KBALLARD  I just started using this to wake me up in time for class, and it hasn't failed yet. It works very well and always wakes me up. Thank you!  
(Version 2.3.6)

KBALLARD  Unfortunately, I can't exactly comment on what features will show up in future versions of Yahoo! Messenger.

As for the drop down, the problem is if we put every single used name into the dropdown, that list could very quickly fill up with typos and once-off names (e.g. a friend comes over, wants to log in), and there'd be no way to remove them. And adding a preference to remove items from the list would be a fairly ugly way to solve the problem.

Basically, if you use a name regularly, you should probably go ahead and tell it to save the password. You don't have to worry about security, the app actually saves a separate set of login credentials, not your raw password, and if anyone ever manages to steal your saved login credentials they'll only gain acccess to Messenger (and probably Address Book) and all you have to do is change your password and said credentials will become invalidated. It's a pretty secure system.  
(Version 3.0b1)

KBALLARD  Is it fair to negatively rate the Messenger application because of completely separate Yahoo! properties? Yes, it's more powerful when you use multiple different Yahoo! properties in conjunction, but your rating here is specifically for Messenger, not for Yahoo! as a whole. And besides, if Yahoo! didn't give you advertising, how could they make money? Yahoo! isn't a charity, it's a business. Be thankful you get all the capability you do without having to pay, all because of the ads.  
(Version 3.0b1)

KBALLARD  The webcam view is of course slower than iChat. That's because iChat has actual video streaming, whereas Yahoo! has actual webcam. This means while iChat's video will be a lot smoother with higher fps, it's a 1-to-1 situation and requires a P2P connection. Yahoo!, while slower, lets you broadcast to many different people at once, and works even when you can't establish a P2P connection with your viewers. It's a bit of a different paradigm, and each have their strengths and weaknesses.  
(Version 3.0b1)

KBALLARD  Please, if you're having problems, send bug reports to the feedback email accessible from the Help menu. And remember, this is just public beta 1. That means things like, for example, archiving aren't implemented yet. Oh, and webcam should work perfectly fine between pretty much any Yahoo! Messenger client except for the old 2.5.3 (since the webcam support in 2.5.3 is broken).  
(Version 3.0b1)

KBALLARD  This text was shown at launch. Perhaps you breezed by that window without paying attention?  
(Version 3.0b1)

KBALLARD  The lack of archiving is known, but the other two issues should work perfectly fine. If you select save your password, it remembers your name in the dropdown and your login credentials for future use. If you don't select save your password, it doesn't remember your name or login credentials. Perhaps that's why the dropdown doesn't work for you? If you never tell it to save your password, it won't save the login names (after all, you generally want to save your own password but not, say, your friend's, and you don't need your friend's name in your dropdown).  
(Version 3.0b1)

KBALLARD  Did you check the box that says to use the desktop decoration on new desktops? And did you Merge/Replace it onto your existing ones?  
(Version 0.52r155)

KBALLARD  Virtue shouldn't be able to cause a problem like that.  
(Version 0.52r155)

KBALLARD  The "preview" window is actually the broadcast window, and it's showing you the speed at which it's sending out frames. Of course, if nobody's viewing, it's not actually sending frames, but it's still capturing them at the same rate, so if anybody views it won't get any slower. However, it could in fact get faster - if you have 1 person viewing and you can establish a P2P connection with them, you go into what's called "super" mode and it sends frames as fast as it can, which bumps the fps quite a bit.  
(Version 3.0b1)

KBALLARD  Are you serious? This is a 100% complete re-write from the ground up in Cocoa, and it's a Beta. And yet you give a ridiculous rating simply because it's lacking a single feature.

Besides, Yahoo! Messenger for Mac doesn't have any built-in advertising, so no, Yahoo isn't throwing advertising at you (in this medium).

Please, grow up.  
(Version 3.0b1)

KBALLARD  Does this version actually work properly? last version I used never bothered clearing the existing list of bookmarks before displaying new ones, so it just piled up duplicates. I had to fix it myself in the source.  
(Version 1.1)

KBALLARD  Doesn't seem to work properly on an intel iMac. I hope a universal version is released soon.  
(Version 1.50b1)

KBALLARD  Wow, this is completely useless. Not only is it a manual process to detect these two pieces of malware, it's also something that you can already detect by simply *getting info* on the file! Plus the vulnerability has already been fixed.

Sheesh.  
(Version 1.0)

KBALLARD  Uhh, you are aware that Macaroni has only existed for 3.5 years, yes?

Also, you didn't in fact rate it 5 stars. You just said you did.  
(Version 2.0.7b4)

KBALLARD  That review you linked is so laughable I'm not even going to try to refute its "points". Instead I'll address your specific issues.

1) What do you mean, no full unicode support? Please define full unicode support for me. TM reads/saves as UTF-8 out of the box and can read/save UTF-16 as well. What else do you want?

2) Built-in S/FTP integration. That's actually, IIRC, slated for the next TextMate release. But for now I highly suggest going to panic.com, downloading Transmit, and using that instead. That supports TextMate as an external editor.

3) TM's HTML bundle has Tidy commands. If they don't do what you want it's literally trivial to edit the commands to use the switches you do want.

4) Offline XHTML syntax checker, that's a kinda tall order. Most people probably would not appreciate the bulk that would bring. If you really want it, I suggest installing one - IIRc darwinports has one called opensp. You should be able to install it, then whip up your own TextMate command to call it in a couple minutes. It's really very easy.

And I think web developers really are something of a target audience. I think Ruby developers are more of a target audience, but TextMate does have a lot to support web development. I certainly wouldn't want to use anything else (no WYSIWYG editors for me, please).  
(Version 1.5)

KBALLARD  Wow, what a completely useless, redundant, and lying piece of software.

There's so many "apps" that do this already, it's not funny.

Plus the description is completely wrong. In no way does this speed up your computer. All it does is disable functionality that does nothing if you're not using it anyway. Yes, Dashboard uses RAM, but only if you have widgets open. If you close all the widgets, no RAM will be taken, nor any CPU, or any other resources. And you can drag the silly Dashboard icon out of your Dock to make it disappear. And you can forget about Dashboard and it will have exactly the same effect as this, but with less work and with the possibility of actually *using* Dashboard if you decide the couple MB of RAM it takes isn't a hard price to pay (the amount of RAM a widget takes really isn't very much at all).

So to sum it up, just ignore this app and drag the Dashboard icon out of your Dock instead. Maybe open Dashboard and close any open widgets as well (although they won't take RAM until the first time you open Dashboard after a system restart anyhow).  
(Version 1.0)

KBALLARD  You can probably use the `pax` tool from the command-line to achieve the same results, but the point of this software is it makes it far easier, especially for non-technical users. If I actually used it routinely I'd probably pay the shareware fee (I've only ever used it once, but I recommend it to other people).  
(Version 1.6.3)

KEVIN BALLARD  I would encourage people to take a look at Smart Crash Reports . This seems to be similar to SCR except on a per-app basis and not as powerful.  
(Version 1.2.3)

KEVIN BALLARD  Mr. X - perhaps your external drives are slow, or fragmented, or something?

I have >200GB of music on iTunes on an 800mhz machine, which is then accessed over the LAN with iTunes music sharing to an old 400mhz G3 laptop, and even over music sharing that thing plays the music quickly and easily.  
(Version 6.0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  This sounds like a really useful widget, except it requires Indigo to exist on the local computer. I want to see a widget that lets me give it the hostname of another computer on my LAN and access Indigo across the LAN. Basically, I want to be able to control my room lights from my laptop with Indigo running on the server in my basement.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  I agree that you should be submitting crash reports instead of ignoring them (ideally you should install Smart Crash Reports so any apps that support it can get your crash reports directly). However, an alternative solution to this app (that doesn't require using the Terminal as was suggested before) is if you have Developer Tools installed, go to /Developer/Applications/Utilities/CrashReporterPrefs.app and turn on Server mode.  
(Version 1.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  The explanation here isn't matching the issues I'm having with lookupd. Twice now I've had Safari simply stop being able to load web pages. No apps hang, just Safari is sitting there trying to contact the site and never going anywhere. When I unplug my ethernet cable I suddenly get a crash reporter dialog for lookupd, and plugging back in my ethernet cable allows Safari to function once again.

Will this program help with this issue, or is this something completely unrelated?  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Ok, so you just started developing the program, and you're new at Cocoa itself. So why bother posting it? There's really no point in sending it out to the world until you actually have something to show for yourself - i.e. a browser that can actually be used well, or a new feature that the other browsers don't have. Something, anything. Not a pre-beta wrapper around WebKit.  
(Version 0.1.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  I'd just like to mention that rating everything 1 star because of a simple bug (regardless of the magnitude of the bug) is a terrible way to behave.  
(Version 1.0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  I have a dual-1Ghz (with a brand spanking new ATI Radeon 9800 Pro) with 1.5GB of RAM and it starts up for me. I haven't played it yet (because I have 1.0.0 installed and it told me 1.0.1 was available, so I'm dl'ing it now), but it does start for me.  
(Version 1.0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Why is this showing up in the OS X section despite Realmz (sadly) being OS 9 (and below) only?  
(Version 8.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Maybe you're encoding Using H.264? If that's the case, of course it's going to be extremely slow.  
(Version 2.1.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  Sure, David has a highly abrasive personality and doesn't know how to interact with people, but he *does* read his mail. I know, because when I submitted a bug report and made a slightly negative comment about his tendency to react poorly to any criticism, he replied saying he wasn't going to help me with my problem because of my comment. So while that certainly wasn't a good customer experience (rest assured I followed up with a long email explaining why his behaviour pisses off so many people, although I fully expect he stopped reading after the first paragraph), it did assure me that he does read his email.

And even though his behaviour is so poor, I still don't regret registering Acquisition, because it's such a great program. He may have terrible social interaction skills, but he is a skilled UI programmer.  
(Version 121.4)

KEVIN BALLARD  Because the "free steak" is extremely slow and ugly, while the "McDonalds hamburger" is very pretty, has a far more usable and faster UI, and works just as well in terms of actually downloading files (because it uses limewire internally).

My question for you is, what justification do you have for raking a product so low simply because you disagree with the author charging money for all the work he put into it? Do you refuse to pay for Mac OS X (and lambast it publicly) because it's built in top of open-source components as well?  
(Version 121.4)

KEVIN BALLARD  Oh really? A CSS file can hardly equal the power of this. All a CSS file can do is hide images that match certain URLs, or maybe sizes if the size is declared. It can't block the URLs, which is the main feature of PithHelmet (block meaning the URL is never loaded, meaning it doesn't slow down the page load and suck up bandwidth and the like). It also can't configure all the other myriad options on a per-site basis - for example, on some sites I don't want to block anything, on another site I want to change how my cookies are handled.

But regardless, even if a CSS file does all you need it to do, that's no reason to rate this product 2 stars. Should I go rate a 3D modeler app 2 stars because I don't need to do any 3D modeling? No. And it's the same thing here.  
(Version 2.6)

KEVIN BALLARD  Oookay, so you're blasting Flash and rating it 1 star just because advertisers use flash in ads? I think your anger is misplaced - Macromedia isn't responsible for advertisers using Flash to annoy you.  
(Version 8.0beta)

KEVIN BALLARD  Wait a second - you're accusing Macromedia of peddling spyware just because you're *assuming* it's sending back info, without even checking?

Sheesh.  
(Version 8.0beta)

KEVIN BALLARD  I would suggest just dragging the Dashboard icon out of the Dock.  
(Version 1.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Warning: this build of Bonjour Browser does not appear to actually run on Jaguar. I'm still investigating why this is so. But until I figure out what's going on, if you're using Jaguar, don't upgrade yet.  
(Version 1.5.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  I'd love to add that feature, but unfortunately it's impossible. It would require resolving every single service as I find it, which would put a massive load on the network and would also fail to update the services if the host ever changes.  
(Version 1.5.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  The other half is that spotlight is for searching for all the files that contain what you're looking for, whereas QS is for quickly accessing and manipulating bits of information that you already know what they are. Spotlight lets you find where it is, QS lets you do stuff with it. If I wanted to find all the iChat transcripts that mention my friend's birthday, I'll use spotlight. However, if I want to launch iChat, I'll use Quicksilver. If I want to find a document that mentions the preparations for my friend's surprise party, I'll use Spotlight. If I want to send that document to 3 other friends via email, I'll use Quicksilver.

See how it works?  
(Version 1.0b42)

KEVIN BALLARD  Yeah. Go to the plugins preference pane in QS and download the other interfaces you want.  
(Version 1.0b42)

KEVIN BALLARD  Let me get this straight. You're rating QS badly because you happen to prefer an (inferior) alternative? Sheesh.  
(Version 1.0b42)

KEVIN BALLARD  Erm, did you actually download the icon set? It's there, it's just not shown in the screenshot.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Erm, what's new in this? A 2.0 release is a major release, so you'd think there would at least be release notes on their website?

Anyway, last time I tried Konfabulator, it sucked: it was a CPU hog all of the time (even with no widgets running), definitely a RAM hog, and I never found a single widget worth keeping Konfabulator open for. Dashboard, on the other hand, is very resource-friendly, takes no CPU when not showing (even though the widgets are still open), and has plenty of useful widgets, AND comes with every copy of Tiger. In other words, what possible reason is there for me to use Konfabulator?  
(Version 2.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  I'd just like to point out that this name is extremely close to an Extra that comes with Growl itself called GrowlSafari (which adds Growl notifications to Safari downloads).  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  I'm sorry, but by requiring me to sign up for a free newsletter in order to play this game, I'm never even going to *look* at this game. I don't need more spam, especially in return for trying out what's probably just another mediocre game.  
(Version 2.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  The built-in DVD player is quite decent. If you're really having trouble with it, I would suggest that something is wrong with either your system or your hardware and you should have it fixed.  
(Version 4.6)

KEVIN BALLARD  The only room I can see that you can go in doesn't do anything except, when you pull a handle, bring up an empty scroll, wait 10 seconds, and go back to the title screen. I don't see anywhere else to go.

And what's worse, this game doesn't properly acquire the screen when it changes resolutions, so it shoves all of my other windows out of the way and resizes them. This is absolutely HORRIBLE behaviour in any application, something that in my book gets the application tossed in the trash immediately.

Please fix this! I want to play Dark Castle, it's game that I played many years ago and loved, but I can't when there's nowhere to go and the game itself doesn't play nice with the system.  
(Version 0.9b12)

KEVIN BALLARD  PSPWare is excellent! It makes it a snap to sync movies, music, and pictures to my PSP. I'm especially impressed by the auto-recoding of movies to sync. Great job!  
(Version 2.0.9)

KEVIN BALLARD  I just launched 118.2 for the first time and it updated core components just fine.  
(Version 118.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  I've never had this issue. I registered the day Acquisition went shareware and have never regretted it.  
(Version 118.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  Have you *tried* the 2.0 public beta of NNW? By far the best newsreader anywhere.  
(Version 1.1v32)

KEVIN BALLARD  butt-ugly? Please, go try out NetNewsWire 2.0 Lite Public Beta. It is far better than NewsFire (and the full version is even better).  
(Version 1.1v32)

KEVIN BALLARD  Ok, so you're blaming the update because Word was broken due to a problem in Word's preference files?

Sheesh  
(Version 2005-004)

KEVIN BALLARD  Interesting game. The concept reminds me of a flash game I played a while back - I forget the name. The game itself is enjoyable. A bunch of levels (I played up to level 10), each one you try to grow by eating smaller fish while avoiding the bigger ones that can hurt or kill you.

The biggest (and only real) problem I had with it was mouse control was completely broken. I don't know if it works in fullscren mode, but at least in window mode, touching the mouse to move it in any direction sent my fish speeding straight left. I had to use the keyboard. I didn't mind, though - keyboard controls are good.

The music was appropriate, although it started to get old (not much variation there). The graphics are decent, keyboard controls are fine, and there seems to be a reasonable amount of play value. However, I think the $19.95 price tag is too high for this game. Were I to be spending money on games (currently I can't afford that), $9.95 would be more than fair for this game, perhaps $12.95, *possibly* even $14.95, but no higher. Had I any influence, I'd suggest $12.95 being the sweet spot for this game.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Yes, that's me, and yes, Rendezvous Browser phones home. Maybe if you opened up the Preferences window you'd notice a checkbox there to enable version checking? That's what it's doing. It's a fairly common practice. I send no information back to my computer - it's simply an HTTP GET request.

Oh, and that blip about SSHKeychain? I'm involved in the development of it because I liked it so much that I started hacking on it (since it's open-source) and contributed patches.

But what does that have to do with anything? The entire point of my original comment was that the interface for SSHFun is godawful ugly.  
(Version 0.3)

KEVIN BALLARD  Right, SSHFUn is an application to tunnel two specific services over SSH. I'm perfectly happy doing that myself instead of downloading and using this eyesore.  
(Version 0.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  Saves a bunch of time? There's only 3 places in the project that the name exists (not counting the project file itself). It takes all of 10 seconds for me to rename a project file. Of course, if you want to rename the precompiled header too, that takes, oh, another 10 seconds. So 20 seconds total.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Oh geeze, talk about a non-standard HIG. That screenshot alone makes me never want to use this application (not counting the fact that it's ASS or that I'm perfectly happy doing my SSH tunneling on the command-line or with SSHKeychain)  
(Version 0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  This game is pretty sweet. Unfortunately, my regular computer is too under-powered to play it, so I can only play it when my father's dual 2Ghz G5 is free.  
(Version 1.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Wow, `ftp` in the command-line does my FTP'ing needs for FREE! as well! And `sftp` does my SFTP'ing needs fore FREE! also, unlike OneButtonFTP.

However, I still bought Transmit, because I think it's a great app.  
(Version 0.0.3)

KEVIN BALLARD  All the important fields? You do know you can edit the template address book card for Address Book (the template card being all the fields that are visible by default)  
(Version 1.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Takes forever to download. I clicked download, after a minute it started downloading, but when the time hit 20 minutes and kept *rising* I cancelled.

I highly suggest finding somewhere else to host this file.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Gee, thanks for insulting me for preferring a vastly larger database of quotations. Also, as has been said, the terminal *is* a user interface, and since I use the terminal every day, I get lots more quotations than if I had to run yet *another* program to amuse myself.

Oh, and it's not hard to wrap fortune in a GUI so you don't have to sully yourself by opening the Terminal.  
(Version 2.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  I haven't tried this program, but from the description it just looks like an attempt to re-invent the wheel, i.e. fortune. If you want to see random quotations, go install fortune and put it in your ~/.bash_profile (gives you a new quotation each time you open the Terminal).  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Please, file your grievances here:

http://trac.growl.info/trac/

Simply go there and click New Ticket and enter the information (one ticket per bug, please).

Thank you  
(Version 0.6.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Ok, lets try this again. First URL:

http://growl.info/applications.php

Second URL:

http://growl.info/documentation/growl-registration-information.php  
(Version 0.6)

KEVIN BALLARD  It doesn't do anything by itself. You have to run an application that uses Growl. Once you do that, the application should show up in the Applications tab.

If you want some help with this, go to - that's a list of all known applications that work with Growl (known to the Growl development team, that is).  
(Version 0.6)

KEVIN BALLARD  $14.95? That's ridiculous. I wouldn't even pay $4.95 for this. If it was free, I'd consider downloading it, but as-is, from the description, it's not worth paying for.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  This is an incredibly useful tool. I don't often have to fool with XSLT, but when I do, this tool is a godsend. Only thing that would make it better would be an XPath browser (i.e. execute arbitrary XPath statements on the XML and see what matches).  
(Version 3.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Dude, you're complaining about Panic because people are rating Unison badly? There's two reasons I see why Unison gets bad ratings:

1) At least one person used to think it was free and is complaining that it costs money. It never was free.

2) People complaining about missing features. The way I see it, Unison was meant to be a fairly simple usenet reader for people who haven't gotten into usenet because either they're not power users or because they don't like the poor interfaces (just guessing - never actually used any others) of other readers.

Basically, Unison was (as I see it, I could be wrong) meant to be a reasonably lightweight but nice-looking usenet reader, and people are complaining because of this.

The only really valid complaint I can see is that Panic seems to have an extremely long update cycle for Unison without much user feedback on reported issues. I do understand why this is not desirable, but it's certainly not a crime (nor is it all that uncommon). I personally have no problem giving Panic money - I like Transmit, and I liked Audion back when there was a reason to use it (back before iTunes dominated the market). Granted, I probably won't buy Transmit 3, but that's just because I use FTP so rarely that it's not worth it. I bought Transmit 2 and I am perfectly happy using that.  
(Version 3.0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  A decent game. Reminds me of the old Ambrosia Software game Barracks. I like it, but I'm not sure if it's worth the $20 the full version costs.  
(Version 1.01b)

KEVIN BALLARD  The description of this program is a bit misleading - it actually *is* a webserver bundled with the MoinMoin wiki. Basically, you run this and it sticks a little icon in your menubar which gives you access to prefs and a homepage link. You select the link and it opens up a MoinMoin wiki in your web browser of choice, which you can use just like any other wiki. So basically, it's giving you a private version of public collaboration tools.

I think this is a poor idea for several reasons, the biggest being it's pointless to use a web application for one-man personal use. Web applications exist so multiple people can use them. A web browser is not the best interface for personal applications.

If you want an application that acts like a wiki, go check out VoodooPad. I think it's a great note application with wiki-like functionality and it's an actual Mac OS X Cocoa application, not a front to a web-based wiki software.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Interesting idea, but $15 is far too much for this sort of simple functionality.  
(Version 1.0b1)

KEVIN BALLARD  I've been beta-testing FlySketch for a few weeks and I think it's quite a nifty little piece of software. It's great for just doodling or highlighting things on-screen and such.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  I haven't tried this app, but the minimalist description makes it sound like a GUI grep. And if I ever decide I want a GUI grep, I think I'll just stick with BBEdit's multiple file search.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Not at all. I used both NewsFire and NNW 2 (beta) for a while together, to test them out, and I have to say that NNW is far, far superior to NewsFire. If you are a NewsFire user and you try out NNW 2 (try the public beta that was just released), you won't want to go back.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  The concept is very useful (I already have a free version that just drags files and is nowhere near as powerful, but works), but it's not worth $15. If It was $5, I'd go ahead and buy it despite having my free poor man's drag. If it cost $10, I wouldn't buy it but I'd think it was priced decently. But $15 is just too much for this.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Why pay $5 for a fairly simplistic application launcher, when you can get the power and beauty of Quicksilver for free?  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Interesting game. Of course, quick battle in demo mode was only beatable because the computer AI for battles is *very* limited (at least, at the default setting - I haven't tried bumping it up, and I wonder at how stupid it could possibly get if I lowered it). If it cost $10 I'd be tempted to buy it, but at $20 it's not worth it.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Uhh, wow. Could you be *any* less specific? Especially because no known bugs were introduced in this release (and in fact I can only think of one bug off the top of my head, and it's an obscure one)  
(Version 1.0b33)

KEVIN BALLARD  Oh god, is this really a good idea?

Prepare for the swarm of half-baked buggy EV plugin editors. Not because I think REALbasic is bad, but because bad programmers can use REALbasic.  
(Version 1)

KEVIN BALLARD  This is an interesting application. This mimics the iTunes interface pretty well, so it's familiar and pretty easy to use. that's nice. However, there's 2 big reasons why I'm not going to use it, and 1 feature that I think would make it much better.

2 reasons:

1) Its Netflix support is pretty bad. It's not entirely clear how to use it: the My Netflix popup never had anything below the separator. In the rental history selection, it didn't tell me what those green and red squares in the first column were. It gives very little information about what I'm seeing - pretty much just the title, and in the queue it has the number as well. No Netflix rating, no information about the movie, nothing. Granted, for real Netflix control you should go with Netflix Freak, but I still expected more from iFlicks.

2) It's $30. And it doesn't really give me any reason to pay that. I don't have very many movies on my computer, so I'm not in dire need of an organizer. Especially since I don't have any information about said movies aside from the names. So using iFlicks is pretty much worthless. Maybe if I kept a lot of TV series on my computer it would be worth more (I do occasionally download episodes of 2 different series, but I delete them after watching because I don't need to waste the space). This is the biggest question about this application - most people don't keep a lot of movies on their computers. Movies are large. Music, on the other hand, is much smaller and is used much more often and lasts for a shorter time, so people keep a *lot* more on their computers. That needs an organizer. Movies generally don't need an application to organize - a simple folder hierarchy generally does the trick.

If iFlicks improved the Netflix support so it's actually usable and dropped the price down to maybe $12.99 or something, I'd actually consider buying it. But right now, definitely not.

The one feature I think would greatly enhance iFlicks:

The ability to fetch information about movies. It should be able to query Amazon.com to get all the information it wants about a movie, the same way Delicious Library does. This would actually give me a reason to start putting movies into iFlicks, because I could gather information about them and organize them that way. And when I say Amazon.com, I really mean the source that's best for that medium. For movies, Amazon.com is probably decent, but for, say, Anime, there's probably a better place to get information from.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Why on earth is there ANOTHER shareware MD5 app out there? MD5 is a well-known open-source algorithm, and there's already TWO free implementations on every OS X machine (`md5' and `openssl md5'). Regardless as to how nice this app may or may not look, there's absolutely no way it can be worth any money at all.  
(Version 2.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  This doesn't seem to do anything! I launch it, and all it has is a menubar (in the wrong order, incidentally - the Help menu isn't the last one). The only thing I can see to do is the Get My Weather item from the Scripts menu. I select it and it gives me a few ugly AppleScript dialog boxes to select options from (and requires me to manually type a URL in my browser to even figure out the answer to one). When it's finally done, absolutely nothing happens. As far as I can tell, this app is a complete dud. And then when I tried to quit it, it wouldn't. I selected the Quit menuitem several times and nothing happened (and no, the app wasn't frozen). I had to force-quit it to get it to shut down.

Don't even bother downloading. It's useless.  
(Version 0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  This is completely ridiculous. OS X comes with a free MD5 tool (actually, 2 of them). I'm 100% sure you can get a free md5 tool for both Windows and OS 9. And as for cross-platform checkfiles, all it consists of is the MD5 checksum itself, which is cross-platform. There is absolutely *no* reason why anybody should have to pay $10 for an app that simply does the same thing that you can get for free quite easily.  
(Version 2.0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Dude, MD5 is the same on all platforms. If a checkfile is just the checksum, then yes, it's cross-platform.  
(Version 2.0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Never heard of that issue before, and nothing I'm doing in SafariSource should be able to cause that.  
(Version 1.5.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  $14.95 is too expensive for a powerful to-do manager? I wonder what sort of comments you post on apps that cost $20-$30?  
(Version 2.0.3)

KEVIN BALLARD  I think this is pretty cool. I will be switching to it despite the lack of 1 feature I like (menubar pager, although I do like the spiffy pager that Virtue has), the non-working status of another feature (impossible to disable transitions), and the fact that you can't navigate the pager via the keyboard. Despite these flaws (which I may try to fix myself, seeing as this is hosted on sourceforge so it must be open-source), I think it's pretty cool and can only get better.  
(Version 0.5r1)

KEVIN BALLARD  I think Bwana is really neat, but I think it would be even better if it was done as an internet plugin. That way it would work in all browsers that support internet plugins, it would work transparently in browsers (i.e. no more URL bar going blank, then sitting and waiting and it magically changing to a temporary HTML file).  
(Version 1.4)

KEVIN BALLARD  Interesting, and looks promising, but isn't there yet.

* I managed to hop myself completely out of the track - I got flipped upside down, hit space to right myself, landed on another racer and bounced out of the track entirely. At that point, I couldn't get back on the track (although I got myself up to some pretty fast speeds!)

* It's way too easy to get stuck on the wall. If I hit the wall at an angle such that I'm pretty much perpendicular to it, I can't get off without stopping and backing away. This is bad. I should be able to just turn myself and slide off - after all, the racers aren't *square*  
(Version 1.0.7)

KEVIN BALLARD  This update seems to be broken. I tried 'man:growlnotify' and got absolutely no feedback. No manpage, no Not Found page, nothing. man:ls works, as does man:sh, but apparently /usr/local/man still isn't in the list of paths to search (please use manpath!) and the Not Found functionality is broken. Either that, or the growlnotiify manpage is just magical and kills Bwana.  
(Version 1.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  Interesting, but it's not using `manpath' to locate the manpages. When I do man:growlnotify (growlnotify's manpage being installed in /usr/local/man/man1) it finds nothing.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  I don't understand the point of this. It just turns any window into a text field. Why would I possibly want to use this instead of, say, opening a new BBEdit window?  
(Version 0.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  Uhh, what? You can expand the source code window as large as you please  
(Version 0.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  If they didn't store that they'd have to re-query Amazon every time you went to the related items pane. Disk space is cheap.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Library has a comment field too. Go to the My Info pane and hit Edit.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Delicious Library is pretty spiffy. It scans pretty well, searching is a breeze, and it looks great too. I'm not sure how much use I'm going to get out of this as my collection isn't too large (although my father's collection is huge), but I purchased it anyway because I want to support Delicious Monster.

Oh, and iSight scanning is amazing, although I wish it would work with tiny barcodes (it doesn't work on the really tiny variety some games and DVDs are branded with).  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  I'm glad that worked. Now if I can only figure out why that's happening...  
(Version 1.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  Somebody else reported the same problem and said that deleting the array of preference module identifiers from Safari's preferences solved the problem. I haven't a clue what's causing it, but please try the following:

1) Quit Safari

2) Open Termin.app

3) In a Terminal window, type 'defaults delete com.apple.Safari "NSToolbar Configuration NSPreferences"' (without the single quotes but with the double quotes)

4) Open Safari

If that doesn't solve the problem for you please contact me by email.  
(Version 1.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  I have no idea how you can possibly give this application a 1-star rating. You probably opened it up, saw that it can do everything, and decided that doing everything means doing it badly (which this app clearly proves false). Quicksilver is the one must-have app for any machine. I use it daily and I use it far more than any other application on my machine.

Yes, Quicksilver does look different than other mac apps, but it also does something different than all other mac apps. Quicksilver doesn't fit into the normal user-application paradigm because it is not so much an app as it is a framework for getting things done. Would you call AppKit bloatware because almost all Cocoa apps use it? No, it's a framework. It doesn't *do* everything, it *enables* everything. And Quicksilver is the same way.

You say Quicksilver is a swiss army application. That doesn't mean it's bad. Why do you think Swiss Army knives are popular? It's because they contain a lot of useful tools and they're easy to use. Quicksilver is the same way. It can do almost anything I want and I can extend it myself to do things it can't already. And I can pick and choose among the features (read: plugins) so I only have installed what I want to use. Imagine if you could design your own swiss army knife that held any tool you wanted and left out all the tools you didn't want to use. And imagine that this knife was modular so you could snap the tools in and out of it. And imagine that each tool is high quality and works as well as a standalone tool, if not better. And also imagine that this knife looked great and was lightweight. Wouldn't that be the ideal tool? Why then, when confronted with the software equivalent of this tool, do you rate it badly?

Quicksilver is an incredibly elegant, useful tool. It has so integrated itself into my workflow that when it's not running (such as if I'm writing a Quicksilver plugin and I introduce a crashing bug into my plugin) I actually try to launch Quicksilver by hitting cmd-space, typing QS, and hitting return (obviously that doesn't work since Quicksilver isn't *running*).

I just can't possibly understand how someone can rate this 1 star. You obviously haven't actually used Quicksilver, you just looked at the list of features and maybe a screenshot or two and decided that it was bloatware. Well, I'm sorry to disillusion you, but you're dead wrong. And please, next time you decide to give a poor rating to a product you haven't even honestly tested, give yourself a name. It's shameful to hide behind the Anonymous mask.  
(Version 1.0b31)

KEVIN BALLARD  What do you mean, no point and no use? Most people like to see nicely-colored source. It makes it much easier to read. You are definitely in the minority in that you want uncolored source. Surely you must be able to figure out that most people like syntax highlighting. So, based on this, how can you say that SafariSource has no point? You may not want to use it, but that doesn't mean it has no point. That's like saying Quark has no point because I have no desire to use it.  
(Version 1.0.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  I was actually inspired to do this because of SubEthaFari, an input manager that pushes the source into SubEthaEdit. You can find it with a quick google search. And since it comes with source, you could modify it to use a different app than SubEthaEdit if you wish (it's just a string or 2 you'd have to change).  
(Version 1.0.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  ⌘F always worked in the source view. I didn't do anything to change that.

Thanks for the rating :D  
(Version 1.0.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  Did you install SIMBL, as the ReadMe clearly describes (and using the installer I helpfully bundled with SafariSource)? My guess is no. Either that or you installed it in the wrong place. Or you didn't restart Safari.

Anyway, please actually read the ReadMe and follow the instructions it lists.  
(Version 1.0.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  I'm sorry, I just discovered that SIMBL itself requires Panther to operate and will crash Safari on Jaguar. I will update the requirements list to show the correct information. I'm sorry I can't make SafariSource work on Jaguar but it's out of my control.  
(Version 1.0.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  Yes, I'm looking into it right now. I should hopefully have a solution shortly (or if not I'll bump the requirements).  
(Version 1.0.5)

KEVIN BALLARD  You *do* know that you can increase/decrease font size with cmd + and cmd -, right? And I'll bear in mind your suggestion for changing font  
(Version 1.0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD   I'm sorry to hear that, but posting a bad rating here instead of emailing me privately is not a good way to get your problem fixed.

I don't have Safari 1.0.3 to test against and I naively assumed that, as the source viewer hasn't appeared to change in any update to Safari, that the internals for HTMLSourceDocument would still be the same. In fact, it shouldn't crash even if HTMLSourceDocument is different, it should just log some messages to the Console.

If you want your problem fixed, please email me privately with a crash log. If instead you just want to publicly complain about a bug (an incorrect requirements list at worst) and rate me badly because of it, please ignore this message and continue with your life.  
(Version 1.0.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  This demo is very fun. The graphics are nice, the controls are easy, the premise is believable, and it shows promise. With an instruction manual (as I assume a game would come with) it would be even more fun. I will most likely buy the full version next week.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  To download this update, use Software Updater.  
(Version 2.1)

ARANOR8  $5.95 for an app that lets you do something that you can already do for free? Sheesh...  
(Version 1.1)

KEVIN BALLARD  3 drawers? EWWWW. Redesign your interface, please!  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Must be something wrong about your system. Paranoid Android is a very simple and safe haxie - most likely it's just exposing an underlying problem in your system.  
(Version 1.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  Must be something wrong on your system. This is a very simple haxie and works perfectly well.  
(Version 1.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  Well, I *had* written a long description as to why the developer behind this software doesn't deserve to make a cent off of this, but Joel deleted it because he didn't like the label I applied to Erik (the developer). Basically, Erik's the most arrogant, egotistical, [censored] I've ever had the misfortune to run in to. He did some pretty rude, nasty stuff and lied about it later on his blog (and banned me from comments). If you care to read what happened, go to [http://kevin.sb.org]. If you read the few snippets he talked about on his own blog, be warned that he has some lies there.

In a nutshell, Erik booted me off of the Beta team with no warning or reason (only way I knew I was kicked off was because I couldn't log into the bug reporter to report the fact that PulpFiction leaked 91000 leaks (yes, 91 THOUSAND) for over 100MB of lost memory in the course of 2 days - a sure sign of shoddy development). When I contacted him later about it, he was *extremely* rude and refused to give me a *single* reason why he kicked me off, aside from, basically, "because". He also wasted a full day of my time with PHP+MySQL programming for a PulpFiction v1.1 feature backend that he decided he no longer wanted (at the same time as he kicked me off the team) with, again, no reason given. And given that he obviously wants this v1.1 feature, he's going to have to recode the thing himself (I had *finished* it when he told me he didn't want it). He did more than just tell me he didn't want it, but this is long enough already, so just go read the story at [http://kevin.sb.org].

Basically, Erik doesn't deserve a cent of your money. Use PulpFiction Lite if you have to, but don't pay for this.

Oh, and NetNewsWire 2.0 is much better anyway (still in beta tho).  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Anonymous - I wrote a long description why, but Joel just removed it, apparently because he didn't like the label I applied to Erik. Basically, Erik's the most egotistical, arrogant, I've ever had the misfortune of encountering. He kicked me off of the PulpFiction beta with no reason or warning (only way I knew was I couldn't log in when I was trying to report that PulpFiction leaked more than a colander full of water - >100MB after 2 days) and acted *extremely* rude to me when I contacted him and refused to explain why. Then later he lied on his own blog about what happened and banned me from commenting in an attempt to make himself look good.

Read about it here: http://kevin.sb.org  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  I'm not going to copy & paste, so just go read my review on the full version. After that, go to http://kevin.sb.org and read what I have to say there.  
(Version 1.0)

KEVIN BALLARD  Even if you do like this, please don't pay for it. The developer does not deserve your money. Seriously.  
(Version 1.0)

ARANOR8  This is not Minerva's fault. There is *no way* this application could have screwed up your computer like that. First off, due to protected memory, the only way it could crash your entire computer would be to cause a kernel panic, something which this application is not capable of doing on a working system (which would imply your system was damaged before you ran it). Secondly, even if it could crash your system, it couldn't do any permanent damage. What I'm trying to say here is that your system was already damaged badly, and it just so happened that it finally crashed when you ran this application. So don't blame Minerva for your faulty system.  
(Version 1.2)

KEVIN BALLARD  Very well-made app. Nice Cocoa interface, familiar tcpdump filters, very nifty traffic mapping feature, a pleasure to use. A shame it doesn't support all the features that more sophisticated programs like the free Ethereal (an X11 app, mind you, and with a much more complicated interface) does, such as display filters, protocol translation (such as decoding an HTTP conversation *as* HTTP and displaying each different part), etc. Also, Ethereal is free. So I'll stick with Ethereal for now, but I'll watch this app to see if it becomes useful enough to warrant purchasing.

Please note, I'm not advocating Ethereal over this for all users. I'm just saying that it's more powerful and free. However, it's an X11 app, it has a *much* more complicated interface, it has a much steeper learning curve, etc. If you haven't done any packet-sniffing before or you aren't interested in the advanced features of Ethereal, then this app is perfect for you.  
(Version 1.2.1)

KEVIN  Acquisition rocks completely. The day it went shareware, I purchased it (at the full $15, not the first-week-only "macworld" price of $10). Acquisition has an awesome UI and it consistently finds results. The developer is very responsive (go sign up for the forums) and fixes bugs and adds new features quickly. Also, for those of you comparing it to LimeWire, you do realize that the gnutella core of Acquisition IS LimeWire's code? It's a Java subprocess that's run from Acquisition, and he can do this because the code is GPL'd.

Acquisition totally rocks. And each new version is just better and better.  
(Version 0.72)

KEVIN  Awesome! Thank you! I've long been annoyed with iChat for the carriage-return stripping, and this fixes that! Also, thanks for the input window expansion.  
(Version 1.5)

KEVIN  Wow. I have to say, this is quite possibly the lamest space game I have ever seen. The graphics are a bit choppy, even though they're very simplistic. The AI is nonexistant - it just follows your ship. I can beat it consistently without taking damage. The "cheat codes" don't help either - I didn't try AIHOLOGRAM because it's impossible to win with that, but I can still kill it with AITELEPORT.

To put it simply, this game just isn't worth the time downloading it (and I'm on a T1, so it took just a few seconds)  
(Version 1.1)

TILDESOFT  Interesting. There should be more than 1 type of snowflake, and there should also be a size control. Smaller snowflakes should also fall more frequently. As it is, they're too large and it doesn't look as snowy as I want. Also, fog doesn't seem to really do anything.  
(Version 1.1b1)