ITISTODAY  This browser is laughable.

It claims it's the fastest thing on the block, yet Safari smokes this thing, even in javascript performance on *_Google_ Maps*!

And both Safari and Firefox use less CPU when looking at a YouTube video.

In terms of performance, it's OK, but the marketing hype leads us to believe this things amazing when it's not, and in fact is slower and more resource intensive than the stuff that's already out there. So to the browser I give 3 stars = average.  
(Version 4.0.249.4)

ITISTODAY  Thanks for the fast 10.6.2 update! It's greatly appreciated!

This is excellent software, it's simply perfect in its utility and unobtrusiveness, and, apparently, the speed with which its developer updates it! :-)  
(Version 3.2.3)

ITISTODAY  I'm confused, are you outraged at VMware or your own inability to understand why someone could have a legitimate use for it?

I know I have a legitimate use for such technology: I sometimes need to be able to test and develop software for two different systems at the same time. The only way I can do that is by using virtualization (in my case, Parallels, though I'm sure VMware is great too).

I'm sure other people have other legitimate reasons for paying the $80. So please, chillax, if you don't have a use for it, that's great, but no need to flip out about it.  
(Version 3.0)

ITISTODAY  With this one piece of software I can do away with Logitech's drivers for my keyboard, and Microsoft's drivers for my mouse. Truly ironic and ridiculous how this independent developer can provide better quality software than those two giants--to their own products. All I can say is "thank you!"  
(Version 3.0.1)

ITISTODAY  This is almost perfect, the one problem is that it doesn't work with Spaces. :-(  
(Version 2.3)

ITISTODAY  I may have come down too harshly on NNW as I did not acknowledge that is does have a lot of great features, albeit most of them can be found in Vienna. One feature *not* found in Vienna though is Google Reader synching, and I especially like how they're working around GR's inability to handle nested folders through the use of dashes.

If the bugs are worked out I'll happily revise my review.  
(Version 3.2)

ITISTODAY  Tried to give it a chance, but when it can't handle something as basic as rearranging folders I gave up. I imported a bunch of feeds from Vienna (a *GREAT* RSS reader), it placed them into an "Imported" folder so I had to drag them out of it. After dragging 2 of folders out of the Imported folder it became impossible to drag the rest out without placing them into one of the other folders. I can't rearrange them because NNW forces me to place the folder into another one, not next to one, or above one, but into another one.

Hopefully they'll fix this major usability bug soon, but being blasted with advertisements while delivering this kind of quality (when better quality, ad-free alternatives like Vienna are around), leaves me to question whether it's worth switching at all. For now I'll stick with Vienna.  
(Version 3.2)

ITISTODAY  - Builtin tabbed web browser!

- Fast!

- Support for folders and nested folders!

- Email-like view to show article titles from either a feed, or a group of feeds!

- Open source!

- Smart folders!

- Easy flagging!

What's not to like?? This is the best news reader I've come across, bar none.  
(Version 2.3.4.2305)

ITISTODAY  Err... sorry, it's not beta currently, but maybe it should be labeled as such due to the number of bugs, whether or not it is 'technically' beta or not.  
(Version 1.0.2)

ITISTODAY  Actually a thought occurred to me, and that's that the Start menu could serve a useful shortcut location to various commonly used folders that could be customized by the user. Folders like "Documents" and "Pictures", etc. Normally mac users have to navigate through the Finder or search in Spotlight to access these folders (if they're smart they'll have them in the Dock). The Start menu could be used to provide even quicker access to these folders.

If done correctly, this could be very useful. A really well made implementation could go far, i.e. ability to drag and drop any item, etc. I would suggest moving away from RealBasic though as that could be limiting.

Anyway, I think I'm done here for now, best of luck to the developer with the app! Consider making it free maybe during the beta. ;-)  
(Version 1.0.2)

ITISTODAY  It's definitely improving. Now clicking on an app in the uBar seems equivalent to clicking on it in the Dock.

Oddly enough, although it does seem like the preference pane is compiled for 64-bit, it still causes System Preferences to relaunch and load in 32-bit mode. Why this happens I'm not sure, but I would advise the developer to test the app on Snow Leopard.

Still buggy: the app still checks for updates when the update check is turned off. I also noticed is that right-clicking on an app and adding it to the quicklaunch doesn't work.

I think this is a great opportunity to improve upon the Windows taskbar and create a Mac-specific task bar. So one feature idea would be to add a sorting option, so that the user can have the apps in the uBar sorted alphabetically or in a manual order. The reason for this is to pull in one of the Dock's strengths, and that is rote-memory, i.e. what's great about the Dock is that the positions of the applications are always the same, you don't have to spend time looking for where the app happened to launch.

There are also some things that could be taken away: there's no need for the time, that could be used to make room for more apps. The time is already displayed on every mac in the standard location in the menubar. The Start menu is another area that could use some thought as it reproduces many functionalities that are already easily accessible elsewhere. I.e. the shutdown/restart options are available in the Apple menu, and the applications are quickly and more easily accessed by searching for them in Spotlight. Then again, this may perhaps lend itself to simply allowing Windows users to remain in their comfort zone, and that might be an appealing feature for some users of this program.

I think the developer would be wise to ignore the hostility that he is sure to receive by making such a program, as there are many zealots out there who hate it on principle and do not seem to fathom that this software could have a legitimate purpose. While it's obviously useful for grandparents who grew up on windows, it also has some appealing notions to someone like me, who has been raised on Macs his entire life. I for one always have the Dock set to hide because it takes up so much screen real estate. Sure, I could shrink it down to the size of uBar, but then it would be almost laughably useless as the icons would be too small to serve any value.

Kudos to the developer, you're thinking different. ;-)  
(Version 1.0.2)

ITISTODAY  Oh man this is awesome! Very fun to play with. I'm not making any games right now but I can see how this would be incredibly useful. Thanks for making it!  
(Version 0.1.5)

ITISTODAY  Please read my comment again, iStat isn't supposed to be doing *anything* in that situation. When it's not giving you any information, it should be idle at 0%.

Top, yes, does take 4% by default, but when you run it it's *doing something*.

Top also doesn't have to take 4%. This top command will run at 1.2%, and it's grabbing a whole lot of information:

top -ocpu -R -F -s 2 -n30

They could improve performance by fetching only the information that's being displayed at the moment.  
(Version 2.0)

ITISTODAY  +1 for the responsiveness. :-)

I took a look at the hiding issue again and it does bring the application and its document to the front (yes, on SL). But it doesn't reproduce the behavior of a Dock-click. I.e. try with TextEdit. Close all TextEdit documents, and then click on it in the Dock, it will cause a new document to be created, but not when you do the same thing with uBar.

Looking forward to the next release!  
(Version 1.0.1)

ITISTODAY  Yay! I'm happy to see Spaces support, and the new transparent look is quite nice, and the window support! :-)

However, "beta", as COUNTPOLLEN mentioned, might be a better designation for this software. On first launch I immediately got "an exception of class NilObjectException was not handled. The application must shut down."

Turning off the status bar and back on didn't fix it, I had to quit and re-run System Preferences.

Another issue is that it's not 64-bit, and because of that System Preferences must quit and relaunch, which is can be annoying.

Also, while "Automatically check on startup" is unchecked by default, it still checks for updates, toggling it and relaunching doesn't seem to help.

There's also a new feature to immediately hide all but the current application, but it doesn't toggle (i.e. clicking it again doesn't unhide all of your apps, you have to manually click on each one of them). Speaking of hiding, that still seems to be the only thing it does when you click on an app, it doesn't bring it to the front. This can be done with an apple script (tell application "name" activate end tell).

So, neat improvements, but needs a whole lot more work! Still interesting though, and am happy to see it developing so fast.  
(Version 1.0.1)

ITISTODAY  Running the Snow Leopard build, and while I'd love to love this app because of its beautiful UI, pretty graphs, and lists of the top 5 memory/CPU users (etc.), I can't because it has one cardinal sin: it hogs too much CPU. A stat viewer app should be super efficient since it runs in the background all the time. This one idles between 0.9-1.7% CPU usage when it shouldn't be doing anything (no displays are up). MenuMeters seems to be more efficient, so I'm going to stick with that for now.

As the SL build is beta ATM, I won't give this a rating yet, otherwise I'd take off 2 stars for that.  
(Version 1.3)

ITISTODAY  Works great! I've got it running on 10.6 and haven't had any problems with it so far, it does exactly what it says and it does it well. Thanks for this fine piece of *free* software!  
(Version 3.2.1)

ITISTODAY  I'm happy to see Snow Leopard compatibility!

But what happened to the display? There no longer seems to be an option to disable anti-aliasing and so they look blurry now, please bring this back. Also the thermometer seems to be different, fatter and not as tall as it was...  
(Version 1.4b1)

ITISTODAY  Wow.... This is indeed interesting. I personally would never use this but I'm happy to see someone's giving this a shot.

I won't review this right now since it's the first version (if I was I'd give it 3 stars). There are several problems that I noticed in the first minute of use:

- The check for updates cannot be disabled as it can in most mac apps.

- Does not support Spaces (this is a significant problem).

- Instead of bringing apps to the front it hides/unhides them. This means that unlike the Dock, apps will not bring up their main window when you click on them in the task bar.

- Doesn't show the windows that belong to an app (i.e. when you right-click)

To be honest, this doesn't even reproduce the behavior of the task bar either. It's really a sort-of broken Dock at the moment, but I'll continue to keep an eye on this to see how it develops.  
(Version 1.0)

ITISTODAY  While the UI is pretty good (not great, it can be a bit confusing and non-inuitive, it took me about a minute to figure out how to post a tweet, "Oh, it's that tiny camouflaged button in the lower-left!), the fact that it doesn't support authentication for URL shorteners makes it unusable for me.  
(Version 1.2.2)

ITISTODAY  Woah, I just noticed a problem, this doesn't work with Spaces. It should show on all spaces but it doesn't.

Also, how do we download the source? The website says it's open source but I couldn't find a link on sourceforge for it.  
(Version 0.7)

ITISTODAY  Great job! Just one request: Can you make it so that "Stay On Top" places the tool above the menubar?  
(Version 0.7)

ITISTODAY  * err, "problem" should read "program".  
(Version 3.0rc5)

ITISTODAY  While I'm happy to see this is finally being updated, there are still several problems, and one of them is quite unforgivable:

- GeekTool is currently taking up 200MB of RAM. This is unacceptable and makes it unusable for me. Such a small problem should not take up so much RAM. NerdTool by comparison takes up only 16.6MB (that could probably be improved too, but it's certainly better than 200).

- You can't put a drop shadow on the text from a shell script.

- You can't customize terminal colors as you can with NerdTool. I.e. I don't like what it picks for the default green, it'd be nice if that was something I could change.

- There's no way to change advanced text output like line spacing.

On the plus side though, unlike NerdTool, you when it says "stay on top", your tools will stay above the menubar which is very useful for doing stuff like replacing MenuMeters.  
(Version 3.0rc5)

ITISTODAY  This is one of my favorite games to kick back with. Love the concept!  
(Version 1.2)

ITISTODAY  I've only tried two of the major GTD apps for OS X, Things and THL. IMO, THL blows Things out of the water in several respects:

== Intelligent Design and Features ==

- I absolutely love the way it presents and handles setting due times for tasks. It has a clear place for the start time, and a place for the due time. These can be quickly adjusted via keyboard shortcuts. Instead of 4 different meta projects (Today, Next, Scheduled, Someday), it only has 2, and that's all that you need, any more and you've got confusion (should I put it in Next? Create a project for it? An "Area"?). THL has "Today", and "Upcoming", what a concept, and you can't create tasks in those areas, leaving no confusion as to where tasks should go.

- Almost everything has a keyboard shortcut, so you end up using the mouse very little to create tasks, set due dates, or even navigate between different lists. This allows you to focus on getting the task out there, the application itself kinda disappears, out of your way.

- The "one up" view that lets you focus on just a single task.

- A task timer! A beautiful one at that! (Request: It should hover over all spaces, or there should be an option).

- Smart Folders, these are just great, and Things doesn't have them.

- Nested folders, and even nested tasks. Great!

== Support ==

- Unlike CC, I actually got a response to my feature requests.

== Why not 5 stars? ==

First, the price. I don't care if Things/OmniFocus are "doing it too", $70 for this program is far too much, that's only $20 off from Parallels, does the developmental effort even compare between those two apps? Even $50 for the beta is too much.

I would never have bought it (and don't recommend it) for this amount of money, the only reason I got it is because of the MacHeist bundle, and had I tried it before that I still don't think this is worth the price, and judging by the comments below, it seems like many people feel the same way. I think the developer has a chance to blow past the competition if they were to lower the price significantly.

Second, there are a couple small issues, a few related to the way THL handles tags, and also the inability to use tag filters to filter for this tag OR another tag (as opposed to this tag AND another tag).

The frequent updates are greatly appreciated, I look forward to how this app evolves, and I hope the devs listen to the community and consider lowering the price.  
(Version 0.9.3.12)

ITISTODAY  I love innovative ideas like this, but what results is that each tab is a process that on average takes around 39MB of RAM. If I were to use this browser as I use Firefox, with 4 windows open, each with about 8 tabs, I'd be out over a gig of RAM, where Firefox manages to keep the memory usage below 300MB, with more features and several plugins installed.  
(Version 0.6)

ITISTODAY  Very good application. The reason I'm not giving it 5 stars is because there are several areas that need improvement:

- The English text could be better. I.e. what does "Number of items place inline" mean?

- Changing any preference seems to require a restart of the application to take effect. This is annoying.

- Could probably be easier to quickly access the items in the menu...

The last one isn't as crucial, but if the first two are fixed than this would be a 5 star application for delivering a high degree of quality for the price.  
(Version 0.3.3)

ITISTODAY  One of the most visually stunning and pleasing screensavers I've ever seen.  
(Version 1.1.1)