SCHOSCHIE  I don't know about FLAC, but it definitely runs on Tiger and it does split tracks as well. I've used it like that for at least a year. There must be something wrong with your system set-up… or maybe the latest version is broken…  
(Version 1.4.4)

SCHOSCHIE  Great app, but after I upgraded to Snow Leopard, FStream now takes up to several minutes to connect to a station. Before, it was almost instantaneous. Have no idea why. It's quite irritating when switching stations to see what's on.  
(Version 1.4.4)

SCHOSCHIE  Broken download link; developer page cannot be found. Didn't find the download anywhere else on the net either. Pity.  
(Version 1.0)

SCHOSCHIE  Yes, I think this should be re-listed as freeware. I've not found any note on the website or in the app itself that it's shareware. Please fix, thank you!  
(Version 3.3.3)

SCHOSCHIE  Audio Recorder is no longer free. Its $20.  
(Version 2.1)

SCHOSCHIE  Works like a charm. Sweet and simple. Thanks for making it!  
(Version 1.72u)

SCHOSCHIE  I'm wondering why I hadn't heard of this app earlier. It's a godsend! I've been listening almost exclusively to net radio stations for the last three years while doing work, and it bugged me to have to launch the big iTunes behemoth just to tune in to the radio. Now I don't have to anymore, as FStream does just this, and it's much more lightweight and easy on the system, and it starts up in no time, and automatically re-connects to the station you were last listening to. Also, it has a nice streams manager where you can organize all your stations.

FStream can also record the radio stream. I had previously bought RadioLover for this purpose (the non-free successor to the no longer updated StreamRipper X), but I didn't mind that FStream would obviate an extra app for that purpose, too. However, I was a little disappointed to realize that FStream apparently re-encodes the audio before saving it to disk, in contrast to what RadioLover/StreamRipper X does, which is basically just write the stream packets into a file and put an appropriate container around it.

I wouldn't mind about the re-encoding (although I'm questioning the necessity), but it's rather heavy on the system. On my (admittedly old) machine, FStream uses up nearly the entire CPU while recording, which makes it impractical to record a radio stream while doing work. This, for me, is FStream's one major weak point (and this is why I'm giving only 4 out of 5 stars for "Features").

I've suggested to the author the possibility of recording the radio stream directly (without re-encoding), but he seems to be rather reluctant to consider it.

I can't really complain though because FStream is of course free, and it's the best choice for listening to radio streams, afaik.  
(Version 1.4.1)

SCHOSCHIE  Indispensable.  
(Version 1.0.6)

SCHOSCHIE  This software is no longer available; the links no longer work. The developer's website is still up, but with no content.  
(Version 1.0)

SCHOSCHIE  All Flash content makes my Mac go down on its knees. The CPU is hogged 100%.

I've read about people elsewhere who have this problem.

Seems to be a Mac-only problem too; PC-users don't seem to be affected.

In view of the fact that most video hosting sites (YouTube & co.) use Flash to play their (bad quality) .flv content, it is a major problem. I've had to force-quit browsers (Safari, FF) a number of times because Flash hogged the machine so badly, nothing else worked. And I was not really enjoying the Flash content either: stuttering video at about 3 fps with out-of-sync sound.

This is on a PowerBook G4 with a 1.25 GHz G4 and a gig of RAM. This is not hi-end exactly, but it's not like my machine should not be able to play video content of "YouTube size" at full fps without everything else halting to a full stop.

Does it not boil down to this: Flash player developers focus on the PC/Win platform and just basically ignore everyone else (which is to say: give those couple of Mac users this very, very sloppy port of our Windoze code, that should be good enough for them)?

Same with Java. The Java runtime on Mac used to be practically unusable, while it was quite ok on the PC. By now, Java has become kind of usable on the Mac, too. Sadly, Flash on the Mac seems to have gotten worse.

What are you doing, Adobe?  
(Version 9.0.115)

SCHOSCHIE  The company who makes this appears, very unfortunately, to be defunct.

From the spherasoft Website:

To everyone looking for SpheraSoft:

I don't know what happened to SpheraSoft, nor do I know how to contact them. Black Ring obtained their IP a few months ago. I would assume the company has dissolved. Please understand that I can not help you with your programs or serial numbers.

-Nace 1-17-08  
(Version 1.1)

SCHOSCHIE  To all commenters who are wondering what the point of this app is: there is none. This is a joke program.  
(Version 3.1)

SCHOSCHIE  This is a totally cool idea. A bit crazy, but fun!  
(Version 1.0)

SCHOSCHIE  I need to compare folders often, and a tool like this is very useful for me. However, at this stage, I think Compare Folders needs a lot of polish, and comparing it with other Shareware products in the same price range, the price for Compare Folders is way too high.

The app has a number of drawbacks that turn out to be quite irritating if you happen to really USE this tool often.

1. It doesn't do recursive compares (looking into folders and subfolders). You would have to compare each subfolder manually. When comparing a large hierarchy of files, this becomes unusable and defies the purpose of a compare tool.

2. It is very slow. I'm not sure if the unnecessary transition "effects" between the tabs make it so slow. But it's so sluggish it feels like its wading through thick slime.

3. There is no way to control the priority of compare properties. If you have timestamp turned on, files will always be compared according to their timestamp first, which in my view is not very clever. Particulary when working with fileservers, you often have the case that there are two identical files with differing timestamps. Compare Folders will mark these as "similar" instead of doing a filesize check first and then letting you choose if you want to ignore the differing timestamp.

4. There is no content (byte per byte) comparison feature. Compare Folders uses only the filesystem info, but not the actual content, to compare the files. There are very rare cases where you have files with identical meta-info but differing contents. But more importantly, if you're paranoid and want to make REALLY sure you have two identical copies of a file before deleting the dupe, you want to do a byte per byte comparison. Compare Folders does not offer this feature.

5. You cannot control what columns will be diplayed in the file info tables. For instance, if I'm not interested in the "Extension" and "Type" info, there is no way to make them disappear. With all the info in it, the tables get very wide and you need to scroll around a lot to get everything into view. The stacked display is a good solution, but it makes it harder to compare the info line per line.

(A nifty feature would be if the table columns would autoresize to fit in the largest cell)

6. It would be much easier to have to drop boxes where you can just drag&drop the two folders to be compared. It's no fun having to click through a file open dialog when you have the folders already open in the finder.

That's a lot of criticism. I think Compare Folders could become a serious workhorse, but at the moment there are too many issues.

Bottom line, calling it "demo" and asking $25 for it is just inappropriate. People (including me) will use this until the "demo" comparisons run out, and then they will trash the app, not buy it, and go look for something else.  
(Version 2.6)

SCHOSCHIE  It launches, but then nothing happens for a couple of minutes. I quit. :(  
(Version 0.2)

SCHOSCHIE  Unbeatable deal. I wish you had offered this sooner. I had already bought GraphicConverter and GarageSale separately before. Now I have 2 licenses for each. :)  
(Version )

SCHOSCHIE  I tried it out yesterday using a set of about 2600 photos (around 6.5 GB). Indexing took about 2 hours which isn't exactly fast.

The result was good; a calendar appears in a drawer and shows you when the photos were taken. There is a Flickr upload feature which is very handy.

However, when examining the catalogue, it turned out to be a packaged directory of 6 GB size. The entire load of full-size photos was contained (i.e. duplicated) in the catalog... completely unneccessary.  
(Version 2.8)

SCHOSCHIE  Follow-up to my previous post: The converted SVGs are upside-down and horizontally flipped. May be a problem with the SVGs I used, but they display correctly in a web browser.  
(Version 1.0b1)

SCHOSCHIE  I used it to convert a number of coat of arms SVGs taken from Wikipedia into pdf. It works very well; except, the resulting pdfs were turned on their heads. This wasn't hard to fix. SVG detective converted all SVGs without problems (except for the one mentioned), also those on which Illustrator failed. Thank you for making this available!  
(Version 1.0b1)

SCHOSCHIE  It works like a charm. Great fun. Thank you.  
(Version 1.40)

SCHOSCHIE  Camino is THE best browser on the Mac. It's very fast, it's got the most precise HTML rendering engine on the planet (Gecko), and it's got an excellently-designed GUI.

It doesn't get on its knees when rendering AJAX websites like Safari does. It's got an excellent, zero-config annoyance blocker built in. It's got all the essential features and no clutter.

Developers might want to use Firefox for web development because of the possibilities with using plug-ins.

Everybody else, get Camino.  
(Version 1.5)

SCHOSCHIE  Compiling and installing Bochs isn't soo hard. It's described here: http://bochs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/topper.pl?name=New+Bochs+Documentation&url=http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/index.html

You don't even need to read this, though. The steps to compile and install are rather simple. Do this:

1) Get the Developer Tools and install them (if you haven't already). You can get the Dev Tools for free from Apple's Developer website after you have registered as a Developer using the "free plan".

2) Download the bochs source package. Unpack it.

3) Open the Terminal. Change into the bochs directory by typing "cd " and dragging the unpacked bochs directory into the Terminal window. Press the Return key.

4) Enter the following lines, waiting for the operation to finish after each line:

configure

make

sudo make install

Each will take a while and you will see hundreds of lines printed out. This is normal. The last command (sudo make install) will ask for your administrator password which is your normal login password if you're a user that is allowed to administer the Mac.

You now have a finished MacOSX binary executable inside the bochs directory. You can launch it by double-clicking it like usual. It will complain about not being able to open a hard disk image file and an unknown display extension "vbe".

To fix this, follow these detailed instructions to setup bochs. Afterwards, everything will work fine.

http://bochs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/topper.pl?name=New+Bochs+Documentation&url=http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/index.html

It does take some time. And it does help to RTFM once in a while.  
(Version 2.3)

SCHOSCHIE  »it would be nice if I could alternatively click a "Same As" button next to those fields to choose any file that already has the file type or creator I want«

You can drag&drop any file into the Details drawer and it will be added as a new type/creator.  
(Version 3.0)

SCHOSCHIE  The download link does not work and the developer's website has been taken over by some domain trader.  
(Version 1.0b.2)

SCHOSCHIE  The developer of PathSnagger appears not to be too interested in fixing bugs. PathSnagger still doesn't handle paths that contain non-ASCII characters. While I very much appreciate freeware, it's a bit sad that programs like this are not maintained.

I have found a very good replacement to PathSnagger, which doesn't have the aforementioned problem. It can only copy paths in UNIX style and without quotes, but this is perfect for most everyone.

http://www.hsoi.com/hsoishop/software/  
(Version 1.1b5)

SCHOSCHIE  Have only played with it for a bit and I think it's super cool.  
(Version 1.6)

SCHOSCHIE  I found out why the script only added half of the songs on my iPod. It's easy to fix. The songs are stored in a number of invisible folders inside an invisible folder /iPod_Control/Music/ on the iPod. These folders are named Fxx, where xx is a number. On my iPod, there are 50 such folders (F00-F49). In the script, there is a line that makes it search those folders in a loop, but it only goes up to 19.

If you, like me, have more than 20 such folders on your iPod, just open the script in the Script Editor, and change the following line:

repeat with theNum from 0 to 19

to

repeat with theNum from 0 to 49

(or whatever the number of folders you have is).

I now have all the songs on my iPod in a playlist inside iTunes, from which I can burn CDs etc. Works fine!  
(Version 1.0)

SCHOSCHIE  FinkCommander is a very nice tool. However, for those not scared of the Terminal, fink is really *very* easy to use without a GUI.

The only commands you basically need to know are:

fink list thesoftwareyourelookingfor

-- scans the available packages and lists those that match your query.

fink install thesoftwareyourelookingfor

-- install the package you want.

That's really about it.  
(Version 0.5.4)

SCHOSCHIE  It is still probably the fastest image viewer there is for the Mac. However, after trying it out for a couple of weeks, I found that it is, unfortunately, not a viable Preview replacement.

The main downside is that Xee cannot print. Also, it does not handle PDFs well (or at all?). Thirdly, it seems to get confused by some color spaces (or maybe embedded profiles)... on numerous occasions, JPEG images were displayed in very weird false colors.

Nonetheless, if you regularly need to sift through large loads of pics, Xee is probably the best choice. In that respect, Xee is likely the closest you can get to the ACDSee tool on the PC.  
(Version 2.0)

SCHOSCHIE  Very well done. Appears to be significantly faster than both Apple's BOMArchiveHelper and StuffIt Expander.  
(Version 1.6)

SCHOSCHIE  A password generator with roughly the same set of options is already included with OSX 10.4. Open System Preferences, go to "Users", click on any user, go to the "password" tab, press "Change password" and then click on the "key" icon next to the "new password" textfield. Voilà.

It's pretty stupid of Apple to have hidden this nifty little thing so deeply, though.  
(Version 1.6.1)

SCHOSCHIE  The "reviews" by Mr. Zwicker and his buddy sound a lot like they are friends of the developer.

I'm not really sure what the point of an app like this is, as Apple's own Keychain pretty much does the same thing, and it's integrated into the system, so you don't need to manually add and update your login data.

Also, I think it's a bit suspicious to claim that because of using DES, there would be "absolutely no way" of retrieving the data without the passphrase. It is known that no encryption technology is perfectly secure, and as my fore-poster already stated, there have been more or less successful attacks on DES already.  
(Version 2.01)

SCHOSCHIE  Very good! Very, very fast indeed, very low cpu and mem usage.

But there's a big downside... Xee can't print! I was going to almost trash Preview because Xee is so much better, but you can't live without it if you wanna print.

Too bad! Maybe this will come up in a later version. No matter what, Xee is the fastest image viewer I've seen on MacOSX.  
(Version 2.0)

SCHOSCHIE  Just found out it copies only about half of the songs on my iPod. Strange.  
(Version 1.0)

SCHOSCHIE  EXCELLENT!

Works perfectly on iTunes 7.0.2 using a 3G iPod 20 GB. Havent tried burning a CD yet, but I can now share my iPod over the iTunes port as usual. How cool is that.

Used Music Publisher for that, but that one has a bug where it somes goes bananas and claims all the cpu and needs to be force-quit. So, no need for an external application anymore.

Would still have to find out what happens if you change iPod contents... do you have to clear the playlist and import it all over again or does the script update the playlist?  
(Version 1.0)

SCHOSCHIE  I've just updated a bug report I filed earlier:

http://www.bergenstreetsoftware.com/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=10

Path Snagger has a problem with paths that contain special characters such as German umlauts, French accented characters etc. These are represented as escape sequences of the form \xxx. PathSnagger apparently gets confused by these and does not copy the path in that case. Since we have a LOT of paths that contain umlauts and the like, it would be so cool if this could be fixed.

Other than this, PathSnagger is extremely useful and I recommend it to everybody.  
(Version 1.1b5)

SCHOSCHIE  Very powerful software. Horrible, horrible interface. We Mac users frown upon bad interfaces. Sorry, just kidding.

In sooth, the GUI is really neither pretty nor user-friendly. Never mind the non-prettiness, but there is a lot of stuff to set up before anything works and most of this stuff could be set up by default to get users going (and then tweak things for better performance later on). But if you follow the guides on the amule wiki, it's no big deal.

However, this is not the software for users who have gotten used to the many polished, foolproof one-click-and-go Mac applications.

(Also, in my experience with the donkey network, you hardly ever get download rates higher than 5 or maybe 10 kB/s, so any average download will take from about a day to more than a week. You need a bit of patience.)  
(Version 2.1.3)

SCHOSCHIE  The current download link points to a new version that has all the changes the previous reviewer complained about, i.e. an English user interface, and digits can be entered using keyboard.

It does not create Sudokus; the New button just clears the board.  
(Version 0.6.1)

SCHOSCHIE  Oh, never mind. Just read this on the developer's page:

As of version 0.5.0, the FinkCommander binary will run only on Jaguar.

(using Tiger, so... *damn*)  
(Version 0.5.4)

SCHOSCHIE  Hi, just freshly installed the Fink package and FinkCommander. However, when I launch FinkCommander, the icon just bounces for a while in the Dock and then it crashes, even before any GUI elements appear. Any solution? Thanks :)  
(Version 0.5.4)