OZZPOT  @Kosovar:

On the contrary, MA3 is a total overhaul of the whole app, which has taken the artist/developer a very long time. The art has been painstakingly, expertly and totally redrawn from scratch in ultra-high definition to accommodate modern screen sizes. Many of the background features now animate too. there are many more fish to choose from, and you can now have up to 30 at once (rather than 8). The work that has been put into this is well worth the $10 upgrade.

If you visit the official forums for this app, (www.feldoncentral.com/forums/), you'd be able to communicate directly and frequently with both the developer/artist behind the whole thing, and the guy charged with converting the app to Mac. You'd also have access to info and screenshots of version 3. I recommend you check it out.

At time of writing, the conversion to Mac is complete, and version 3 is available to download in it's full from from Nova Development. We are still waiting for the download to appear on SereneScreen.com however, so that we current users can pay the very reasonable $10 for the upgrade. Hopefully this is imminent.  
(Version 2.6.1)

OZZPOT  I have this on Xbox 360, and was curious to see how good it looked on my 24" iMac. The first time I played it I turned all the settings up to maximum, and it looked amazing. When I recently went to show my friend, there was a 1.01 update, which seems to prevent me from using my native resolution of 1920x1200. Now the highest available is 1280x800, which looks awful on my iMac's screen.

Is this a bug? Please sort this out if so. I have no confidence in the full product when there are such mistakes in the demo, and it's something I would consider buying for my mac otherwise.  
(Version 1.0)

OZZPOT  This 0.93 update is also causing major issues for me. It now takes more than 10 minutes to even scan a DVD. 0.92 took no more than 10 seconds...

...and when it does finally finish scanning, it only seems to recognize a fraction of the titles on the disc.

I will have to revert to 0.91 as 0.92 is no longer available, and I have no backups.

Please sort this out!!! BTW by system is a 24" C2D iMac 2.8ghz, 4gb RAM, 10.5.6.  
(Version 0.9.3)

OZZPOT  If memory serves, they said that it was because it didn't have an ear on it, and suggested it may have been unclear to me that the other object on the icon was an ear.

In truth, of course I recognized it was an ear, but;

1) It's a hard thing to work into an icon and keep it attractive. An ear is a pretty ugly, asymmetrical object. Hard to draw and hard to make look nice. They always either look too photo-realistic or too cartoony (both are frowned upon in Apple's interface guidelines). A pair of lips is the opposite; symmetrical, colourful and instinctively attractive to the human eye. It's hard coded into our brains. It's also relatively easy to render lips to any level of realism required, from photo-realistic to almost abstract.

2). I didn't feel the ear was entirely relevant. Perhaps I'm not in a position to say such a thing, but I felt the focus of the app is the study and science of speech. Of course the ear plays it's part - in the normal human perception of that speech, but that's kind of obvious. The main goal of the icon is to get across the function of the application, which is speech (represented by the mouth) analyzed graphically (represented by the sound wave), on a computer display (a common convention of analytical software). To include the ear in the design is unnecessary and only serves to overcomplicate the icon (another no-no in Apple's interface guidelines).

Those are my reasons for not including the ear. I don't think I bothered to explain that to them - I have found that the client wants what the client wants. It's hard to change their minds. It's very hard to design something when you don't agree with the design direction. If you don't think it looks good, you never know when you're finished! So, you keep plugging away until it drives you insane. I hate getting into that situation even when I'm being paid, and since I did this one for free I certainly had no incentive to rework it.

Here's the link to it anyway for anyone that missed it: http://www.ozzpot.com/icons/  
(Version 5.0.43)

OZZPOT  Okay, sorry for taking so very, very long to get this out... if anyone wants to use my replacement (that the developers turned down) go here:

http://www.ozzpot.com/icons/  
(Version 5.0.38)

OZZPOT  I have used CosmoPod for ages, and would hate to be without it now, but ever since updating to 2.5, the format conversion has stopped working. The MPEG-4 file produced is damaged and cannot be played by any application, and when inspected, appears to be 0kb in size.

At the moment I'm having to convert the downloaded flv file using iSquint.

This is the case for every video I've downloaded since 2.5, from several different websites.  
(Version 2.5)

OZZPOT  This is a fantastic application, and one that quickly becomes indispensable. It does many things that Apple's own Keychain Access app should do, but doesn't.

I have one request though: Any chance of being able to import from Pastor?

http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/11818/pastor

I have scores of app serial numbers etc in there, and it'll take me hours to move them all manually. :(

I'll happily give this a 5 star rating if this is added!  
(Version 2.5.12)

OZZPOT  For those that want to see the icon I made, here it is:

http://ozzpot.com/stuff/Praat-256.png

The soundwave on the screen was actually made in, and exported from, Praat!

I would normally charge about US$300 for this type of thing, but did this one out of charity. They still won't take it though! Oh well, I tried... ;)  
(Version 5.0.13)

OZZPOT  No, I's still on Tiger (10.4.11).

David is a well-known and experienced producer on mostly great Mac software, but yes, his after-sales support is notoriously hit and miss at best.

He does continue to develop his products though, so hopefully there'll be a fix for your issue soon. I hope so as I'll be switching to Leopard soon!  
(Version 1.4v70)

OZZPOT  I love Newsfire. I've used it for longer than I can remember. I've tried all the other alternatives, including Safari's built-in RSS capabilities, but nothing deals with feeds quite as simply, beautifully and elegantly as Newsfire.

It does everything you want it to do, without being bloated.

There's one thing I wish it did SO much though - it's only a small thing:

I wish the dock icon's unread item count's badge was customisable and preferably optional too. The lime/acid green of it is an eyesore on my desktop. I wish I could select the colour of it myself, or even better turn it off altogether.

As soon as that is an option I'll give this 5 stars no question.  
(Version 1.4v70)

OZZPOT  Not much happening here...

The image of the tubes is horribly pixelated, and there is no plasma whatsoever. Haven't had a problem with the related products (i.e the plasmatube widget).

iMacG5 2ghz, 10.4.11  
(Version 1.0)

OZZPOT  A good start to a programming career! When I started making widgets they were just static images, before long they had basic functions, and they got more and more complex (and useful) from there, and I was about 19 when I started!

For an 11 year old starting out now, this is a great first step. Keep it up!  
(Version 1.0)

OZZPOT  I find this app very useful. It has a very simple but versatile project management facility, and the menubar stop/start is very useful. The automatic idle time feature is also very good. But one thing drives me insane - when the window is closed, the entire app shuts down. I have lost count of the number of times I've done this, and had to estimate how long I've been working without it running, and adjust manually - it's very frustrating. Most apps (just look at Safari, Mail, Finder, or just about anything else) do not quit when the window is closed - it just means the window is out of the way. With this, you have to minimize it to the dock to keep it out of the way.

That's the only flaw with this app, and I'm sure it's easily fixed.

All in all it's a very nice, very useful little app, and it's free!  
(Version 1.2.1)

OZZPOT  I am a professional icon designer, and have dispatched a shiny new icon to the developers. Just a matter of seeing if they approve it now!  
(Version 4.5.16)

OZZPOT  Well, it was a lot more than a restart. I completely reworked my whole network from scratch. Somewhere along the way the problem was ironed out, but exactly where I don't know. I know little about how networks work. Sorry I can't help more.  
(Version 2.5)

OZZPOT  I am a professional Photoshop artist and graphic designer, who just recently got into digital photography after buying a 7.1mp camera to take on vacation with me.

I took many picturesque panoramas using the camera's 'stitch assist' function, but found it hard and time-consuming to stitch them together in photoshop. It took skill and knowledge to acheive the results I did, and decided to check out alternatives.

I found Calico, but wasn't very confident that it could do a good job with such little input from the user. I was wrong. It faultlessly stitched together a 17-shot 360° panorama on the first try. Now I must purchase it t get rid of the watermarks!

This will save me so much time and effort. Awesome software!  
(Version 1.2b8)

OZZPOT  This is a great app. Very useful, and works like a charm.

As a future enhancement, scheduling would be a cool feature, i.e you could tell the app to take a snapshot of a certain page at a certain time each day or each week, and automatically put it in a specified place or even put it in an iPhoto album.

Of course, I can't ask too much with this being a free app!

Thanks!  
(Version 0.4.3)

OZZPOT  It took me a while to fix what seems to be a very rarely experienced network problem (see 2 posts previous), but I am very happy to say I now have it fixed.

The developer was very quick in responding to my support emails, and kept his patience throughout. FYI, I had to rebuild my wireless network using some old Airport Express's I had lying around, and when that didn't work, hardware reset everything, and start again from scratch. Somewhere along the way the problem was ironed out, and I joined the thousands of users enjoying instant and painless streaming of music an photos twixt Mac and 360.

Once I had it running I have to say I was blown away by it. It is so easy and so simple, but somehow thrilling to be able to play any of my 15gb of music on my 360 without having to re-encode any CDs again... and viewing my photo albums on my 32" HDTV is a stunning feast for the eyes that I did not expect to find particularly interesting at all, but must admit can't stop playing with.

As soon as it was working I was so impressed I purchased right away. A paltry $10 really is a bargain for such beautifully written, genuinely useful, user-friendly and well supported software.

So don't worry about these initial problems I had, it seems I had something set up wrong. Everyone else I know or have communicated with concerning this software had instant joy with it.

I'd highly recommend this to anyone with a 360 -you won't believe how great it is.  
(Version 1.6)

OZZPOT  Hey thanks for your concerns, but after 3 days of ceaseless troubleshooting I finally got it working. I have no idea what the problem was, but after completely resetting all my network hardware and establishing a brand new wireless network, it worked staright away. I meant to post a new review here but forgot. Will fix. Thanks again!  
(Version 1.6)

OZZPOT  I have been trying to use this software for 2 days now without any progress. The software appears to be working correctly on the Mac end, i.e Connect360 shows 3 green ticks just like the screenshot, but my 360 simply will not connect. It takes about 5 minutes to even see my Mac as an option, and then tries to connect but fails saying there may be a firewall blocking the connection. There is no firewall. This is really really frustrating. I emailed the developer who replied quickly but his solution did not work, and he hasn't replied to my follow-up emails. I really hope I can get this sorted out soon, it seems to work instantly for everyone else, and I am getting extremely stressed and infuriated with it.  
(Version 1.5)