK  Not everything deserves a detailed rationale. Some things are so obviously useless to any impartial observer that I don't need to explain it to them.  
(Version 1.0.4)

JOHN NOWAK  Unfortunately, it'll never be fixed. There's massive incompetence on the part of the author.  
(Version 2.1(3590))

JOHN NOWAK  I take it back -- This doesn't even deserve three starts. Just had to trash my prefs because Colloquy keeps crashing on launch. SILC support is barely functional. Buddy lists don't work right. Iconography in the Connections window is insane... I still have no idea how to tell if something is connecting or not. What on earth is the lightning bolt arrow supposed to mean? Garbage garbage garbage! I'm going back to irssi.  
(Version 2.1(3590))

JOHN NOWAK  One of the best open source games available. Very solid gameplay, although I think it could be just the slightest bit deeper. Nice, reserved graphics and sound as well.  
(Version 1.3.2)

JOHN NOWAK  " I hard-coded some stuff for 1152x864 resolution"

Oh boy.  
(Version 0.6.10)

JOHN NOWAK  Colloquy is a mixed bag.

On the plus side, it looks nice, works nice (mostly) once you have it set up, and most importantly for me, it has SILC support.

Unfortunately, it has a number of issues. Appearance preferences usually do not update unless you restart the app. There's a bug in tab handling if you use the tabbed window mode (dragging a new tab to the left side jumps it to the right). It crashes on me once a day or so. It doesn't give much indication of how a connection attempt is going, especially on startup. It keeps creating a transcripts folder even though I have logging disabled. Etc etc...

If you need SILC, this is definitely your best bet as nothing else exists beyond irssi-silc or gaim. If you don't need it, well... it is still probably your best bet. Just get used to the annoyances. It's a shame there isn't a more solid IRC client for the Mac. I'd happy pay $15-25 for one if there was.  
(Version 2.1(3590))

JOHN NOWAK  Smultron is getting too much gloss and losing focus. What's the point of having animated preferences and resizable list views if it can't seem to handle two files with the same name in different locations? Saving is also broken in the current version... you can't save until you edit the new document. In fact, it seems like you can't save empty documents at all (or at least the UI doesn't update if you do.)

Please focus on core functionality!  
(Version 3.0.6)

JOHN NOWAK  Utterly pointless. The developer should work on his skill and produce better software... not continue pushing crap. Mac shareware at its worst.  
(Version 1.0.4)

JOHN NOWAK  Like other games from the same developer (not Ambrosia, the original developer who produced Uplink and Darwinia), this game gets boring very quickly. It's the most fun you can have for a day or two, or at least it seems like it will be, but in the end its empty. Too easy, too little to do, no real strategy required, and each game is more or less the same. I bought the PC version, and I regret it.  
(Version 1.4.2)

JOHN NOWAK  Very clever game. The sounds are irritating, but you just turn them off and you're fine. Really a lot of fun and quite relaxing somehow.  
(Version 1.2)

JOHN NOWAK  While it is better than most of the free mac FTP clients, it's slow, clunky, and crashes quite often. Looking through the source, it's impressive that it even works at all! Oh well... maybe one day we'll have a good, free alternative. For now, I'm going to unhappily stick with this.  
(Version 2.7.1)

JOHN NOWAK  Downloaded the latest version from the site... Completely unusable. I've yet to get into a game without it crashing. (Powerbook G4, OS 10.4.8)  
(Version 1.12)

JOHN NOWAK  Nothing you can't do with a quick command in the terminal. For example:

mv *.txt destination   
(Version 1.1)

JOHN NOWAK  Not having played Lumines, I downloaded this is an attempt to kill some time during a train ride. I found myself playing it for a few hours... very impressively executed, and a clever game. The graphics are solid, the controls are simple, it performs well on my Powerbook G4, and it seems very stable. Easily worth $10. This may be the first shareware game (okay, besides Escape Velocity) that I personally will have paid for. I look forward to additional modes in future revisions.  
(Version 1.0.2)

JOHN NOWAK  This is quite a nice little program. It is lacking some features still, and the fact that it moves files even if you change your mind and decide not to tag them is a major nuisance. (I've mostly trained myself not to do that at least.)

One pain is that it does not let me rename bookmarks when dragging them over. I need to bookmark them in Safari first, then "show all bookmarks" and drag over the correct one. If I could assign a name when tagging it, I'd never even use Safari's bookmark feature. The extra step is a bit annoying.

The interface makes too great a use of hiding things until you need them I feel... it took me a few minutes to figure out all of the features. This is fine (maybe even desirable) while Punakea has so few features, but as this grows, it may become a liability -- We'll see!

I've had it crash once, but only once.

Finally, some way to group tags would be nice, but is not necessary at this point.  
(Version 0.1.2b)

JOHN NOWAK  The best open-source "Mac" editor around. When I'm not using vim or emacs, I'm using this.  
(Version 2.2.5)

JOHN NOWAK  Useless, expensive garbage. Try CyberDuck for a good, free alternative.  
(Version 1.1.7)

JOHN NOWAK  Sure, it ruins the game, but sometimes it can be fun for letting off a bit of steam. Besides, /anything/ Fallout-related deserved five stars! Thanks for this!  
(Version 1.4)

JOHN NOWAK  I downloaded this just to see the icon. It really is the worst I've ever seen -- I couldn't believe it. What is it!?

That said -- Lovely app! Works great! Who gives a toss about the icon?  
(Version 4.4.31)

JOHN NOWAK  First off: No, it is not a beautiful Cocoa editor. It isn't supposed to be. It is supposed to be a Mac version of emacs that doesn't require X11 and integrates a bit better with the system -- And it does that. Very solid documentation, good stability, lots of included packages, good concept, and a wonderful implementation.  
(Version 0.9.9d)

JOHN NOWAK  Very quirky. You're much better off either using the version of vim that came on your system, or downloading the official version and compiling it yourself if you want to run the graphical version (via X11). To be avoided.  
(Version 7.0)

JOHN NOWAK  TextMate is quite popular nowadays. For the most part, that's for good reasons. It has a good number of features, including the most advanced per-language system for handling syntax, special features, etc, out of all the Cocoa editors.

It does have some problems though. I've hit one nasty bug with it where what was shown in the window as being part of the file was actually not being saved. Deleting it and pasting it back in was not solving the problem either -- I had to paste it into a new file and overwrite the old one. This cost me an hour of time, as I never considered the editor might be lying to me. I captured this with Snapz Pro as it was so insane, but I've lost the file. Nuts.

Also, while TextMate is more advanced than the rest of the "Mac" editors, it still is behind other editors like vim in terms of how well it handles languages without algol-like syntax. Editing Scheme in TextMate with the Scheme bundle is a bitch, and languages like OCaml can be quite quirky. This is not a problem with the bundles: It's a problem with the system TextMate uses for performing these things, which needs to be completely revamped (a big undertaking at this point).

It's also a bit slow to launch, which can get to be a bit of a pain. Removing unneeded bundles helps, but not enough to eliminate the problems. It doesn't handle large files very well.

The undo feature sucks. If you type a sentence and undo, it'll only remove one character at a time, instead of the whole 'insert' you just performed. This needs to be fixed before I'll pay for it. It just is not acceptable.

Finally, the price is steep for what is still really beta software. It's nice, but it has rough edges still, and a couple show stoppers. For now, I'll stick with vim and Smultron for my editing needs.  
(Version 1.5.3)

JOHN NOWAK  Smultron is your best bet if you want an open-source Macified text editor. (If you don't need the Cocoa experience, there are tons of great options.) Its strongest aspect is ease of use. Very simple, no distractions, et cetera.

It does however have some problems. Stability is not that great. Sometimes it'll beachball on launch for me. It does not, however, seem to crash after it is up and running.

Another issue is lack of features. I understand this is to be a simple editor, but it is only really friendly towards Algol-esque languages. If you want smart indentation for a language that doesn't use curly braces, you're out of luck. If you're primarily using Smultron for HTML and PHP (ugh), then you're fine.

It also has stiff competition from the free TextWrangler, which, while a bit crufty, is free, more featureful, and handles large files better. I personally use Smultron over TextWrangler nowadays, but it wins for me only by a small margin. To be honest, due to the languages I use (Scheme, Haskell, etc), most of my time is spent in smarter editors like vim or emacs.

In short, it works, but it has a long way to go. TextMate beats it if you can front the cash, although it is not perfect yet either (still some rough edges, and I've hit one nasty bug with it).   
(Version 2.1.3)

JOHN NOWAK  Namely does what it says on the tin. It is very fast and compact. It does however have one problem: The learning algorithm is not sufficient. For example, after typing 'T' a few times and selecting Terminal, it would put Terminal at the top when I typed T. However, if I type 'TE' and select TextEdit a few times, it not will only put it at the top for 'TE', but also for 'T' (meaning Terminal is no longer at the top). Unlike Quicksilver which seems to use one ranking order per input string, Namely seems to use one ranking order for all input strings. This is fine if you're willing to satisfy it by typing until you get to a unique string of characters ('tex' for textedit, 'ter' for terminal), but otherwise you'll get unpredictable behaviour. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future version. For now, I'll stick with Quicksilver.  
(Version 2.1)

JOHN NOWAK  This game is a poor version of Escape Velocity. Much of the game is a direct copy. This would not be so bad if EV was cited as the inspiration, and if this game was free and open source. However, this is a shareware game trying to sell a poor imitation of someone else's idea. The writing is *god awful*, the shareware nags are unbearable, and it is without any polish. Don't even bother with the download.  
(Version 1.1)

JOHN NOWAK  Terrible software. The list view that you arrange your images in is buggy. Oftentimes, the items will not insert at the point specified. There is no way to drag more than one item into the window at a time, forcing you to use the Load Folder menu option. This option does not load images in the correct order (it will put 19 before 2 for example, since 19 begins with a 1). It also has trouble dealing with some file paths.  
(Version 3.8)

JOHN NOWAK  Nice little RAR wrapper app. Works flawlessly. Fast, Cocoa interface, etc. Very nice.  
(Version 2.0b)

JOHN NOWAK  Looks alright so far, although the refresh/rename/etc buttons should be part of the toolbar, not on the side. If you resize the window, they can get hidden. It is lacking anything other than the basic features (you cannot even move files), but it shows some potential. Best of luck to the author. I'm sick of using Fetch!!  
(Version 0.0.4)