SIMONM  This is actually a pretty useful application. I use it mainly to find the key combinations required for selecting various characters. There is nothing in OS X that lets you browse a font's complete character map and tell you what the key combinations are.

No updates since 2007 though so maybe the developer should drop the price a bit to encourage more buyers...  
(Version 3.0.1)

SIMONM  Nowhere near enough blood and guts in my opinion!  
(Version 1.0)

SIMONM  Current version doesn't seem to be working for me. Maybe it needs to be updated to accommodate the latest iTunes? I'm trying to export album art and it doesn't work.  
(Version 1.7.8)

SIMONM  I agree, $200 for this is a joke, but you can't compare a GUI-based stat program with R. Though powerful, R is essentially a command-based language and pretty intimmidating to most.  
(Version 5.6)

SIMONM  After using Papers, I don't know how I'd ever be able to write a research report again without it (or how I managed in the past). Papers was invaluable in helping me negotiate more than 500 papers I'd accumulated from the net during a literature search. The ability to search for key terms and quickly find references to them was a godsend.

I didn't use the online search tools, and it's a little frustrating that so few papers have quality metadata. Perhaps it's an area of improvement that Papers could intelligently determine paper title, journal and/or authors where applicable from the paper...? Given that this is much cheaper than Sente, I'd recommend it to any science student or professional researcher.  
(Version 1.9.1)

SIMONM  OK, I got the pricing wrong, it's $49 per extra language, not $99, but you're still looking at say $297 for a selection of five languages, not exactly chicken feed. I can see some language schools wanting this but $99 seems like it'll put off many an occasional language student!  
(Version 1.3)

SIMONM  The best French voices I could find, but very expensive. US$99 is for one language only. You'll find that in each language one voice is probably the best and the others you won't really use, but you're forced to buy them anyway. If you want a French, German, Italian, Russian and British English voice it'll cost you nearly $500!!!! If they charged a flat rate of say US$30 per voice I'm sure they'd make a lot more money. I'd buy at least two or three then, whereas now I won't buy any becuase it's not worth paying $99 for a few voices in one language...  
(Version 1.3)

SIMONM  New version seems broken...wait for update!  
(Version 2.2)

SIMONM  ODYSSEUS you seem to be affiliated with this software as you wrote the same comment on the Bookends page.

At less than half the cost I decided to go with Papers. It has a great interface too. It might lack a couple of features in Sente but I mainly needed something to organise all my papers and allow me to search through them easily and Papers does that wonderfully!  
(Version 5.7.1)

SIMONM  This doesn't offer any more than the free Icon Composer that comes with the developer tools. Also, version 0.51 -> 1.0 seems to have bloated significantly:

0.51: 400k

Icon composer: 800k

1.0: 6Mb!

It would be good if it did something more powerful like being able to badge folders quickly and easily in a variety of styles, but not even the paid version can do that.  
(Version 1.0)

SIMONM  Some of the gains are amazing, especially on the Apple apps. Mail from 289 to 40 Mb, iChat, 115 to 17.4, iCal, 94 to 16 etc etc! The interface could use a little improvement, like being able to sort the list of apps prior to slimming based on potential saving and being able to export slimming log, but the guts of the program run fine! Saved over 4 Gb on my nearly full laptop drive.  
(Version 1.6.2)

SIMONM  Why would their method of activation have anything to do with your opinion of Adobe? I mean if you're a legitimate customer it's hardly that big a deal. They have a right to protect their excessively priced bloatware any which way they choose! In my mind it's not even worth the hassle of download even if it were free!  
(Version 1.3)

SIMONM  Although you get an initial generous 30 day trial period, after this has expired you can no longer assess future versions of the software! How can we test out new features if the developer won't allow us to trial the software again???  
(Version 5.6.3)

SIMONM  PS If you really like a dark theme and don't mind your colours being screwed up, there's a really easy way to get it without any applications or any risk to the system...simply invert the screens colours! I really like it except for when I have to do anything with colour...

Simultaneously press Cmd+Ctrl+Optn+8

Try it!  
(Version 1.3)

SIMONM  Unless you can change the colour of text labels in the menu bar, there really isn't much point in darkening it as you're just reducing contrast and making it harder to read. If you want a dark theme you really need lighter text to make it work...  
(Version 1.3)

SIMONM  I've found Office 2008 to be generally quicker with a much improved interface over 2004. I'm on a first-gen MacBook Pro (2 years old) so not exactly the latest hardware. As much as I'd love to use Numbers, it's not exactly ready for prime-time. Until then, Office 2008 will be my tools of choice until the next version of iWork.  
(Version 12.1)

SIMONM  Simply one of the best Mac apps around! It's lightning fast, stable, intuitive, has a gorgeous interface and has plenty of features including well implemented layers and masks and core image filters that update in real time so you don't have to apply to see the result. It has a great user support forum as well. It's apps like these that are the reason I own a Mac. 6 stars!  
(Version 1.2)

SIMONM  Lineform handles svg importing quite well, but it's useability and intuitiveness are quite poor in my opinion. Particularly working with layers, the symbolisation in the layers window, isolation mode etc are all quite confusing. Selecting a layer doesn't select it in the editor. Also, there is no way to specify a canvas size in pixels. I wish the speed and SVG capability could marry with the useability, layout and intuitiveness of DrawIt...Unfortunately there is no lite vector editor that fulfills all these at the moment...  
(Version 1.5)

SIMONM  It's kind of sad to see this aged software still trying to cling to life. It still looks and feels like an OS 9 app. This software has been well-and-truly trounced by the fantastic Pixelmator in the light image editor category. To the developer...please let it die with dignity...it's had it's time and should be remembered fondly...not like a gollum living beyond its years greedily trying to trick people into giving up their gold.  
(Version 6.1)

SIMONM  As of 1.7.4 MPFreaker does not recognise songs that have their art stored in the iTunes Album Art folder as having art. It only recognises them if they have art in the file. This is of no use for any iTunes 7 users (and lets face it iTunes 7 has been out for a while). The other features work OK but most people will want this to fill in their album artwork and for that reason you don't wanna touch for fear of replacing decent art downloaded from iTunes with inferior versions from the net.  
(Version 1.7.4)

SIMONM  For 5 times the price Freeway 4 Pro would want to have a few extra features!!!

Honestly, for creating simple, good-looking websites on the run, you really can't go past RapidWeaver! There are plenty of commercial websites out there that could use a RW makeover!

Hunt around for a really good theme and get the free plug-ins and you can really do quite a lot.   
(Version 3.6.6)

SIMONM  Is good, but it has a few minor inconsistencies with the latest IUPAC rulings on atomic weights (generally last digits or missing digits). Sorry but as a periodic table it's the first thing I'd check and the last thing you'd expect them to miss. Not that they're likely to affect calculations.  
(Version 2.1)

SIMONM  I downloaded the JMP 7 trial and it IS a Universal binary. It's just the MacUpdate page incorrectly lists it as PPC. I used JMP in my introductory stats course and found it easy to use (easier than SPSS) though now that I've used SPSS 16 I wouldn't go back to JMP, even though SPSS is a little slow and clunky in some ways it makes really nice, professional graphs and tables, which is what I mainly need.  
(Version 7.0.2)

SIMONM  This is one of 3 programs from Omni that do variations on the same theme (the others being OmniPlan and OmniFocus). Seems to me (and from what I've heard about excessive upgrade prices) that they're really only out there to make money. I can't believe they still try to charge for a web browser! Who would pay that? Their programs are OK but way over-priced. It wouldn't take a talented Mac programmer too long to make a similar app as this. I haven't seen it do anything I really need anyway.  
(Version 3.6.4)

SIMONM  aMSN has gone downhill! It seems the latest version is considerably less stable than the last time I tried it a year ago! It crashes whenever you select the Help menu item (done by accident sometimes) is sluggish isn't sending authorisation notifications when adding a contact. It's clearly a bad port of a PC program, which is disappointing because it's the only option for video chat with MSN contacts on the Mac at present.  
(Version 0.97)

SIMONM  Seems to no longer work with MSN contacts. Slow pace of development leads me to consider an alternative client.  
(Version 3.0b2.78326)

SIMONM  I don't know how anyone can claim this app as "powerful". I'm a geographer that uses ESRI ArcMap all day and this app is so basic it's useless for anything except plotting a bunch of points or displaying a vector map or raster image.

Bundling a freely available composite satellite image as a "feature" is very poor form.

This product might be worth 3o bucks if you've got a GPS. $199 is a joke.  
(Version 3.5)

SIMONM  Doesn't seem to let me open .ac3 audio only files. QT claims an unrecognised file format.  
(Version 0.3)