JIM_T_3  I finally actually did get off of my butt and add in a pretty long and involved introduction/tutorial to the application. It shows off most of the features, how to do many things, and demonstrates the utility.  
(Version 3.0)

JIM_T_3  I try not to reply to comments like this, but every so often I feel like I must chime in.

First of all, there are two types of debt out there. There's the debt you acquire by being reckless and living beyond your means. Rack up your credit cards buying crap you can't afford and you'll be in trouble.

But there's also debt you acquire by living life. Buying a car? Probably need a car loan. A house? Almost definitely need a mortgage. College? Probably have student loans.

What happens if you have a disaster? Car wreck? Medical bills? Your son is born with a birth defect and requires extensive care and treatment?

Sure, everybody should have saved up thousands upon thousands of dollars to pay cash for their house and cover any medical bills that arise without issue, but here in the real world, that's not always the case.

Regardless, whether your debt is due to your own reckless spending or not, what's wrong with taking some responsibility for yourself and paying it down? Properly managing your money can save you tens of thousands of dollars in interest payments.

Of course, you'll need to keep yourself under control. If you keep running up your credit cards, you're going to be in trouble no matter what. But if you've stopped doing that and want to get things under control, it's not like the debt magically goes away once it's been created. Don't use your credit cards? That's great advice. Tell someone that has no debt. Once you've got it, though, it's extremely hard to get out.

But blanket statements like saying that people just shouldn't use their credit cards and their debt magically vanishes is juvenile and counter productive.

Props to you if you have no debt to manage and no money in interest payments to save. For the rest of us? Leave the software tools alone and let people get on with their lives.  
(Version 2.5.1)

JIM_T_3  Props to this guy. I've been using this program for months. I can't stand going to the online TV listing sites since most of them are overly fancy by this point. Back when it was just HTML it was okay. Now? They suck. Plus I frequently need to reset my location since that gets trashed for some reason.

I also don't use Dashboard and never found a good widget anyway. yes, yes, there are widgets. None I liked.

This program I like. It launches fast, it displays what I want to see, it's stable, and it works well. It's no frills, but it's TV listings. I want no frills.

And the fact that he stepped up and rewrote the thing to use a different service after zap2it discontinued their free service was top notch. I'm sure many other people would've just killed the app in some sort of silly protest about information being free. But this is the real world, and I still need my TV.

$15 every three months ain't great (but, again it's paying to the service, not the programmer), but it also isn't the end of the world. I'm sure if a viable free service shows up again that he'd consider rewriting to support that one instead.

This guy deserves support for keeping things going after zap2it split. It's a good app, to boot.  
(Version 0.55)

JIM_T_3  There's a little bit of confusion about the registration numbers - you have to type in your name into Debtinator the same way you typed it in when you registered (firstname, lastname), or it won't accept it. Unfortunately, macupdate doesn't appear to include that name when it sends out the email. If anybody has any problems with their numbers, please contact me (links provided in software and on bassetsoftware.com) and I'll help out supplying the appropriate name.  
(Version 2.1.4)

JIM_T_3  I think this reply is kinda missing the point.

You're already saying that you have a mortgage and a car payment. That's two debts right there.

Are you paying them down in the most efficient fashion possible? Namely, are you putting every spare cent you have towards paying them off? Which one are you paying off first?

What about when one's paid off? Then what are you doing with the money that was going to it?

Do you have any other debts? How do those factor in? What's the most efficient way to pay 'em off?

Do any of the interest rates vary? When? By how much? How does that factor into a payment schedule?

The program's designed to help you find every spare cent you have. "Spare cent" meaning "unallocated". So if you don't want to pay for cable television, broadband internet, dinner out every other night, and so on, then don't do it. But where's that money going instead? I mean, you may have a budget where you earn $X per month and spend exactly the same $X per month, and that's cool. But most people don't track to that extreme a level. They get mostly close enough.

If you're already tracking where every single penny you have goes, then bully for you, and you've forecasted out tracking every single penny until all of your debts are paid off, so you know where everything's going and when everything'll be paid off, then bully for you. You're right, you don't need it.

But I'm willing to bet that most people are more like me. Me? Sure, I have debt. Mortgage, 2 car payments, a credit card with a small balance from an emergency a while back. All very small, very low interest rates. So all these posts here telling me that I should get lower rates or only pay for the essentials, well, I'm already doing it.

I'm still saving a fortune by tracking how I'm paying everything.

Telling people to not acquire debt or to only acquire small amounts with small interest rates is _not_ the entire solution. It's part of it (a big part!) but the rest of it is better planning with what you have.

The program helps with the better planning.  
(Version 2.1.3)

JIM_T_3  Actually, maximum payments aren't required to keep you from going bankrupt, the program's smart enough to pay as much as it can, but never so much that it can't cover the future.

If you set a maximum payment of $500, but can actually affor $600 w/o going bankrupt, the app will still only send $500 and keep that extra $100 in the bank.

If you can only afford $400 in a month, it'll only send $400, regardless of the max.

I put in the maximum payments option for cases where you have a debt in the middle of a reporting option that you want to "skip over".

For instance, your mortgage may have the 3rd highest interest rate of your debts, but you don't want to overpay on it ever, figuring that your money is better invested elsewhere. So you can set a maximum payment on the mortgage and then it'll get skipped over when a report is determining who to overpay. That way, you can run any report you want and it won't be overpaid.

But to keep you from going bust? Maximum payments aren't necessary in that case.  
(Version 2.1.2)

JIM_T_3  Excellent suggestion. That'll be in 2.1.1, at least support for using the currency specified in the International control panel.

Dates are still going to be formatted in US m/d/y style, since that's going to take a bit more twiddling, but I'll do my best to add it into a future release.  
(Version 2.1)

JIM_T_3  I didn't have any crashes on my powerbook w/10.4.9.

But, it is...weird. Some documentation would help immensely. The object appears to be to move the cursor around, which causes a small cluster of balls to follow you. You use that cluster of balls to knock smaller balls into larger balls. They get stuck together, explode (for some reason), and then you advance to the next level.

I only got that far by getting lucky, and I almost gave up before getting that far. Again, no docs that I could see.

It's more like a surrealist or expressionist concept of a game, than an actual game.

The control needs work, and some documentation would be nice. But the music is very soothing and it looks reasonably pretty.  
(Version .04)

JIM_T_3  Truly an awesome game. I downloaded it about two weeks ago when I was feeling an urge for some 2d adventure. This thing delivered in spades - and I registered it after a few hours.

The thing is huge. 8 different mansions with 3 different difficulty levels. This effectively translates into 24 mansions, since they're all different. It's not one of those games where the "hard" setting is the same level all over again but with an extra enemy. You can tell that you're in the same mansion and things are sort of where they used to be, but the rooms are all slightly different and slightly tougher than they used to be.

I'm a little less than halfway through. It's hard, but not frustratingly impossible (usually).

A lot of love and care went into this game. I highly recommend it.  
(Version 1.0.3)

JIM THOMASON  I'm reasonable. Feature requests are reasonable. I'd certainly be interested in spicing up the game a bit. So suggestions are welcome. Have any?  
(Version 1.0)

JIM THOMASON  Using Yahoo Mailer in Tiger is difficult, since Apple now has an account wizard in Mail.app. You can't even get into Apple Mail anymore without configuring an account. So it's hard to set the default reader this way.

This is certainly one of Apple's dumber decisions. Moving it out of System Preferences was bad enough, but then adding that Wizard to Apple Mail is just lousy.

Solution is pretty easy, just download a nifty program called More Internet

It's a preference pane (shows up in system preferences) that allows you to configure the applications used for various protocols. Just scroll down to mailto and choose Yahoo! Mailer and you should be all set.  
(Version 1.0.1)

JIM THOMASON  Actually, please note that Globe Trotter is a 100% new program that happens to do the same thing as an older program of mine, called jSearch.

Functionality is similar, but the product itself is brand spanking new. It even has a different icon.

MacUpdate for some reason insists upon merging the Globe Trotter listing in with the older jSearch one.  
(Version 1.0)

JIM THOMASON  Guys, anonymous notes on macupdate about how the program doesn't work and you don't like it and everything's broken are utterly useless.

The program does work (at least on the 4 various macs I've tried, and the registered users are presumably happy with it), so usage problems are simply that - usage problems. Not software.

Yet, I'm at a loss to be able to make suggestions to these anonymous users as to what to do, or find out what they've tried, or offer anything to tell them what to do, since no one's bothering to let me know what their problems are.

I'm not going to post generic "do this, do that" instructions, since I've done it before (I believe they're still in the description), they're included in the read me, and there are extensive walkthroughs and usage tips in the built in help.

If something's lacking, I'm happy to extend the documentation to make things clearer, but until I know what attempts to understand (if any) a user has taken and what it is they don't understand, I'm at a loss.  
(Version 1.3)

JIM THOMASON  As the Read Me, help system, website, etc. all say, the program is 100% background and accessed 100% via hotkey.

To bring up the Text Bucket Window, press command-option-control-T (unless you changed it, in which case press whatever you changed it to). That will bring up the Text Bucket window and allow you to use it.

If you still have trouble and can't figure it out, then press the "help" button on the lower part of the window to bring up the help screens to talk you through basic usage.

To quit the program, simply press the "quit" button. Due to how apple's force quit menu works, it's the only way to get out of it other than going through the terminal and killing the process.

You may rest assured, there is nothing sinister about it. Just read the included documentation and help, and you'll be fine.  
(Version 1.2)

JIM THOMASON  In case anyone was wanting to use this with Google's gmail, simply launch the program and set this to be the URL:

https://gmail.google.com/gmail?view=cm&cmid=0&fs=1&tearoff=1&to=%@  
(Version 1.0.1)

JIM THOMASON  Definite potential. This is extremely similar to something I've been meaning to write.

Two points:

1) This program is insecure on multi-user systems. It fetches the email by executing a command line program called 'curl'. It passes to curl the user's yahoo username and password in cleartext. If a second user is logged into the machine when mail is being fetched, this could be exploited to gain the user's email password. So only use it on a secure machine when you're the only one logged in.

2) Is there contact information for the developer anywhere? I can't seem to find any.  
(Version 0.1)

JIM THOMASON  If you have any problems with no search sites showing up, please delete your preferences file. Quit jSearch, then go to your home directory, then Library, then Preferences and delete com.thomason.jsearch.plist. Then re-launch the program and you'll be fine.

Also, please note that the initial software launch can take a few moments as it is trying to cache the favicons from the various search sites. Depending upon the speed of your connection, this may take a while. Subsequent launches will be instantaneous, since it will have the icons cached.  
(Version 1.0.4)

JIM THOMASON  Now that's peculiar, since 1.0.4 was checked on 3 machines before its release. For the future - please email me directly if there are bugs or whatnot and I'll happily help to address them, but without further details, I may be stumped right now.  
(Version 1.0.4)

JIM THOMASON  A new, properly compiled, version of jSearch 1.0.3 is now available. It should run without any problems.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience or hassles this may have caused.  
(Version 1.0.3)

JIM THOMASON  Sorry, guys, minor compilation bug. It'll be fixed a little later today.  
(Version 1.0.3)