ATROPOS  You actually managed to get Retrospect 8 to back *anything* up? How many virgins did you need to sacrifice? I've been considering selling my soul just to get it to even properly enumerate the files on our Windows 2003 server—ONCE—so I could, maybe, possibly, back them up.

Retrospect has never been a "happy" Mac application, but for the most part 6.x worked. Version 8 has consistently been nothing but trouble and, IMO, an enormous waste of time and money.  
(Version 8.1.526)

ATROPOS  This seems counter-productive. If you need to open Character Palette to find the character in question to start with, how will "uXXXX" be more efficient? You can use the existing UNICODE Keyboard support to accomplish exactly the same effect.  
(Version 1.0)

ATROPOS  Although much of this application works as expected, there are parts where it fails. For example, clicking any "Smart Playlists" results in a list of zero-size nameless tracks for the playlist. Attempting to click on any song title in the list of recently-played tracks produces a similar error.

Tracks or album names with non-ASCII characters in them appear to crash the PHP parsing modules, so be wary of, e.g., the soundtrack to the movie π; or albums by Asian artists that use non-Roman characters.

The most frustrating part of the program is that bug reports appear to be completely ignored. I filed reports for a bug that occurred in multiple versions of the application and have been ignored.

If you are willing to put up with quirky behavior, the program's Web interface is remarkably similar to iTunes and when it *can* play music it does so very well. I'm not aware of competing products that come close to KavaTunes' functionality, but if there are any out there I would recommend checking them out before paying to register this application.  
(Version 3.2)

ATROPOS  Twice in a row now I've had my 1.1.4-firmware iPod Touch (with 'software update' for additional functions) left at an endless, slow cascade of "BSD root: md0, major 2, minor 0" across the screen after running ZiPhone 3.0. The "even a caveman can do it" attitude of the developer is great, but sadly it's just not working.  
(Version 3.0)

DAVID O’DONNELL  2.0b1 crashes immediately upon launch under Mac OS X 10.4.2.  
(Version 2.0b1)

DAVID O’DONNELL  Newsfire is a pretty capable RSS reader, supporting multiple protocols in a user interface that should make Mac OS X users feel right at home. Although power users might like additional control over some interface elements (like the typeface used in the preview pane) and support for nested feed folders, the application is stable, delivers what's promised, and has a developer who is responsive to bug reports. Twenty bucks to support good, solid programs isn't that much, when you think about it.  
(Version 1.0v29)

DAVID O'ďż˝DONNELL  SpamAssassin is a spam *tagger*. It's up to your e-mail client or (better) server-side filtering solution to take action based on its determination of whether a message is spam or not. I use it on my home network and it catches 90%+ of the spam that makes it past my Postfix IP and regex filters. Going from 30+ pieces of crap a day to one or two every few days is a godssend.  
(Version 3.0)

DAVID O’DONNELL  WHY in the name of all that is good and right are people releasing installers that require all running MAC OS X applications be quit before they will run?   
(Version 6.1.1)

DAVID O’DONNELL  I bought 9.0 based on its claim to defeat Windows virii. Unfortunately, it doesn't integrate with my e-mail client (Mulberry) and it caused or contributed to over a dozen kernel panics.

This seems to be a consistent problem with Norton applications on the Mac, and a reason why I seriously doubt I'll ever spend money for them again. *Any* of the other Mac utilities out there do a better job and cause less instability.  
(Version 9.0.1)

DAVID O’DONNELL  The app runs, but it doesn't seem to work on my dual 1 GHz Mac running Mac OS X 10.2.6 (1.75 GB of RAM). No drawing tool appears, and attempting to generate a world or make any settings changes results in numerous program errors (exception in XXXXX.cpp) followed by crashes.

Testing on a plain-jane account on this machine, on my Aluminium PB G4, and 17" iMac always produces the same results as outlined above.  
(Version 1.32.1)

DAVID O'DONNELL  It seems to work as advertized, except that it cannot import OmniWeb bookmarks?Safari Enhancer instead displays a "Cannot find a valid bookmark file" error.  
(Version 1.1)

DAVID O’DONNELL  Great software! Works as advertised—and on a UPS (presently) listed as unsupported. Developers are FAST to get back to you. Definitely worth the $20.  
(Version 1.0.7)