THEBRIX2008  It's a pity that the popular belief is that Google Reader synchronisation to Mac desktop means NetNewsWire because Gruml is, in many ways, a better implementation of that task (as is Socialite, which is not free).

All of the special items in the Google News Web interface (starring, liking, sharing etc.) are implemented via Your Stuff and there is much closer integration with other social networks via toolbar buttons; one click to send to Instapaper, for example. NNW is lagging in those respects.

Even as a basic three-pane reader, ignoring the Google News features, Gruml is excellent; fast synchronisation, no clutter, simple, well-designed news pane styles. And the author is most responsive to requests and bug reports; the only real omission I can think of (adding an optional summary of the article in the article list) is an enhancement down for the next beta, 0.9.14.  
(Version 0.9.13.184)

THEBRIX2008  It's a great pity Vektor3 appears to be no longer updated - the copy I downloaded from Schubert IT is not even a Universal Binary - because the user interface is the best by a mile.

I just had a look at the new Shredder Chess 4, saw the same old clunky Java behaviour, and decided not to put forward my upgrade fee. As a reasonably good player, no more, I am willing to trade off a lot of the chess engine's playing strength for a proper OS X application!  
(Version 3.2.2)

THEBRIX2008  Just to completely contradict the last review, I synchronised 16,000 songs from an iPod to a newly rebuilt Mac (OS X 10.6.1, iTunes 9.0.1) with only one trivial error; a Composer field was not brought across in half a dozen tracks.

There were a couple of problems, although I suspect they are down to iTunes rather than PodWorks:

1. The sync took a few attempts to get going - it froze after 20 or 30 songs the first couple of times;

2. Once the sync had completed, iTunes decided to recognise the iPod it had just received the files from as a "new iPod" and synchronised everything back to it!

I cannot fault PodWorks really; synchronising seems to be a difficult problem to crack in general and handling 16,000 files almost flawlessly is impressive. I tried a couple of similar applications, but they both froze repeatedly at the same place and could not be coaxed into continuing.  
(Version 2.9.6)

THEBRIX2008  I use only part of the functionality (RSS, Google Reader, Twitter). That said ...

EventBox is the only OS X feed reader I have found that synchronises with Google Reader - perfectly, as it turns out - and it is elegantly done. There are lots of subtle but meaningful graphic effects, hotkeys for everything, and many alert options - sound, Growl, a well-designed heads-up (white on black) display, highlights in the Dock, a Menu Bar item ... most of which can be set for all feeds or per-feed.

My only reservation is that the application doesn't have its own browser; the Web pages linked to feeds open in the default Web browser. It would be nice to have some sort of embedded interface as a space-saver on a laptop screen.

I will not be going back to Web interfaces; EventBox is faster, better-looking, easier to use and more tweakable, and $15 is not much for what it offers.  
(Version 1.0r580)

THEBRIX2008  I used to use KeePassX to keep my licences. It is an excellent general encryption program, but was starting to become unwieldy and the difference in switching to LicenseKeeper is huge - the sheer slickness of capturing a licence is great.

Press Import Application and select it from the Finder to create the basics (database entry, name, icon, version number etc.), then select the corresponding registration email in Entourage and press Attach Email. The email contents are parsed and usually put into the various fields (registration name, registration email, product key etc.), including attachments as separate files; that doesn't always work, because there is no standard format for registration emails, but I found there was no further typing required about 80% of the time. So a registration is usually captured in two mouse clicks and, even better, the product key is automatically pasted to the clipboard.

If there is no email, the application details may be typed directly into the form, which is well designed (a big box for serial number on the front tab, so no constraints on its format).

I created a database with about 40 entries in half an hour, then exported it (XML plus encrypted attachments) to DropBox. Job done, and far more accurately than before; spending a little money on a dedicated application was money well spent.  
(Version 1.4.8)

THEBRIX2008  I have a Sony e-reader (PRS-505), which doesn't come with Mac desktop software and isn't supported by Sony UK - the official advice was to "use Parallels or Boot Camp to run the Windows software"! - but this application fills the gap superbly.

The Sony could be used without desktop software - it mounts in Finder as a drive, and .lrf files could be dragged into the appropriate folder - but caliber makes things easier and better:

1. Synchronisation between desktop and Sony e-book libraries, so the desktop library can be moved into a Dropbox folder and backed up that way;

2. Conversion of e-book formats, which is a lifesaver as .lrf is a relatively new format and there are many older e-books in (for example) .pdb format which, otherwise, would be unusable;

3. Editing of e-book metadata, including cover art, again another lifesaver as it is frequently wrong or mis-spelt;

4. (Best of all) Recipes, which scrape an RSS feed and bundle the content, including embedded images, into a .lrf file for synchronisation. There are now almost 200 recipes (100 in English), including all the main news and current affairs sites.

With the Sony Windows software, RSS feeds are not available at all in the UK and (I believe) are restricted to a small number of pre-defined sites (yuck) in the USA.

This is a great example of a "labour of love" which is better than the vendor's software; I have donated quite a bit to the author because it is so impressive.

The only omission is that Waterstone's e-book store cannot be accessed using Calibre. However, it uses DRM to protect its content, which is barely less expensive than printed books anyway, so I would not be interested even if I could access it; manybooks.net provides open content galore.  
(Version 0.5.3)

THEBRIX2008  This must be an almost unique case of software moving from commercial to free (not open source) and speeding up in development ...

The difference between 5.9 and the new 5.9.2 Sneaky Peeks is spectacular. Not only is rendering improved (I can now use several financial sites which were unusable with 5.9 and the old WebKit) the whole application has become much more predictable in its behaviour, particularly when opening dozens of tabs at once; 5.9 frequently ground almost to a halt, or even crashed, in that case.

An unexpected surprise is that what looks like a trivial change on paper (automatically closing the tab drawer when the last tab is closed) improves the whole "tone" of the browser. The user interface may not have changed much in some time, but it still looks and feels good; there is nothing superfluous and I hope that OmniGroup resists the temptation to add CoverFlow or similar worthless bling as it moves towards 6.0.

After some time away I am back with OmniWeb as my default browser.  
(Version 5.9.1)

THEBRIX2008  As with browsers, I keep moving between RSS readers (NetNewsWire, NewsFire, Vienna) ... but keep coming back to Shrook because of four reasons:

1. It has the most subtle and effective method of showing which feeds have updated most recently;

2. Although it demands a wide screen, because of the physical size of the single window, a lot is packed in without becoming unreadable, and the method of switching between feed listings, feed details and Web pages without using tabs is slick;

3. The new "highlight item changes" feature is better than NetNewsWire's;

4. It consistently has the fewest problems with parsing malformed feeds, of which there are unfortunately too many.  
(Version 2.7)

THEBRIX2008  I used GyazMail for years but have ditched it for Postbox because real thought has clearly gone into how to handle large quantities of mail in new ways - which turn out to be better ways.

My biggest problem with email is that I receive masses of attachments which, with other clients, remain trapped in the body of individual emails until they are laboriously saved, one by one, to disk; here the "attachment views" bring them out into lists inside the client, and QuickLook (new to 1.0b8) prevents useless attachments even having to be opened. Brilliant!

Also, the grouping of conversations and tagging, although hard to explain, are again well thought through and better done than any client I have come across.

If I were Mozilla I would stop developing Thunderbird and throw everything at Postbox; I feel that significant improvements are being made here to the whole concept of email.  
(Version 1.0b8)

THEBRIX2008  Having tried them all (literally!) MacCleanse is the easiest to use for day-to-day cleaning as, unlike Onyx, Cocktail or TinkerTool System, it has a one-pane interface. Open it, Command-E and that's it - no presses on tabs or buttons are required. The interaction can be made even slicker by removing prompts to restart Finder or to close the application when cleaning is done.

It also appears to clean more options than (the totality of tabs on) these tools - it was still finding some logs, in particular, after combinations of them had been used.

What it deliberately doesn't do is system, rather than application, cleaning and fixing (permissions, preferences, kernel caches, databases, DS_Store files etc.); any of those three applications will suffice.  
(Version 1.3.6)

THEBRIX2008  Graphic Converter X is probably the definitive example of "doing complex things requires a complex interface". It is intimidating, with masses of options to play with, and requires quite a bit of learning, but there is probably nothing else that could cope with my task - managing an archive of nearly 20,000 photographs and producing picture libraries, redistributable slideshows and similar. It turns out that, in this situation, anything Web-based is appallingly slow, even with broadband, compared to a desktop application: for what GCX does, it is cheap.

XnView MP is a promising start, and clearly takes some features from GCX, but is an early alpha (v0.12) at present.

I am impressed by the way GCX manages to grow slowly over time and take on new tasks without becoming a complete muddle; although the appearance is a bit dated (that said, not being bombarded with HUD palettes and other superficially impressive features is a blessing) it is surprisingly slick once the learning curve is got over.  
(Version 6.3)

THEBRIX2008  I upgraded from v4.x to v5.x, and believe the upgrade is only just worth it; the dual-pane view, now that the bugs have largely been knocked out of it, is worthwhile, and Cover Flow is nice to have but not essential.

There are still a number of fairly trivial inconveniences which could easily be fixed. For example, secure deletion defaults to one pass every time. Should the number of passes (1,7,35) not be set in Preferences as default? In passing, the 5.0.5 Preferences window navigation is a big improvement on before, although the spacing of the left-hand pane is a bit tight.

However, my biggest concern is the "Windows problem" - outmoded baggage being dragged along and the basics of the past, rather than of the future, being attended to because of that. The problem is not unique to Path Finder; I see mature Windows file managers slowly making the painful adjustments that are hinted at here.

For example, the archive types supported emphasise stuffing, which is nearly dead, yet do not include 7z, which is up-and-coming, or any support for encrypted archives, and having facilities like hex views and Subversion accessible by default feels ... quaint.

More importantly, tag support of almost anything is not there. Something like Jaikoz would be over the top, but I would expect at least basic editing of MP3, AAC, FLAC and EXIF tags. As for bulk renaming, it is almost non-existent; again, a clone of Name Mangler would be excessive, but almost anything would be better than a one-line dropdown with no options.

These days, for better or worse, people - even reasonably technically adept ones like me - take photographs and videos and rip music and want to tag and organise the masses of files resulting, and I don't feel Path Finder is supporting those activities much.

I feel there has to be a rethink of how people manage files nowadays; it may be less "intellectual" than in the past but, paradoxically, it needs more powerful facilities than a wrapper round what the operating system does.  
(Version 5.0.5)

THEBRIX2008  As a general board games player (although not an expert in Reversi) I have some idea of the strategy involved, and I must say I like Muryan. The top two of the five levels are devastating, and even on Novice and Easy, although it is fairly clear how the playing program has been deliberately weakened, exploiting that is another matter. In one game it left a corner square open early (a bad idea), then fought for most of the rest of the game to prevent me landing a piece on it, which was impressive.

It is worth noting that, although there are five explicit levels, there are effectively ten levels in practice as switching off "Highlight Legal Moves" makes the game far more difficult - the dots pointing out legal moves tend to draw the eye to trouble.

Other than the engine ... good, clear 3D graphics and easy gameplay with scarcely a wasted click. A minor wording issue: "Lock Board Position" and "Reset Board Position" would be better as "Lock Board View" and "Reset Board View" as they are nothing to do with the position of the pieces on the board - they refer to the pan and tilt of the board on-screen.

The only enhancement I can think of is that would be nice to be able to save and load games as separate files (is there a standard Reversi notation, like PGN for chess games?)  
(Version 1.1)

THEBRIX2008  (Disclaimer - the price has doubled since I bought it!)

iArchiver does the job well, feels Mac-like (excellent use of drag and drop, which makes it very easy to create archives spanning multiple directories) and, at last, forms a complete replacement for the remnants of Stuffit Expander still around and the occasional command line tools previously required for some formats. It also avoids the temptation to bombard the user with excessive configuration options and irrelevant statistics, which is a problem with most Windows-based archivers.

A couple of possible minor improvements:

1. Better feedback - if a password for an encrypted archive is entered incorrectly, it is simply asked for again with no indication that the first password was wrong;

2. Notwithstanding the previous remark about complexity, the engine appears not to support de-archiving of some of the more obscure ZIP and 7-zip options (particularly "solid archives" and some of the more recent of the half-dozen ZIP encryption schemes) as I occasionally have trouble decrypting archives created under Windows (PowerArchiver 2007 and 2009). No problem in the other direction.  
(Version 1.6.1)

THEBRIX2008  This is better than Spotlight, which is not hard, and even Path Finder's search, which is surprising. I thought the second was unbeatable, but this one finds everything - often several times more items. And it is more usable - the breadcrumb list at the bottom is a nice touch.

It would be useful if a double-click on a folder could be configured to either open in Finder or open in Path Finder (or any other Finder replacement?); that would integrate everything nicely.  
(Version 0.3)

THEBRIX2008  The previous user is right - this application is brilliant if you use RSS feeds in a specific way, and I suspect it has been designed with that in mind.

If you have a large number of feeds, and read most of them every day, it is not helpful, as the "stream of news" makes it difficult to differentiate between them and the navigation is slow - click on item - pop out summary - close summary - click on next item ... in addition, you are showered with Growl notifications (one per feed), although those may be switched off in Preferences. The traditional three-pane reader is more usable in this instance.

However, if you have a small number of feeds, it is very slick.

I fall into the first category, but put a couple of my most-used feeds into Headline and like it!

The only real problem is that the pop-out item summary takes up a lot of screen space over and above the (small) main window, so that the space saving is not as great as it appears at first. There are also a couple of glitches; marking as read doesn't remove the item from view immediately, and I have found "refresh all" taking up a lot of CPU.

Overall, well-designed for a specific task.  
(Version 1.0.2)

THEBRIX2008  I take back - in part - two previous comments on beta versions; the CPU problems have been solved, and I have been running version 3 final for three weeks with no problems. There have also been some welcome improvements in the user interface; for example, the (useless) Old Files option - and any other option - may be switched off, and a couple of user interface features that slowed down operation (animations, and calculating package sizes) may also be switched off.

However, I have come across two bugs and one issue. The bugs are that empty entries for application logs cannot be deleted, and that Growl tickets are not found. The issue, which has always been there and which, I suspect, is an artefact of the CleanApp design, is that in general too many files are marked for delete. Two Address Book lock files are almost always marked but, more seriously, all downloaded files from a Web browser are marked, with an obvious risk. There is a workaround - exclude ~/Downloads from the discovery and deletion - but the workaround is not obvious. Perhaps the Preferences option should be auto-populated with ~/Downloads and ~/Desktop?

Overall, the author appears to have cracked the problems which led me to stop using CleanApp for some time, and has made it much more pleasant to use as well.  
(Version 3.0.2)

THEBRIX2008  Having tried all the other (non-iTunes) taggers, Jaikoz wins. The only real downsides are the UI appearance - but that is a price worth paying for a cross-platform application - and some aspects of usability, as it is possible to cram up to four extremely "busy" panes (catalogue, tracks being viewed, tracks being edited, exhaustive details about the current track) into one window.

The most useful feature of all is that it is extremely easy to cut and paste information between tracks, as the track editing pane is spreadsheet-like. It is incredible that no other Mac application (that I have come across) has adopted this approach as it is by far the slickest when working with complex albums. The other big win is that, in effect, any field, including filenames, can be set automatically from the (parts of) any other field using macros: for quick cleanups (e.g. the common one I find where composer and artist are reversed) this approach is unbeatable. Finally, there is standards support for ID3 tags of every version; tags set in the iTunes view are automatically copied to the ID3 view so that any quirks, because of differences between the standards, can be ironed out on the spot. If you don't need it the ID3 view can be switched off.

And the MusicBrainz facilities work superbly; although I have less need of it than most (as I mainly listen to classical music) they fixed several "unknown" albums handily.

As others point out, this application is not meant for an existing, perfectly-tagged iTunes collection which will only ever be used on a Mac and an iPod; it is perfect for building a collection which is not tied to Apple products.  
(Version 2.8)

THEBRIX2008  This is a nice application.

Although unwieldy (it is based on Mozilla, and scatters "Mozilla" folders around various places in ~/Library) it is fast to start up and fast in operation, performs large imports without choking (a 9,000-track iTunes library and 100 folders of FLAC files in my case) and, most importantly for me, handles classical music well; the Composer field is treated with equal importance to the others, accented characters keep their accents, and long fields are not truncated.

For me Songbird's two big advantages over iTunes are that open formats (FLAC, OGG) are accepted and that rules and filtering are significantly better (Smart Playlists, in particular, completely trounce anything iTunes offers); some of the add-ons, such as a duplicate or dead track finder, a drag-and-drop play queue and a tagger much more powerful than the built-in tagger (which is more or less the same as that offered by iTunes) are very useful.

I feel that the developers have done a fine job in copying iTunes where it is good (doing otherwise would have been a bad idea as iTunes has become the popular standard, for better or worse) and improving on it when it is not. The extensions potentially put Songbird far in advance of iTunes, and no doubt more will be released now that it has reached a production version.  
(Version 1.0)

THEBRIX2008  Transmission is production but muTorrent is beta ... and it shows.

I agree with others regarding transmission speed, which is significantly superior under muTorrent with my connection. However, after that it is downhill; the muTorrent user interface is more obviously "Mac-like" but, surprisingly, is much less effective at presenting information because there is a lot of white space and a lot of cramped text, whereas Transmission barely has a wasted pixel. And there is significant functionality in Transmission not present in muTorrent, most notably the blocklist of bad clients and the Web interface.

Finally, I am surprised at the elementary mistake of not setting up the file association (so it is not possible to click on a .torrent in Finder and automatically load it into muTorrent); that should have been caught during alpha testing.  
(Version 0.9.0.1b)

THEBRIX2008  Very nice application - better than Exposé as it displays minimised as well as normal windows and is not so obtrusive. The only minor bug I have come across is that the thumbnail view of windows momentarily flicks on and off whenever the mouse pointer crosses a window button on its way to the Menu Bar; a "dwell time" could be introduced.

It would be worth having more display options. For example, the application icons could be removed from beside the window buttons; they are small to the point of losing clarity. Also, minimum and maximum window button sizes could be set, and transparency made adjustable. Finally, the button bar could be displayed down the left or right of the window, to exploit the mouse pointer's stopping at the edge of the screen (if Spaces is not used).  
(Version 1.2.1)

THEBRIX2008  Two words on the last review: Ignore. Wrong!

KeePassX wins because it is cross-platform and open-source, so the password database format is never going to fade away undocumented; such an event caught me before. I use Dropbox to share a database between three computers (PC, Linux, Mac), and also synchronise it to a PocketPC. I have never had problems - no matter where a change is made the updated database is always readable on the other three platforms.

The database format is surprisingly powerful; for example, entries may contain files, which is vital when "entering" serial numbers as some are distributed as binary attachments, and they may be nested in folder structures if needed.

My only caveat is that, of the four versions I use, the Mac version has the least native appearance, probably because it is a Qt application. And some of the messages and prompts could do with more work; for example, if you type in a wrong password to access a KeePassX database you are notified that either the password is wrong or the database is corrupt. The second is relatively unlikely, and should not be reflected in a common error message.

But the caveats are superficial; the functionality is excellent.  
(Version 0.3.4)

THEBRIX2008  The two big iCab winners for me are, first, the degree of control over what is, or is not displayed - just about anything (plugin content, images, scripts, iframes, cookies) from third-party servers can be filtered out, either globally or per-site. Secondly, the tab control is excellent; in a nutshell, a new page triggered by any action (user, same site, different site, external program) may be opened in any of a new window, a new foreground tab or a new background tab, and those options are again entirely controllable.

I also note that one of the major stumbling blocks with programs produced by individual developers - poor imports - is no issue here; I was asked to import from OmniWeb, Opera or Safari on first run!

Also, the advertising filter is surprisingly good - I switched Privoxy off and the iCab filter on and was seeing very little that shouldn't have been displayed.

The only real weaknesses I see are the rather murky graphical design - sharper icons and tabs are a must - and the very conservative form-filling. It has been deliberately designed not to automatically fill and submit everything in sight, although I feel that the author has gone a bit too far the opposite way in demanding authorisation for every action. (Trick - changing the default "Strict" field parsing to "Less strict" saves a bundle of trouble).

I can't comment on the price as I bought iCab as a MacUpdate promo (and with a significantly more favourable exchange rate than now :) but, caveats aside, it is a great browser and a remarkable effort by one developer. 1Password compatibility would round things off!  
(Version 4.2.5)

THEBRIX2008  Great plugin - auto-close of the Download window (why Apple has left it hanging around after a download has completed, release after release, is beyond me), navigating through tabs with single keys, a single key to undo the last closed tab, and another one to maximise the window (full desktop) are winners on their own.

Then the search additions steal Inquisitor's thunder - they are similar, but simply better. Less attractive visually maybe, but slicker, and more results can be shown in the dropdown from the search box.

Other features such as the thumbnails added on Google and Yahoo! search results, and the full screen (rather than full desktop) option, are less useful to me personally, but others will differ.

The authors describe themselves as "a group of kids having fun so please don't take us too seriously." This is unduly modest - Saft and SafariStand have been the "gold standard" of such plugins for a long time and now they just look old, with too many redundant or trivial options.  
(Version 1.0b10)

THEBRIX2008  Radioshift has the best user interface and the widest range of available stations of any stream grabber I have used; the sheer ease of searching and bookmarking is great, and the interface for recording has greatly improved since v1.0.

The problem for me (in the UK) is that other products are improving fast; BBC iPlayer, after a poor start, is now a potential replacement for the BBC stream handling, with Listen Again saving the bother of setting up timed schedules and the freeware iPlayer Grabber doing a lot of what Radioshift does anyway, and the schedules are more complete; Radioshift uses a third-party source which offers generic titles such as "BBC Radio 4 Documentary" rather than the actual name of the programme, presumably for copyright reasons.

And the astonishing FStreamer is "good enough" for everything else.

Was Radioshift worth $32 at v1.0? Certainly, because nothing even remotely close to it existed at the time. Will it be worth $32 in the future? More doubtful, especially when it doesn't do video at all.  
(Version 1.1.1)

THEBRIX2008  As others point out, The Tagger is going to have to be good to justify paying anything for it, given that iTunes and now Songbird have the same facility for free.

Certainly filling in tags is much slicker than either of these, and some of the facilities to copy between tags are very useful. (I particularly like the ability to set filenames from tags, which is an easy fix to some horrible messes).

Unfortunately, the user interface needs a lot of improvement; I work with classical music, which tends to expose problems with such packages, and here is no exception; the user interface offers two panes, display on the left and edit on the right, and the sheer length of some tags in the display pane means that the edit pane on the right is pushed partly off the screen. Why not put edit below display or even merge them, allowing edit in place? In addition, some of the fields (particularly Title) in the edit box are far too short and, for some reason, the edit box is fixed width but the display box is variable width, which I feel is the opposite of what is needed.

That is the big issue; the only other major problem is that auto=numbering (e.g. of filenames) doesn't support a leading zero (01,02,...09,10...), which means that the files don't sort properly in Finder and I have to use Name Mangler to rename them again (!)

A decent first try, but I regret to say that there are better freeware packages for other platforms (MP3Tag for Windows, for one).  
(Version 1.1)

THEBRIX2008  This is a massive improvement on v3.x. The most important of all is that the board is easy to read at any scale with the "Gameknot" font; down with bitmaps! The database usage is as slick as ever, and the engine handling is now up-to-date (supporting UCI engines). As well as handling existing games I have no problem playing new games with computer opponents; that is not the case with some other chess database programs.

There are still a few shortcomings:

1. The icons (application and documents) are not up to modern standards;

2. The preferences screen needs clarification (for example, how fonts, board graphics and colours go together is unclear);

3. Some of the font rendering, particularly in the right-hand pane (game score), is messy;

4. Unless I am missing something, it is not possible to set UCI parameters against an engine which means that, for example, Glaurung 2.0.1 cannot be used with its opening book;

5. The game downloader - a nice touch which allows This Week in Chess games to be downloaded automatically - fails with "Where is BOMArchiveHelper.app?"

6. It is not clear where tablebases are stored, although they are referred to by the program.

7. The program insists on recreating a folder ~/ExaChess Games if it is deleted. (It contains various classic game databases and similar).

But these are relatively minor points - although I am not keen on the behaviour exhibited by 7 - and the program, in general, works well.  
(Version 4.0b6)

THEBRIX2008  I am a keen user of OpenOffice (PC/Linux) and NeoOffice (Mac) and I must say that IBM has done a great job here - all existing files load and save perfectly, including those with macros and/or password protection, and the user interface is a significant improvement over that of the other packages, which is frequently muddled or overwhelming. Everything is just easier to get to - grouping of open files in a single tabbed window, the permanently-visible palette with common options on the right hand side (perhaps borrowed from iWork, but never mind), the rearranged and simplified menus and, in particular, the completely reworked Preferences. Finally, jargon has been stripped out, more important and less important options are physically separated, and those for each subprogram (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation) are available at the same time!  
(Version 1.2b)

THEBRIX2008  This is a great application and (nearly) unique for the Mac. I have two old POP3 email accounts which are completely overrun with spam but, occasionally, have a worthwhile email sent to them so cannot be ignored for too long. The inbuilt spam checks look "too simple" but, in fact, work very well and it takes a couple of minutes per day to manage these accounts. Much faster than downloading to an email client or redirecting to a Web mail account to filter there!  
(Version 2.4.9)

THEBRIX2008  Camino still stands up splendidly against the rest - although it may lack fireworks, the basics are done solidly and without fuss and it is fast, particularly with the Core 2 Duo optimised builds that are available. And it still has unique features - I am surprised that the built-in ad blocker is either omitted elsewhere or implemented so poorly the authors might as well not have bothered (Opera, OmniWeb).

Plus - the two make-or-break attributes for me - it has a 1Password plugin and it works with two Web sites I use which fail with all WebKit-based browsers and for which there seems to be little interest, on either side, in fixing. Unfortunately, one is my share dealer and the other is my pension provider, so they have to work ...  
(Version 1.6.4)

THEBRIX2008  RSS menu would be excellent - at face value, it is better than any of the Dashboard RSS readers - if only it were stable! The process has to be killed depressingly often (spinning beachball and 100% CPU usage), and this problem has gone back a long way: I stopped using the application at about 1.3.x, came back at 1.7.2 and was sorry to see it again.

It is frustratingly hard to pin down a scenario where the problem occurs, but I have over 20 feeds updating every 30 minutes and 2 feeds every 10 minutes. It seems to be more likely to happen just after waking from sleep.  
(Version 1.7.2)

THEBRIX2008  GyazMail has become my primary mail client for five reasons:

1. Images, HTML/script content and similar potential problems are unfailingly parsed out of spam, something which Mail.app still does not do infallibly;

2. Very fast at retrieval, even over encrypted connections (gmail/gmx) which other clients often slow down excessively at;

3. Each account is strictly separated in the folder hierarchy - I am not a fan of "universal inboxes" and similar attempts to divert every account into one structure;

4. Straightforward - even slightly old-fashioned - user interface with a lot of customisation possible;

5. Easy integration with Growl and SpamSieve; both "just work" without any scripts or plugins having to be installed.

Overall, excellent, and a reminder that the latest user interface fashions may not last.  
(Version 1.3.8)

THEBRIX2008  Excellent. I used to use Privoxy for ad filtering, but removed it because it became out of date and no longer caught the latest scripting tricks for pushing ads. BFilter is bang up to date and I have had no problems so far. Unlike, for example, Pith Helmet, it works in everything; the trick the author has implemented to do this (Apple menu, then Location, then select your location prefixed with "(BF)" to turn the filter on, or select your location only to turn it off) is brilliant and saves typing the details of proxies into Web applications, as Privoxy required.

The only minor demerit is that the GUI rules editor is Windows-only. However, the default rules are faultless and there should be no reason to edit the text files which contain them.  
(Version 1.0)

THEBRIX2008  Fast, well laid out and an eyeopener (the GB of space taken up by GarageBand and iDVD support files!) ... but derailed by giving incorrect results. My iTunes folder is described by Finder as 32.1GB, but is reported by WhatSize as 23.7MB, and the error propagates backwards through the tree. That appears to be the only error here, but it's a bad one.  
(Version 10.3.9)

THEBRIX2008  Excellent - in many ways, superior to iTunes for ripping. The keyboard navigation is perfect - when dealing with Baroque music, which tends to have a lot of tracks with very similar names, it is easy to fill in dozens of tracks without effort using only the arrow keys and cut+paste. Bravo!  
(Version 0.5.6)