MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  VMWare Fusion is the best Mac virtualization solution, but the customer support is garbage, including simple things like downloading updates. You have to log in simply to download each update, which is ridiculous, and their web site is often broken in various ways (logins fail, pages redirect to cryptic errors, etc).

Now, trying to purchase the 3.0 upgrade, I was presented with a halfassed AJAX popup registration form that hung for a minute or two and then ended with a big gray box overlaying my browser window, saying "Gateway Timeout: The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server. Reference #1.244d32d0.1256691756.0"

I appreciate the app, but VMWare's incompetence in other areas and cavalier attitude about wasting the customer's time really make me dislike the company.  
(Version 3.0)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  This is one of the best Mac scanner drivers I've ever seen. No Carbon/legacy junk, generally just keeps working across major system updates. There are a few quirks, like not using Mac standard keyboard shortcuts within the app (Cmd-S to open Preferences? Really??) but it generally works reliably, and can be configured to hand off a PDF of your just-scanned document to the app of your choice.   
(Version 2.2L11)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  BTW, it also begs the question: why the hell are the Mac's Open/Save dialogs so abominably horrible? Every version of Windows since 95, and even Linux/Solaris/Foonix since somewhat more recently, has positively kicked the Mac's butt in this particular area. And it is one that I have to assume most people use many times per day. But I guess that's a discussion for some other venue...  
(Version 4.3.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Good idea! A visual display of the path without touching any mouse (or even touching the keyboard) would be a very welcome addition.

I too install this as part of an automated setup script for any Mac (along with LaunchBar, MondoMouse, PTHPasteboard, and one of Typinator|Textpander|whatever (depending who's winning the text expansion battle at the moment)).  
(Version 4.3.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  This is the most important Mac enhancement for lots of us.

Especially when combined with a decent mouse driver that lets you assign a couple of the extra buttons on your mouse to the MondoMouse shortcut keys. That way, you have dedicated window resize and move buttons, which work at any point in any window in any app, even if the window is in the background.

This awesome little tool dramatically enhances the way you interact with every single application on your Mac, every day.   
(Version 1.4.3)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Sorry, but this is just a buggy piece of crap. Used to be good, but now it just basically doesn't work. It doesn't save the data that it shows in the GUI, and therefore it is worse than nothing. I recall this used to work, a couple years ago, but it no longer works on my 10.5.7 Mac Pro. Too bad. I just ended up using BBEdit.  
(Version 2.1.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Come on, five stars is way too much. This *is* very useful, but it is so horribly barebones (to a fault I mean) that you cannot give it five stars. For example, lots of errors have links for more info. Click one and BOOM! Your error report is gone because there is no way to go BACK. You have to retype your URL and re-analyze the page.

It is useful to have this app for dynamic pages (PHP or whatever) that you are running on a Mac with an internal IP address. But it is by no means a full-featured program.  
(Version 0.6.3)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Putting your database on a network volume does not work. It *almost* works. It sorta kinda works--except when it doesn't. It will work if you have rigorous self-discipline and a perfect memory and never accidentally have Things open on two different Macs at the same time (like, going to work with Things open in the background on your home Mac).

This is because each copy will periodically save the database and the other copy/copies won't see the changes. Info can get lost.

The only fix is for the Things guys to implement real MobileMe (or equivalent) sync support. Luckily, that is their number one priority, according to their user forum.

I personally can't wait. This app looks great. So now it's a race: will Things get sync working as well as OmniFocus, or will OmniFocus get as pretty as Things?  
(Version 1.1.2)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Wow, the recent reviews here are much harsher and different from those elsewhere on the internet tubes...

My main comment is that it is practically heartbreaking that Things got sync so wrong. OmniFocus, which I own on Mac and Phone, got it right. Things looks and feels way better, though, and I sure wanted to try it. But they just got the sync fundamentally wrong, and sync is more important for this type of app that just about any other.

Syncing only over WiFi, and only when you manually do it, and only between one Mac and your phone is just not correct. With OmniFocus, as with apps like Address Book and iCal, you might enter a task at home, complete a few out with your phone, and enter/complete some others at work, whatever... all the devices see all the changes. That's how you do sync. (Of course, with the option to use your own WebDAV server so you don't have to pay for MobileMe if you don't want to.)

Things looks awesome as an app, but is primitive like a Palm Pilot when it comes to sync. I really hope they fix this, as I look forward to trying it.   
(Version 1.1.2)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Yeah, that's cool. I found ComicLife a bit easier, too--until I had to deal with all the bugs.

After that, I decided it was actually much easier to make a bunch of re-usable speech bubbles, thought bubbles and captions in a .graffle document and use those when I wanted to make comics (admittedly, really not that frequently.

I'm sure it also helped that I use OG all the time, so there was no learning curve to deal with. (OmniGraffle's "Union Shapes" feature is very cool for making complicated speech bubbles.)

However, if they have fixed all the bugs, then CL would indeed be easier to get going with.  
(Version 1.4.5)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Well, great if they have fixed those things in their latest update, but my comments were from January 2008; well over a year ago.

In the meantime, I realized that OmniGraffle, of course, is a much better comic-making solution. That's not its purpose (it is more "general-purpose") but it is such an awesome, awesome Mac app that it beats all comers for making comics.

(And also for making flowcharts, presentations, schematics, resumés, birthday cards, informal maps, state diagrams, floorplans, wedding invitations, lost pet flyers, flash cards, for sale signs, etc etc etc etc)  
(Version 1.4.5)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  I have to agree that VMWare has proven to be the most stable way to virtualize Windows, Linux, and OpenSolaris. I too own Parallels, and have had it crash many times, including freezing the whole Mac. I've not had that experience with VMWare. (Nor with the free VirtualBox, but that is still too primitive for me to really use much, so it's hard to judge.)

Especially under heavy load, VMWare Fusion shines. At work I currently run a 2009 Mac Pro (Nehalem), with 8 cores and 16GB of RAM. On this hardware, in addition to Mac OS X 10.5 as my normal boot OS, I keep four VMs running: Ubuntu Linux 8.04, OpenSolaris 2008.11, Windows 7 beta, and Windows XP. Each VM has 1 or 2 cores and 2GB of RAM.

Normally I keep the VMWare hidden as I go about my work, but at some point in most days I need to call up each of the guest OSes for some specific task. Performance is excellent and it runs great for weeks on end, until I need to reboot the machine for some reason. For me, VMWare is a killer app.

(One hint: in prefs, choose to optimize Mac OS X app performance over VM disk performance. This makes a really big difference in keeping your system performing well if you do most of your work in Mac OS X but like to leave VMs running.)  
(Version 2.0.3)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Yes, wow, thirty whole dollars. That's almost the price of dinner for two at Denny's! For a useful piece of business software? What could Omni be thinking?!  
(Version 1.0b1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Greaat... I just installed this to try out again, because my existing backup tool isn't behaving well. But to use this, you have to log into your CrashPlan online account. I have my account details and try to log in, but CrashPlan hangs at the "Please wait..." screen, forever.

So, what's the deal, I can't back up when your server is down, or whatever? Lame, and back into the Trash it goes. (Wish it worked, though; sounds nice if it did.)  
(Version 01.06.2009)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Oh, I forgot: also incredibly lame is the choice it presents upon startup: a.) Search Documents, Pictures, Desktop, and iPhoto Library, or b.) Search my whole computer for pictures.

How about you *don't* search through my many gigabytes of files? How about at least the *option* of having some control (force-quit is your only way out of this on first launch).

I personally have many many many .jpg and .png files, but most of those are just work junk, schematics, screenshots and whatnot, and certainly not something I want auto-imported into my photo-management software.  
(Version 3.0.3.363)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Like virtually all cross-platform software, it is basically crap. Unless the software does something so amazing that it's worth the crappy interface (Google Earth), or so important that interface and usability are less important than features/reliability (MoneyDance), then cross-platform stuff always sucks.

I cannot fathom why any Mac user would use this software.  
(Version 3.0.3.363)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  I love Omni. Wanted to love this, but don't. Even using the 1-day demo, I experienced myriad problems: 3 crashes, insane difficulties (and ultimately failure) to print sections of the Gantt chart without ugly flaws, one corrupted project file (probably a result of one of the crashes), and many nonfatal UI freakouts and bogosities.

Also, there is a glaring design flaw: resources (people, rooms, equipment) cannot be shared among projects. This means that you either have to only use one project file (very unwieldy if you actually have a dozen real-life projects going on), or you have to guesstimate the availability of each person or resource as some smaller percentage for each project, an then hope it works out (which it does not, at all).

I really hope Omni gets this in shape someday. But they have not yet, and it feels more like a pre-1.0 beta than a shipping product, when you try to actually use it to plan projects in a real business.  
(Version 1.6.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Yeah, find the Minimal Screensaver and use that instead. It works great!  
(Version 1.0.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Simple, but great. Letting your display sleep is not the same thing as activating a screensaver, because the latter can (if you choose) lock your Mac and make it immediately unusable to anybody who does not have a password.

Additionally, if you use Screen Sharing to access a Mac remotely, the built-in screen savers can eat up all your bandwidth when they kick in (especially if you are abroad accessing a Mac back home) and stall your remote connection. This can make it very hard and frustrating to perform even simple GUI tasks remotely.

So, yeah, if all you want is a black screen, then you don't really need this. but if you need a very simple, low-bandwidth screen saver, this is a great little thing.  
(Version 1.0)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  I panned this software last year (see below), but it is really much better now. The guitar tones and effects have always been great, the problems were always tons of bugs, nonworking features, and insanely intrusive and lame product registration mechanism.

The product registration part still sucks; it is some godawful Flash-based app or something, and it is horribly designed and still atrociously bad. But many many bugs are now fixed or gone in version 3.x, and the experience is much better. The guitar part is the same (very good) and the general software quality has improved a lot (it's now average, no longer terrible).   
(Version 3.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  I agree: it's been a good app in the past, but $75 to upgrade is just too high. $49 would be okay. But $75 really does feel a little bit like BBEdit-style "gouge the existing customers quickly while we still don't have any direct competitors".

BBEdit encountered TextMate, and soon the price was cut by $100. I think it is time somebody made a DiagramMate (or whatever).  
(Version 5.0)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Mac OS X 10.5.2 Update: hard crashed my MacBook Pro 17 (2.6 GHz version). At the end of the install, it's been hung with a blue screen frozen for over 30 minutes, can't SSH into it, it seems really dead. No choice but to hold the power button for 10 seconds to hard power off. Lame. Hope my FileVault home directory isn't hosed again like the last time Software Update failed... restoring that is annoying.  
(Version 10.5.2)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  This is quite literally one of the worst software purchases I have ever made in my entire Mac-using life. Due to several different bugs that I discovered while trying to use it, I never did use FileStorm beyond that first project that I bought it for.

Nevertheless, every time I update that old project, FileStorm fails in a different way. Broken disk images, crashes, or error alerts stating that my valid license code can't be used due to error number whatever. Each time I use this app, I end up having to email tech support, wait for their reply, and then do something like run some typo-riddled installer (not a standard installer, mind you, but the crappy one this company makes), which they email me as an attachment, giving admin privileges and let it do lord knows what to my system. Stay away from this junk!  
(Version 1.9.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  This software would be great if it wasn't so buggy. But it is. Small one-page comics work great, but every time you make a multipage comic with lots of editing, it eventually gets into some freaked out state whereby you cannot select/delete certain elements (like speech bubbles), and the undo system crashes, which makes it easy to lose the last bit of your work. Undo no longer does anything, so if you delete an element, it's gone forever.

I don't know anything better for this task, but the bugginess is very irritating.  
(Version 1.4.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Note there is an unfortunate crash bug when you save your email settings, if the Authentication Type is set to "None". A fix is expected "very soon, within hours". A workaround is to use some type of authentication for sending mail.  
(Version 1.0)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  GREAT! I always end up going back to the command line after trying the various graphical Subversion clients, due to buggines, or poor user interfaces. Not this time! ZigVersion is the first one that is actually more *productive* than using the comand line. It's a real native Mac app, with a thoughtful design. Sure, it is expensive for a commercial license, but that's to be expected when there's so much junky-but-free competition out there... I paid, and don't regret it one bit.  
(Version 1.2b1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  This software does have the best guitar sound you can get from software. But unfortunately, the software is otherwise so ATROCIOUSLY bad that it often does not even function at all. The software registration and activation is HORRIBLE and literally fails to work the majority of times. The software stops working and has severe bugs that break basic functionality. The forums are full of users who recorded songs, applied a minor update to fix some other heinous bugs, and then found their songs were all broken. I was motivated to write this review because right now, I have a brand new MacBook Pro, fresh out of the box, and Guitar Rig's activation just doesn't work. I have probably spent more time trying to make this extremely low-quality software work than actually ever playing guitar through it. This would be great software if it worked, but it is simply buggy garbage. Stay away.  
(Version 2.2)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  A power user driver for unsupported mice is a real boon to the Mac ecosystem, and $22 is not too much to charge for it by any stretch of the imagination.

Logitech's Mac driver is one of the worst pieces of software I have ever seen. Without Steermouse (or something like it), there is no way I could even consider and Logitech product, even though their hardware actually is innovative.   
(Version 3.6)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  So, do you walk around town repeatedly posting the same sign at gas stations, too?

"You gas stations need to put this AT THE TOP OF YOUR TODO LIST! You need to bring back NON-UNLEADED GAS FOR MY OBSOLETE CAR! Your gas station is WORTHLESS until you do the obsolete thing that I want!"

It might be nice to have an import function for Mail, but I guarantee you that the rest of us who are not living in the 1980s before IMAP email would rather the Thunderbird team spent the effort making the UI more Mac-like, or some other more useful thing.   
(Version 2.0)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  What is wrong with you people? Are you stuck in the stone ages and still using POP mail? Use IMAP and you don't need any stupid import functions. Mail clients don't need import functions for other mail clients. That has been totally unnecessary for almost ten years. Even if you don't have IMAP, sign up for .Mac or some other IMAP provider temporarily. Then just sync both clients to the same IMAP server. Sheesh.  
(Version 2.0)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Can anybody here provide a summary of what makes this better that the built-in Terminal.app program?  
(Version 0.9.5)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  P.S.

The word "progessional" is the extremely advanced Latin word for "professional".  
(Version 2.5.3188)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  OK, my last comment was deleted, so I will take that to mean I was perhaps slightly too liberal with the term 'idiot'. (Ha, ha.)

Nevertheless, I think it is *incredibly* lame that this company cannot provide release notes when they issue an update to Parallels. (The release notes link provided above is bogus; it simply reiterates the changes fromt he last major release).

I am a paying customer, and have been fairly satisfied with the product, but the inability of this company to even basically document these updates makes me eager to see if VMWare can provide a more progessional offering with their upcoming Fusion product (now in beta).   
(Version 2.5.3188)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  The tab sidebar is one of the KEY features why I use OmniWeb as my main browser. If you have a whole bunch of tabs, it is not only easier to find the one you need instantly, but you can visuallly see when the pages are done loading.

I agree they should have a normal tab bar too as an option, but I certainly prefer the visual sidebar where you can actually see the pages.

(The OTHER killer feature is that it automatically remembers your per-site preferences for font sizes, popup blocking, etc.)  
(Version 5.5.4 beta 1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Not having release notes is amateurish, too. While Yep had some interesting features, I deleted it from my Mac today. (I bought EagleFiler recently, which is similar in function, and although less flashy in some ways it is more professionally done.)  
(Version 1.2)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  I inCREDIBLY wish there was a native Mac OS X (e.g., written in Cocoa/Objective-C) app like this... but there's not. This is the best thing going.

Feature-wise it has lots of the features you would want. I put it head to head against Wing, Eclipse+plugins, and the others I could find. It's got the best featureset for coding in python on the Mac.

However, it has that very low quality GUI, because it is written using Mozilla's cross-platform crapware layer. Same reason that Firefox feels like shoddy garbage on the Mac. You might as well run a Java app: nonstandard UI widgets, menus that don't quite work right, bizarre flaws with text editing, and so on.

Still, I bought this and use it when I need to step through Python code in a debugger. It is telling that I WANT an IDE with all the integration features but still end up using TextMate for 90% of my Python coding, despite it being just a dumb editor without such features. That's because it's a great Mac app doing what it does. Komodo does cool stuff but the app is klunky.  
(Version 4.0b4)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Although the name might get some extra clicks from people (like me) who initally assumed it was something new from Omni, that assumption will be immediately and obviously invalidated upon visiting the author's freakish web site. LOL!  
(Version 1.0)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  NO LOGIN WINDOW / PHANTOM DISPLAY GLITCH: I had a weird glitch after installing this on my MacBook Pro. Upon reboot, there was no login window and at first it seemed the Mac had hung. I noticed that the cursor would move though, then disappear when moved to the left edge.

It seemed like it thought it was still hooked up to my Cinema display like it usually is when I am home, but I am in a hotel now with no external monitor. On a hunch, I typed my usename, enter, password, enter, and sure enough, it logged me in. So the login window had been open, just not onscreen.

Even logged in, I had no menu bar. Luckily I have LaunchBar star at login, so I could use that to launch System Preferences, then open the Displays pane, press Gather Windows and then move my menu bar to the correct screen. I noticed that the Mac thought it had a 640x480 "VGA Monitor" attached, which is a far cry from the 30" monitor I usually have attached, so I have no idea what made it think that...

Anyway that was a lame glitch, and actually the first glitch I have ever personally experienced with an Apple OS update.   
(Version 2006-008)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  2006-11-22 (Wed) 6.6b2 is actually available if you click More Information above and navigate to the DivX Labs Blog... here it still listed as 6.6b1.  
(Version 6.6b1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  AWESOME browser. Now that it is on par with Safari in terms of rendering speed, you can really take advantage of killer features.

1. Per-site preferences is so friggin rad... your bank uses crappy fonts? No prob! OmniWeb remembers all your adjustments per-site, without affecting other sites. And the interface to per-site prefs is great.

2. You can set it to re-open all the open windows upon re-launching the browser. That is killer too.

3. Lots more power features.

The big bad thing is that it should try to emulate Safari as closely as possible in terms of its keyboard shortcuts (at least as an option). The reason is, Safari is THE ubiquitous Mac browser. The discrepancies between OmniWeb and Safari a) make it annoying if you use a lot of Macs and OW isn't set up on them, an b) makes it harder to get other ppl to use OW (e.g., your mom). Still, it is the best browser in the world.  
(Version 5.5.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Awesome. I clowned Parallels in their first buggy release, but they have made good on their promise with rapid, responsive development, and now have a very solid and amazing app.

I don't normally install ANYTHING that needs kernel extensions on my production Macs, and my reward is that these Macs do not ever crash. Early versions of Parallels did cause kernel panics, but after seeing stability in later versions, and AWESOME Windows performance, I made an exception to my kext rule. Parallels flawlessly ran Windows XP daily (just to run QuickBooks and Firefox, but still).

If you need Windows on your Mac, this is great stuff. And the price is reasonable.  
(Version 2.2.1940)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  TextMate has lit a fire under these guys. After not keeping up with Mac OS X over the past years, BBEdit is starting to feel like a live product again, rather than a legacy cash cow being milked for whatever profits it will squirt out without substantial improvements.

BBEdit is a solid editor, but it was dominant for so long that it didn't need to try too hard. Then TextMate came along and really trounced BBEdit in terms of Mac-ness (which is ironic, since BBEdit and the Mac go way way back). For example, BBEdit still uses application-modal dialogs! Stuck in the nineties there guys?? Ever heard of this little thing called SHEETS, where the whole app doesn't have to lock up for details that affect only one document??

At the same time, BBEdit does have a ton of features, and now that they have started copying TextMate, BBEdit is shining brighter than it has in recent years. With text folding, spellchecking of strings inside source code, etc., it's starting to catch back up with modern times.

The final thing is that BBEdit is ROCK SOLID STABLE in my experience. Hasn't crashed on me in YEARS. That is always a plus. BBEdit is certainly one of the top editors, but its legacy clunkiness in some are still prevents it from being a five star app.  
(Version 8.5.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  A lot of people rightfully blast Intuit, and QuickBooks, but it has really gotten better. I just switched from QuickBooks on XP (running under Parallels) to QB2007 Mac. There is no longer much disparity between the Mac and PC versions.

Even though it sucks in little ways (cannot keyboard-navigate to checkboxes and buttons in many dialogs, very poor double-click behavior which sometimes works normally when editing text, but sometimes double clicking a word in transaction opens the transaction in an editor), it is SO SO MUCH BETTER than it once was.

The legacy Carbon interface has been largely replaced by a modern Cocoa-based one. And the features have mostly caught up with the PC side.

Intuit is still a pretty bogus company, but most big ones are. You might have to hold your nose a little bit, but QB2007 really is the best small business accounting package for Mac users.  
(Version 2007)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Matias Tactile Pro. No driver needed, and it has all the keys. I think needing a driver sucks for a keyboard, and this one has had bugs in the past (related to screwing up the system's input device idle time counters--the Macally driver would make all your input devices register as being idle for many years (on Intel anyway)).

Despite that glaring flaw, I like and use this keyboard. The low-profile thing with the full-size layout is great.   
(Version 1.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Should read, "You don't need this app if you AREN'T a Mac developer."  
(Version 1.2.1)

MARUKO DRINKING TEAM  Look, sure, you don't need this app if you are a Mac developer. But if you are, you don't want to use a text editor. That might be fine if you only need to make a couple of edits. And Apple's plist tool is only very slightly better.

If you are frequently revising plist files used in complex apps, they often contain long lists of default preferences, configuration info, etc., and PlistEdit Pro will save you a lot of time: smart row-based cut and paste, drag and drop, undo, the ability to duplicate large dictionaries and arrays (or any property list data), and intelligent search features that understand keys and values and let you restrict searching to either or both. If you do much Mac development, the time savings and convenience easily justify the inexpensive price.  
(Version 1.2.1)