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)

ARANOR8  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)

ARANOR8  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)

ARANOR8  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)

ARANOR8  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)