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User "llscotts" Profile
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About Leland
Developer, owner of Classic 45s: http://www.classic45s.com
Developer, creator of Musings from Mars: http://www.musingsfrommars.org And other fine adventures.
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User Reviews
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Right. Mentioning the technical problem wasn't the point of the review, actually. I was explaining why in my opinion PictureSwitcher is a better product and a better value. Most likely, Picture Switch is having a conflict with one of the InputManagers I use, or perhaps with Application Enhancer. However, even if it were working flawlessly, I wouldn't be tempted to pay $10 for it when PictureSwitcher does so much more and is free. Regards, Leland P.S. You do have several other excellent products that I use. :-) And I highly recommend your excellent Icon2Image, which I use daily myself. |
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Everyone who said these are different apps is absolutely right... there's no comparison! The only thing PictureSwitch has going for it is its handy display of a picture thumbnail in the top menu. If you have a small collection of desktop pictures, and you don't know the picture by name, I can see why you might want to pay $10 for PictureSwitch. On the other hand, I couldn't get the program to actually change my desktop picture! I even went and fiddled with the Apple pref pane, and made sure no other desktop-mod programs were running... the desktop picture just wouldn't change! (However, I had no trouble firing up PictureSwitcher and asking it to change my desktop.) To me, this is a big reliability problem. (I'm on 10.4.9, PowerMac G5 Quad) Just to be sure, I went to the PictureSwitch info page and carefully followed the instructions, including its list of do's and dont's. Beyond the previews, PictureSwitcher has it all over PictureSwitch. Here are its advantages--features you can't get in PictureSwitch:
Almost 'nuff said. The only last advantage--again, a big one to me--is that PictureSwitcher is free. The only negative I've found over more than a year of use is that with a large collection of pictures, it can take PictureSwitcher quite a while to finish initializing itself. Once it does, however, peformance in managing my desktop pictures is very snappy. It helps to organize your large desktop picture collection into smaller subfolders so the preview window draws its large thumbnails more quickly. |
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You're right... they're different. I've always found PictureSwitcher so great I guess I never tried PictureSwitch... but I will now, out of curiosity. I had done review of PictureSwitcher alast year when I decided to make it part of my standard desktop config. |
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I'm pretty sure this is the exact same software--perhaps a newer version--with a slightly different name. The developer used to give it away for free, but has now started charging a shareware fee for all (or almost all) of his products. |
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Crystal Clear works fine with Firefox, but since Firefox is a Carbon app, it doesn't support full transparency except in the titlebar. If you try Camino instead (also built with the same "engine" as Firefox), you'll see the difference, since Camino uses Mac OS X's native Cocoa application framework... which is a lot more sophisticated than the older Carbon framework. |
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Hello again, First, I wanted to let those of you who are particularly interested in a solution to the "menu extras" problem that I have a solution that's much easier than the one used for PhotoPro. It's still not as seamless as I'd like, and does require a little setup, but only one step, really. If you'd like to try it out, I'd appreciate the help in deciding if it's easy enough to "put out there" as an official part of Crystal Clear. Second, one thing readers of this listing may not realize (unless you've somehow found time to read through the entire article on Crystal Clear) is that the theme isn't suitable for users who rely on Microsoft Office and Macromedia (Flash, Dreamweaver) products. Those are the main Carbon apps I'm aware of that use some strange background element that Crystal Clear tries to make transparent. Since Carbon apps don't support transparency, the elements show up as black, and in the cases mentioned above, the black backgrounds can make the applications not just ugly, but also hard to use. This isn't the case with all Carbon apps, mind you. I have no problems with Photoshop CS3, BBEdit, YummyFTP, StyleMaster, iTunes, or many others. Now, the Macromedia products aren't as big a problem as the Microsoft ones, because you can at least enter them in ShapeShifter's list of excluded apps so they don't get themed. Microsoft Office is a total oddball, however, and doesn't respect the exclusion at all. I've tried and asked around, and as far as I know, it's impossible to exclude them from being themed. That's it! If you're a user of mostly Cocoa applications, Crystal Clear will be gorgeous and you'll wonder what the fuss is about. :-) If you spend a lot of time in Microsoft Office, you might want to pass this opportunity up. Better yet... switch to apps from some other vendor, preferably one who is developing in Cocoa! (e.g., Pages, Keynote, Mesa, Tables, TextEdit...) Cheers, Leland |
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I don't have Acrobat on my system, so I can't test it out... However, occasionally I've had to add an application to ShapeShifter's "Exclude List", and I recommend you try that with Acrobat 8. When you do, Acrobat 8 won't be themed, but if the problem is Crystal Clear, you shouldn't have any problem reading PDF files. If you still can't open PDFs, you may need to add Acrobat 8 to the APE global exclude list. By the way, why do you use Acrobat? I used to be a heavy user of the Adobe product, but there are so many native Mac OS X tools for working with PDF files now that it's no longer necessary to tolerate the heavy resource cost of Acrobat. Preview is much better for light PDF reading/searching/text extraction/etc. Coming in Leopard, Preview will also be able to selectively edit and change fonts in PDF files. Just a thought... |
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To EASER... Funny you should mention this... After getting the latest version out the door, I was once again turning to the problem of menu "extras" in themes with transparent/translucent menubars. I'm toying with the idea--suggested by another Crystal Clear user--of offering the fix that the developer of PhotoPro did. When I first tried that fix a couple of months ago, I thought it was too difficult to expect users to mess with. I still do, but if you are someone who doesn't reboot very often and are not a heavy user of menu extras (or at least, don't add them to your menubar many times during a session), it might be worth it to fix the look temporarily. If I did this for Crystal Clear, the fix would involve these steps:
I'm going to try this myself tomorrow, but if it works as I expect, I would then have no menu extras that were "too shiny". Again, my concern is that this procedure would be necessary every time you log in and out or reboot, and any new menu extras you add after the "fix" would be too "shiny." Any opinions from users of PhotoPro who've lived with these steps would be appreciated. Obviously, you could set up a trigger to stop and restart all of your normal menu extras (I already have such a trigger using iKey), but there's still the extra steps in ShapeShifter to deal with... Finally, if any Cocoa developers out there know of a way to tell a given Mac application to suppress its main menu loading, PLEASE let me know. Apps that run as menu extras do this even though they don't need to, and that's the source of the problem. Cheers, Leland
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Funny you should mention this... After getting the latest version out the door, I was once again turning to the problem of menu "extras" in themes with transparent/translucent menubars. I'm toying with the idea--suggested by another Crystal Clear user--of offering the fix that the developer of PhotoPro did. When I first tried that fix a couple of months ago, I thought it was too difficult to expect users to mess with. I still do, but if you are someone who doesn't reboot very often and are not a heavy user of menu extras (or at least, don't add them to your menubar many times during a session), it might be worth it to fix the look temporarily. If I did this for Crystal Clear, the fix would involve these steps:
I'm going to try this myself tomorrow, but if it works as I expect, I would then have no menu extras that were "too shiny". Again, my concern is that this procedure would be necessary every time you log in and out or reboot, and any new menu extras you add after the "fix" would be too "shiny." Any opinions from users of PhotoPro who've lived with these steps would be appreciated. Obviously, you could set up a trigger to stop and restart all of your normal menu extras (I already have such a trigger using iKey), but there's still the extra steps in ShapeShifter to deal with... Finally, if any Cocoa developers out there know of a way to tell a given Mac application to suppress its main menu loading, PLEASE let me know. Apps that run as menu extras do this even though they don't need to, and that's the source of the problem. Cheers, Leland
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There are many things I love about iTunes Volume, its being free is one of them. But the reason I can't use it and can't recommend it is that every time I run iTunes Volume, it works fine as long as I'm playing iTunes. When I stop, even with iTunes still running, iTunes Volume starts spinning very heavy CPU cycles, with System Events tied to it. I've kept some data on this, and typically the System Events process, with iTunes Volumes as its parent, is running 40-60% CPU, and iTunes Volume itself runs at 20-40% CPU. This persists when I close iTunes, and if I force-quit the System Events process, iTunes Volume promptly launches it again at about 60% CPU. The only way to stop this is to quit iTunes Volume. Nice software except for this killer bug. I'm running Mac OSX 10.4.8, PowerMac Quad G5, 4.5 GB RAM. |
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This guy must be related to the developer. What a stupid remark! Does he think every software category should be limited to a single application? Wow! Imagine how bad that would be... kind of like AppZapper, which started out strong and then hasn't had a major update in at least 6 months. Meanwhile, CleanApp has far surpassed what AppZapper can do. |
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In response to the earlier writer who claimed CleanApp crashes a lot... CleanApp has never crashed on me... it's a great application. Not perfect, but well worth the money and more useful than any other app in its class. That reviewer probably had something wrong with his system, or perhaps he didn't notice that CleanApp requires Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") or newer. Honestly... this is the kind of comment that makes me question the value of ratings developed by anyone who raises their hand. If the pool is large enough, the silly votes get weeded out. But when an app is rated by only 5 people and one of them doesn't know what they're doing, it's a problem. For a full review of CleanApp supporting my rating, and points out its strengths as well as shortcomings, see http://www.musingsfrommars.org/index.php?p=784&postcat=25 (3/10/2007, Version: 2.2.3) |
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In response to the earlier writer who claimed CleanApp crashes a lot... CleanApp has never crashed on me... it's a great application. Not perfect, but well worth the money and more useful than any other app in its class. That reviewer probably had something wrong with his system, or perhaps he didn't notice that CleanApp requires Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") or newer. Honestly... this is the kind of comment that makes me question the value of ratings developed by anyone who raises their hand. If the pool is large enough, the silly votes get weeded out. But when an app is rated by only 5 people and one of them doesn't know what they're doing, it's a problem. For a full review of CleanApp supporting my rating, and points out its strengths as well as shortcomings, see http://www.musingsfrommars.org/index.php?p=784&postcat=25 |
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Mesa is actually an excellent Mac OS X spreadsheet. True, it's not perfect, but I find it much easier to use than Excel for basic stuff. I have not yet encountered an Excel spreadsheet Mesa couldn't open, and Mesa writes fully Excel-compatible sheets in return. The only two big gripes I have are that (1) Mesa doesn't support comments attached to fields or sheets and (2) Mesa doesn't export sheets to HTML. Neither of these are show-stoppers for me, however. Like any software, Mesa takes a little getting used to, and you have to want to make the break from Excel in order to learn the Mesa way. However, the software comes with excellent Help documentation, and a lot of its behavior makes perfect sense once you know how it works. That said, I do encourage the developer of Mesa to continue enhancing the product, since it has been over a year since the last significant update. |
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MagiCal is evolving nicely... I've tried every release so far, and the developer is adding lots of useful preferences and options to a cool little app. The biggest weakness--and the reason I'm not using MagiCal regularly--is the problem others have noted with MagiCal's excessive CPU usage. To demonstrate, I took screenshots of three apps that all do pretty much the same thing, and all of which are free: MagiCal, wClock, and MenuCalendarClock (the latter has advanced iCal integration that will cost you, but you can use it for free otherwise). They all present customizable date and time info in the menubar, and present a calendar when clicked. MagiCal's cool trick is that the calendar can be torn off and replicated in case you want to see more than one month at a time. wClock's calendar is torn off by default and can be repositioned wherever, but it's no longer downloadable unfortunately. MenuCalendarClock's calendar is fixed to the menubar and can't be repositioned. Magical regularly uses 5 percent of my CPU to do its thing. wClock typically uses 0.5-1.0 percent of my CPU, and MenuCalendarClock typically uses ZERO percent. MagiCal uses 5 percent even if I disable any behavior that might change the menubar information. Here are the screenshot links if you're interested: MagiCal I hope the developer will utilize some of the testing tools Apple provides to figure out what's causing the extra CPU usage. I'm sure it'll be fun to hunt that down, and I guarantee you'll win over more users with that than by adding another kind of clock icon (as nice as they are!) :-) Cheers, Leland |
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Robert, FYI my previous note was directed to Gannet, not to you, since he's the one whose comments I was addressing. However, I now realize you are both vested in BetterZip and therefore felt defensive as a result of my remarks. Sorry about that, but I don't think there's a "fairness" issue here. As I said, I have nothing against BetterZip. But since this MacUpdate site is a resource for Mac users looking for software to do particular things, it's an appropriate place to inform people of other products they might be interested in. Hence, Zipeg. As you point out, Zipeg can't create archives, only open/preview them. However, Mac OS X comes with archive-making tools for free, so it's not clear why I would use BetterZip just for that... For that matter, as my review points out, BetterZip is the choice if you'll want or need to search your archive, which is something Zipeg can't do. However, Zipeg is much better at browsing, since it provides a Finder-like column view, whereas BetterZip uses the list view. I've now tried BetterZip 1.4, and it definitely is snappier than 1.3 was, both in opening archives and in previewing files from them. That said, it's still demonstrably slower than Zipeg at both tasks. The first archive I opened, purely at random, was a fairly large (1.1 GB) archive of an old Mail directory. BetterZip took 1 minute, 30 seconds to open the archive. Zipeg opened it in 45 seconds... half the time. As far as preview is concerned, there's still no comparison. I tried this out twice just now to be sure I was testing both applications fairly (I'm usually pretty careful in my testing...) With each application, I previewed a small .icns file, which opened in Preview, and a small .plist file, which opened in PrefSetter (my default app for this kind of file). Both of the helper apps were already launched and ready, to exclude the app launch time from the tests. BetterZip is much faster than before, as I said, but there is a noticeable delay between the time you click "preview" and the file shows up in the helper app. In both cases, the delay is maybe 5-6 seconds. First, BetterZip activates a sheet which displays what appears to be a download of the file, and then there's a lag while BetterZip passes the task to the helper. With Zipeg, preview is literally instantaneous. Click preview, up pops Preview with the .icns file. Click preview again, and up pops PrefSetter with the .plist file. If the files happen to be .png, .gif., or .jpeg files, Zipeg will preview them in a small popup as you mouse over them... no need for clicking at all! As far as your problem launching Zipeg, perhaps you are using a version of Mac OS X prior to 10.3.9... I notice that Zipeg requires 10.3.9 or later. I'm testing on Tiger, with a PowerMac G5 dual-2GHz system. Regards, Leland (Geez.... all this because I gave the guy 3 stars instead of 5!!) |
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Ah, Zipeg is also free, not $20. Java isn't a Windows technology, by the way... Zipeg actually uses the Cocoa framework, so clearly he's using Xcode. In fact, you're completely wrong about the origins of Zipeg. It's developed with Java so the developer could make it available for both Mac and Windows... it wasn't a Windows app first. There's no question that BetterZip is nicer looking, and it has a helluva lot better icon. But in my opinion it isn't a good value if what you want is to open up a given zip file and see what's inside (Zipeg handles a slew of different archive formats). Zipeg did that instantly and easily... BetterZip took forever to display even a small HTML file. Read my article first if you want to carry the conversation further... You're also wrong about Zipeg not supporting drag/drop... I just tested that out, and you can drag a file from a given archive to the Finder, no problem! You must have tried an older version of Zipeg... ? (Say... are you the BetterZip developer? If so, my article has a few suggestions for you. I also had some for the Zipeg developer, so don't feel picked on!) I'll definitely try 1.4 and have nothing against BetterZip. I just think it's overrated, and I wanted to let Mac users know about the free alternative in case they'd like to avoid paying for the privilege. I've thoroughly enjoyed Zipeg in the month it's been handling my zip files, and there's nothing in BetterZip that I'd pay $20 for now that I've got Zipeg. |
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BetterZip isn't a bad piece of Mac software by any means, but it's overpriced for what it does. I came to this conclusion a week or so ago after testing out the incredibly cool, FREE, Zipeg (http://www.zipeg.com/index.html). Zipeg is much faster at opening archives than BetterZip and is actually usable for previewing files of any kind. (BetterZip can be quite slow and actually downloads a copy from the archive in most cases.) So, before you shell out $20, check out Zipeg. I wrote a mini-review of it on my blog, which you can find here. |
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Excellent... best audio editor I've ever used at any price. Also has a gorgeous, highly customizable interface that beats everything else out there. At $40, it's a huge bargain. At $25, it's a no-brainer! How Rogue Amoeba thinks they can get away charging $30 for Fission, which does nothing but split files up, is beyond me. Compared with Amadeus Pro, Fission should be Freeware. Amadeus Pro has so many surprising, wonderful features I'm thoroughly delighted. I was a Sound Studio user many years ago, but switched to Soundtrack after Sound Studio stopped development for a long time. It looks like HairerSoft is really on the ball now and pushing this software category forward in great new ways. |
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I agree. FastAndSlow is totally reliable and easy to use. I've used it on my PowerMac G5 for over a year now with no problem whatsoever. There's absolutely no need to pay for this functionality. |
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QuickImageCM is a different kind of product, not designed for previewing images. It's great, and I use them both. But they're not alternatives. |
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I agree with Jazzy. GarageSale is a piece of cake! You must have been trying too hard. Hopefully you didn't pay for it before giving up on it, though. :-) I love GarageSale and have always had the best results with my GS-made auctions. |
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Despite the developer's poor English, it's easy to get the hang of QueueMemo, and I really like what it does! Basically, QueueMemo lets you attach stickies to particular applications. Whenever you activate an app that you've attached a memo to, the memo appears. Memos can be customized to change font style, background color, and transparency, and you can enter straight HTML as well as plain text if you like. I haven't tried it long enough to know how stable it is, but so far, so good! |
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Then why didn't you give it a star rating you think it deserves? |
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Thanks for the feedback. I'm uploading a new version tonight that fixes that JavaScript error. For those who are curious about it, the error had no effect on the widget's visible behavior or performance, but did generate an error message that would appear in the Console or whatever JavaScript error log you may be using. |
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The latest version addresses the CPU cycling problem and the problem with the resizing that was noted in earlier reviews. The next major version will incorporate a local database so xCuts can be used when you're not connected to the web. |
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Some people just like to put other developers down. |
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Hi... thanks for saying something nice about xCuts! Some of these critics on MacUpdate make you want to never offer free software again! :-) Yours is a good question... I've noticed the same thing myself. I'll look into it and post an update when I figure out how to reduce the persistent usage. Cheers, Leland |
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Could you please supply some information about your system? One thing I will add to the description is that this widget requires Mac OS X 10.4.3 or higher. Also, since this widget uses a remote database, it may be that it performs unacceptably on slower internet connections. It does assume a reasonably fast (non-dialup) connection. |
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What I can't believe is all the jerks who post here with nothing more to say than, "Why the heck isn't this freeware?" or "This software is too expensive" or, worst of all, "This developer must be stupid to build an application like this when xx and xx are already available." Come on guys, use the review feature to say something others might actually find useful! For example, if you comment on an application, you should at least have downloaded and tried it out, or maybe visited the developer's site to learn more about it. If any of you had done that with this software, you would have discovered that it's "donationware" and is free for the basic functionality. If you want to be emailed or have something FTP'd, you need to pay $6 eventually. Seriously... give these hardworking Mac OS X developers a break, willya? |
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Sorry about the link... I haven't had a chance to add it to my blog site yet. I've changed the link to point to my old software page, and added a working email address also. (For the record, I didn't add this information to MacUpdate... someone else must have done that on my behalf.) About the slowness... Yesterday my server was having huge problems because of heavy load. I think it's better today. Once I have a chance to learn how, I'd like to convert the database to use CoreData rather than an external database, which will of course make it much snappier. Also, xCuts isn't designed to handle character code shortcuts. If there is enough demand for that, I can add that later. One of the main areas of enhancement will be to add a broader array of keyboard shortcuts... for example, for Quicksilver, Mail, Safari, etc. As stated in the intro text, this covers the usual type of shortcuts that Apple includes in its own documentation. |
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Sorry about the link... I haven't had a chance to add it to my blog site yet. I've changed the link to point to my old software page. About the slowness... Yesterday my server was having huge problems because of heavy load. I think it's better today. Once I have a chance to learn how, I'd like to convert the database to use CoreData rather than an external database, which will of course make it much snappier. Also, xCuts isn't designed to handle character code shortcuts. If there is enough demand for that, I can add that later. One of the main areas of enhancement will be to add a broader array of keyboard shortcuts... for example, for Quicksilver, Mail, Safari, etc. As stated in the intro text, this covers the usual type of shortcuts that Apple includes in its own documentation. |
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