BIGCLOITS  I’ve been a heavy NNW user for a couple years now. I have basically never had one day of trouble-free operation. Almost all the problems concern feed management and syncing, and these problems have been remarkably persistent through all versions, including the most recent (3.2). There are many, many head-scratching moments with the syncing of feeds.

Everything else about the application is basically fine, either “fine” or even pretty excellent. But the syncing problems are so numerous and severe that I can’t even begin to recommend the application. Let’s put it this way: I would not dream of recommending it to my mother ...  
(Version 3.2)

BIGCLOITS  Dictate is one of the most unstable and generally poorly designed major pieces of software I have ever had the misfortune to be stuck using.

Far from being a major improvement over MacSpeech's previous product, iListen, Dictate still feels as twitchy and poorly thought out as iListen ever did, even after a year and a half of development and at least two major updates. The only real improvement is that Dictate is based on a far superior speech recognition engine (and that's not nothing). However, it's a lot less use if the software wrapped around the engine totally sucks.

I purchased Dictate shortly after its release in early 2008, and have barely had a day of trouble-free use of the product ever since. Routine hanging and crashing has been the main problem. Due to an egregious Canadian localization bug, for several months I had to choose between a version of Dictate that would literally not launch all, and an older version that merely crashed frequently.

When 1.5 was release recently (May 09), I hoped I would finally be able to use Dictate with fewer hassles, but no such luck. Even running on a well-maintained year-old MacBook Pro, Dictate 1.5 (and 1.5.1) is as crashy as ever. Within minutes of using the new version, CPU usage spikes to 98% and stayed there -— not just bringing Dictate to a halt, but the entire machine, and even refusing to force quit. Lovely. Such experiences have been the rule with Dictate from the beginning!

For many months I communicated regularly with MacSpeech about my frustrations with their product. I cooperated diligently with a great deal of troubleshooting. I was often treated like I was some kind of problem customer, despite the fact that I have some empathy for the kind of frustrations tech support workers have to cope with and try pretty hard to be nice to them. Some weren't so bad, of course. But despite the professionalism of some individual tech support professionals at MacSpeech, the overall customer service experience was abominable.

Ultimately, MacSpeech simply was not willing to stand behind their product in any substantive way. I am a deeply annoyed customer.  
(Version 1.5.1)

BIGCLOITS  Developer did not respond to a very simple pre-sales question. I probably would have bought the software otherwise, but I don’t buy from developers that can’t be bothered to answer their email.  
(Version 1.1)

BIGCLOITS  I’m an intense typist, and I have worked with tools like clipboard managers and other typing tools since the Apple IIe. To this day, my quest for a quality clipboard manager continues. PTHPasteboard is not the end of that quest, unfortunately. It’s a strong contender, but it falls well short of what I have known all along that I want.

After two weeks of regular use, it does at least seem fast and stable to me, and that ain’t nuthin’. Certainly it blows the doors off the snazzier-looking iClip in the speed department. It also has some impressive power-user features. It’s absolutely amazing to have my pasteboards synced across two machines, for instance.

But the GUI is a rough around the edges, which drives me nutters. It isn’t a deal-breaker, but I’m a Mac-user, and I want visual polish. There are practical implications, too: ugly UI elements are also often harder to understand, and there are certain parts of the UI that are as cryptic as a CLI. The developer really needs to hire someone who understands interfaces!

I sent the developer an easy question two weeks ago and never got an answer. Not a great sign.  
(Version 4.4)

BIGCLOITS  After over two years of regular usage of first v3 and v4 since its release, I am finally abandoning iClip, and I'm not in a good mood about it. My major complaint is that it is too slow: I am tired of waiting for its glitzy interface to respond to my requests, and sick of it taking as long to launch as about six other applications combined.

iClip 4 is certainly not horrible, but it's far from excellent, and there's really no excuse for that. It certainly could be excellent.

As other reviewers here have commented in the last few months, the developer seems to have abandoned the product. Optimizations and bug fixes are needed, but there's no sign of active development, and the only responses I've received to about three different inquiries have been slow and a touch defensive and disinterested -- the "no one else has reported that" school of tech support. Meh.  
(Version 4.0)