CYMORROW  This is a short review about the latest (as of 2009.03.16) version (4.0.3 v865) of iVideo.

I did not understand the high rating this application has but I noticed that most of the reviews are very old, not for the current version

This looked like a good app when it was offered as a deal on MacUpdate but now I am on the verge of requesting a refund, deal or no deal.

I originally purchased this application to catalog my large video library. I was not aware of any "Mac" like applications for this purpose in the past. I was pleasantly surprised by the resemblance of the user interface to iPhoto. But that is where the resemblance stopped. None of the functions I tried worked in anyway expected at all.

At first, I let the application search for all video files automatically as sugested by the application. After running a very long time, the application aborted. When I relaunched, it had found some files including many clips which I do ont consider movies. So I started over again by removing the app and the library.

I set preferences is to keep the movies where they are and chose to find movies by myself. I selected VLC to be the default player.

Importing movies file by file takes an extraordinary long time,about 40 minutes for 20 movies. Remember, it is only finding movies and cataloging them, not importing or re-encoding. Worse, during this time, the application shows as not responding with a spinning wheel so I could not stop importing as the button suggested I could. But I could tell progress was being made because the movie count and the movie name was advancing.

After the import, I clicked on a movie but it took 5-6 minutes before it started playing and the play was very choppy at best. I checked but it did not seem to be using VLC to play as I had selected in the preferences. Further more, it was using 110% CPU resources (I have quad core). Any time I click on the movie, it froze for an additional 2-3 minutes before pausing or continuing.

Ths was enough, this application is completely unusable and I have requested a refund.  
(Version 4.0.3)

CYMORROW  I bought this software based on my need for archiving my emails from Apple mail so that I could reduce the online size of my Apple mail. But after I paid for the license (very cheap) and set it up to use it, I found that the functionality I wanted was not there and the function that was there is already available in Time Machine (TM), hence I have no use for this software.

What Email Backup (EB) does is provide a timed automatic backup of your entire email. In doing this it merely replicates the same functionality that TM already provides. Even worse, with TM, I can do selective restores whereas EB does not, it can only restore the entire email DB to the point of time when the backup was taken. So this precludes any ability to archive (and remove) emails because if I restore from the backup, any new emails would disappear.

The developer explained that the purpose of EB was to provide a last resort backup. Well that is exactly what TM provides.

Each backup file created is a full backup, no incremental or differential backup capability is provided.

I tried in vain to think how I can use this for archiving purposes but any scheme I came up with wuld not work given the current functionality of EB.

The developer did say that they are thinking about providing an explorer type function to view the contents of the backup file. That and the ability to restore selected emails from the explorer view would be a great addition in my view. But in the mean time, I will remove the software from my system and rely on TM for the same functionality.

I rated the value as a 3 only because it was so cheap and got it at 40% off from Macupdate.  
(Version 2.0.3)