UNCOY  Thanks Tutor. Will do.  
(Version 0.07)

UNCOY  Cog is great but stopped working on me.

Tried Vox, Taply and Play.

Vox and Taply had very high CPU usage in background when not running.

Vox was running at over 3%. Looks awfully good. Unfortunately the playlist is a bit of a pain to manage in comparison to Cog or Play.

Play is a bit ugly but uses .1% CPU in the background.

Which one you choose is a question of looks.  
(Version 0.2.6)

UNCOY  Cog is great but stopped working on me.

Tried Vox, Taply and Play for substitute.

Vox and Taply had very high CPU usage in background when not running.

In the case of Taply, 5.4% on a Macbook Pro 2.5GHz. Just too much background resources.

Play is a bit ugly but uses .1% CPU in the background.  
(Version 1.6)

UNCOY  Cog is great but stopped working on me.

Tried Vox, Taply and Play.

Vox and Taply had very high CPU usage in background when not running.

Play is a bit ugly but uses .1% CPU in the background. Plays music very well. Seems to have some kind of treble boost which makes music sound sharper on so-so systems. On my B&W towers through a top of the line NAD, the sound is a little bit too sharp.  
(Version 0.3)

UNCOY  Cog is great. Just stopped working on me though (won't add songs to the playlist).

Tried Vox, Taply and Play.

Vox and Taply had very high CPU usage in background when not running.

Play is a bit ugly to look at but uses .1% CPU in the background and plays the music very well.

So if you have trouble with Cog, give Play a shot.  
(Version 0.07)

UNCOY  Recovering from the addiction: http://foliovision.com/2009/10/09/37signals-basecamp-url-change/  
(Version 1.0.1)

UNCOY  A superb little tool to be able to write in Textile on your Mac and preview it live.

The preview includes export so you can cut and paste html into your weblog, if like me you are a recovering Basecamp/Textile addict.  
(Version 1.0.1)

UNCOY  Your comment is foolish. Graphic Converter is an extremely powerful application unlike the toys you mentioned.

Sure it needs a makeover. But no need to be insulting.  
(Version 6.5)

UNCOY  Photomatix can make great images (unlike Hydra for example). But it's expensive and complicated. Bracketeer will generate great natural looking HDR for a fraction of the price. Far few bells and whistles, but I'm interested in results, not fiddling or fighting extreme presets.  
(Version 3.2)

UNCOY  I agree with the suggestion to go with Bracketeer. I checked out Hydra's galleries and the results are atrociously artificial. The team look like nice people and they have their marketing sorted. Pity about the software.  
(Version 2.1.1)

UNCOY  Great straightforward software. The HDR that Bracketeer produces is what you want to see (if you are aiming for gorgeous but realistic HDR). If you want plasticy, fake hideous HDR you'll need Photomatix or Hydra.

The interface is really well sorted and minimalist - as a good Apple application should be.

Works great in Aperture. In short, together with PTTools for lens correction, Bracketeer is my best photo processing purchase.  
(Version 3.3)

UNCOY  After another interaction with Benjamin, I can tell you he really cares about his users. I bought a new computer and again ran into licensing trouble but Benjamin had me sorted out within 12 hours.

MimMac also handles packages well (iPhoto, Aperture generate packages into the hundreds of Gigabytes), treating them as folders so you only have to update the files which have changed not the whole database (minutes instead of days of copying).

MimMac is the only affordable high quality sync tool available on OS X. SuperDuper! is the way to go for volume backup but SuperDuper! doesn't handle folders or partial drives well and won't do two way syncing at all.

MimMac and SuperDuper! are a killer combination though.

I've since bought another license to support the developer's efforts with MimMac, despite our rocky start.

What's even better is the licensing scheme will be changed so that your license will continue to work even if Ascendent Softworks disappears (hopefully not!).

All that's left on my wishlist for MimMac is dry run preview of two-way syncing.  
(Version 1.9.2)

UNCOY  Superb free plugin. Makes Safari a joy to use. I've been using it for months.

Really improves browsing experience. Stays out of your way.

Something similar in Safari Stand which I've just started using for the highlighted source code.  
(Version 1.4b3)

UNCOY  Hello Mike,

I got the crashes both with and without AVI movies included for import.

Import is a huge area of fragility and it comes right up front in the application. Better to fix it sooner rather than later.

Best of luck with iVideo!  
(Version 4.0.3)

UNCOY  Hello Mike,

Thanks for the prompt refund. Yes, I buy a lot of shareware and a few times a year the software just doesn't work out. And one developer in particular caused a lot of trouble for me - specifically Tim Breslin of TastyApps. He refused an application swap and wrote threatening and obscene letters when I called him on it.

I think what you should be doing here is either eliminating the import feature (although it is a great feature and something which attracted me to the application) or making the import routine more robust.

There is absolutely no reason why the whole iVideo application needs to crash on import, even if unsuccessful. What you need is to make the import of each individual movie a subroutine. So if this subroutine crashes what happens is that the movie gets logged as incompatible and handed to the end user at the end of import. You could even flag that file not to be imported in the future.

If you do manage to improve your import routine, Mike, let me know.

Best of luck with iVideo. I really appreciate you taking responsibility for the end user experience. If iVideo were a core application for my work, I would take the time to debug this issue much deeper now but I have so much real work now, I just can't do it for the moment.

Cordial regards,

Alec

PS. If Nate would like to take the stars off of my comment above, I would have no issues with it. Based on your prompt response, there is no reason for the low stars to remain.  
(Version 4.0.3)

UNCOY  I am really annoyed about this application. I demoed it from a MacUpdate promo. It loaded in 25 files. Seemed like a nice way to browse one's videos.

Bought it.

First announcement when licenses - it doesn't handle AVI files properly due to defects in QuickTime. I would have liked to have heard about that while we were still in demo mode thank you. iView MediaPro handles avi just ine thank you.

Then iView just won't successfully complete an automatic scan of the video on my hard drive always ending in a crash (even with avi turned off). I've wasted half an hour tweaking the settings already.

I want my money back. But as it's a MuPromo, no chance.

A fake demo mode like this is bait and switch from the developer.

Very displeased. I don't have time to waste troubleshooting gadgetware like this.

Unless you have time to waste stay away.  
(Version 4.0.3)

UNCOY  It is pretty ugly.

No excuse for that sloppy a UI job on a Mac.  
(Version 4.53)

UNCOY  I'm glad you had a better experience.  
(Version 2.3.2)

UNCOY  Here's my experience. Web Snapper wouldn't work on my computer. I asked for help. They couldn't fix it. I suggested an application swap for an alternative product. Declined. Refund promised and never delivered. When I spoke up, the developer began to send me obscenity laced emails.

It took me over a year and a half to get that refund (last week).

Draw your own conclusions.

In the meantime, NetFixer is free and works flawlessly.

PS. For some reason the developer keeps pulling string to get my feedback erased here. As a regular customer at MuPromo and MacUpdate and a regular reviewer, I am somewhat surprised that a personal friendship inside MacUpdate is enough to get my real life experience with TastyApps deleted.  
(Version 2.3.2)

UNCOY  While the MimMac registration system is extremely dangerous (if Benjamin stops his software business you'll have no way to install MimMac on your new computer), otherwise the software is sound. And little else in this sector is. Drive Utilities are difficult to program and seem to attract a peculiar breed of developer (very expensive, locked down in non-user friendly ways, buggy).

MimMac scores very well on two out of three. And that is a lot better than the competition.

For full bootable backup, I recommend SuperDuper! but for sync, MimMac.

I am reviewing MimMac again as there is no way to edit my recent rating.

If MimMac were did not require developer intervention to move to a new computer, it would be a 5.  
(Version 1.9.2)

UNCOY  Come on David, cut the excuses and give the poor soul his/her money back.

The software is clearly defective.  
(Version 2.1)

UNCOY  Thank you to all of you guys who lost your data with the Defrag tool for reporting it here.

Drive Genius 2 has a lot of useless animation but there is no way such a buggy feature as Defrag should be out in the wild.

The benchmarking tool is okay I guess (I have InTech's SpeetTools Utilities as well and they do an even clearer job). I used some of the other testing tools as well (if the scan does work, that's a useful test but I think InTech has that as well).

I think I am going to retire Drive Genius now, before I lose data. I can't believe they allow the Defrag tool to be marketed or to run when it is in this condition. I really don't have a day and a half to set up my computer again after a Drive Genius explosion. If you want to defrag it's cheaper and faster to buy a second external backup drive (you need two backups to do this safely) to clone to the external drive and then clone back to your boot disk. Keep in mind that one of those backup drives has to be Firewire (so you can boot from it).

Clearly, the only Mac disk software you need - or is safe - besides DiskUtility, is Disk Warrior which has saved some buggy disks for me. Oh, and SuperDuper for backups.  
(Version 2.1)

UNCOY  In fairness to Benjamin, he did exchange the serial number quickly this time.

Moreover, out of all the sync apps out there for Mac, MimMac seems to be the only one which works quickly and reliably and/or is not crippled with parasitic copy protection background applications.

I wish Benjamin would find a simpler system for protecting MimMac which does not put the burden on the end (paying) user.  
(Version 1.9.2)

UNCOY  You cannot reformat your hard drive or sell your old computer and move on and keep using MimMac. You have to personally contact the developer and hope that he will get around to allowing you to reactivate your software.

If I had to this much babysitting for all the shareware I buy, I would be out of a job as I would be spending all my time just sending out authorisation emails (for what it's worth, I switch one of three Macs at least every six months and when I do a reinstall I've moved to doing clean installs and putting everything I need back on).

Stop worrying about the pirates - they get whatever application they want anyway - and start worrying about the legitmate users.

Take a page out of Dave Nanian of SuperDuper fame from shirtpocket software.

1. The basics are free.

2. Pirating is easy, but you'd be a few dot versions behind.

Anyone who pirates mission critical applications like backup isn't going to be a customer in any case. When the pirates grow up, they'll buy SuperDuper. In the meantime, Dave doesn't have to deal with them. This model scales. Microsoft and Adobe used a similar strategy for years, although Adobe seems to be moving towards making their applications unpiratable. The consequences - huge hassles for legitimate customers with licensing. Those who do pirate the application actually have less hassle in the end.

What is happening is that the Adobe crackdowns and their absurdly high prices ($2000+/suite/workstation) are making the shareware - reasonably priced photo and graphics space attractive again.

Anyway the point is you won't defeat the pirates, you'll just annoy legitimate users with the heavy handed authorization scheme you are using.

KISS is the golden rule. You follow it almost everywhere else. I ask again, Benjamin, what are you thinking about with this heavy-handed and unscaleable authorisation scheme?  
(Version 1.9.2)

UNCOY  Absolutely brilliant for capturing an image of a full webpage.

I've tried them all and Netfixer is both the simplest and the best.

It works all the time.

Oh, and it's free.  
(Version 0.2)

UNCOY  Well, I have so many domains to manage and it sounded so good, I went ahead and bought it straight up. I wish I’d waited till I’d demo’ed the app first.

The developer states you can import details from a txt file from your DomReg. This is true but VERY limited; you can’t map your nameservers to the fields supplied and there are no fields for: Private, locked, Reg/Admin contacts or most importantly, key info etc. Sure you can add these infos to the Comments field manually but when you have 50+ domains you need to set aside the whole afternoon (yawn). It’s almost seems like the developer either just didn’t think things through, was in a big hurry or has no idea about domain management.

This app has huge potential but needs some follow through at the basis levels. I’d give it a 5.5  
(Version 1.8)

UNCOY  The basic idea is good. Unfortunately the domains within the applications don't automatically get new information periodically. You have to choose to update any given piece of data about the domain.

Far worse is that Rage Domainer freezes regularly. If it doesn’t take down the whole computer you are lucky.

Awful experience. Nothing but trouble.

Three users in a row. Comments from Rage: "It's high quality".

No it's a badly broken RealBasic app.

Someone please build us a decent Cocoa app. I think I'm going to go to running one of the Windows apps under a virtual OS. That's how bad this is.  
(Version 1.8)

UNCOY  Great ability to self-configure for the reasonably technically competent. Turned Barefeats.com from animated GIF mess into a nice white and black website. Brilliant.\

PS. I am also an ex-PithHelmeter (paid). Due to the constant issues of breaking (and current releases don't cover animated GIFs anyway), I gave up PithHelmet a while ago. I have a custom .hosts file but it's a pain to configure. Glimmer solves the configuration issues.  
(Version 1.2)

UNCOY  The upgrade prices and the ridiculous prices for each module (now duplicated with Collins dictionaries as well) should alert anyone with any sense to stay away from this pack of wolves.

I see people who upgraded to version 5 have been shut out in Leopard and have to pay another $20 per dictionary.

If you are online, there are better versions for each language which you can bookmarklet in your browser for quick use - dict.leo.org for German - English for example. On the other hand, when you find yourself offline Ultralingua (or its equivalent) can be useful.

Good news - if you can live with non-Universal Binary, version 4 works just fine under Leopard and doesn't show any signs of breaking in future versions of the OS either. The interface I don't find particularly Windows-like, just very plain-jane. But it works. And that's all we need.

Screw Ultralingua. After seeing what they did to the people who upgraded to the most recent version, they will not be seeing any more of my money.

Talk about a good concept gone bad.  
(Version 7.1.1)

UNCOY  I'm not sure I was clear enough. I sent in the money before the beta or alpha was released. I'm good like that, taking people on their word.

I'd love to see this project succeed or even see a best effort. That's not what we've seen to date.  
(Version 1.0b7)

UNCOY  Hey Tim,

I sent the money on spec, based on their promises to deliver a Eudora equivalent email client for OS X.

IDS haven't delivered anything like Eudora.

How does that make me a bad person, supporting developers?

Go fly a kite (euphemism).  
(Version 1.0b7)

UNCOY  Slow and awful. Why didn't I pony up full price for CDfinder instead of buying this second-rate knock off on promo...

Two stars for running at all. If you've never used a decent cataloging application and don't use the image cataloging functions DiskLibrary is better than nothing.  
(Version 1.8.1)

UNCOY  Hello,

I don't want my money back. I would like you to finish the application.

That's why I and thousands of others sent you $20.  
(Version 1.0b3)

UNCOY  I can't believe I sent these lying cheats money.

Where is the working software? Or some semblance of it...

A deceived Eudora fan.  
(Version 1.0b3)

UNCOY  If you've looked around at KVM switches you've seen that they are pretty dicey. Either they don't work or are buggy or the video doesn't pass through well.

If you can manage to get your video going into a monitor with multiple inputs (preferably all digital!), you don't need a KVM switch any longer.

Teleport will get you there better and faster, with clipboard switching and file transfer. And it takes all of two minutes (1 minute per Mac to configure - don't forget to have a quick look at the read me on the way)

Unbelievably and very generously, Teleport is donationware.

After the onslaught of crappy and overpriced shareware the Mac has had to put up with in the last couple of years (enough to make one think of switching to Linux), it's nice to see a developer creating high quality donationware.

I sent in $20. I hope others are doing the same.

If Teleport is still running as smoothly in a year, I'll send Julien another donation.  
(Version 1.0.1)

UNCOY  Hey Nick,

You know what Voluminous needed to do to enable people to enjoy Project Gutenberg on their computers?

Put up this list of links:

Top 100 Ebooks

Recent books

Offline Catalogue

Bookshelf by Category

If Voluminous were freeware with donations going to Project Gutenberg, it would be a nice contribution.

Right now, it's straight parasiteware.

For those of us who had to put up with Nick and I this far, here's a bonus:

The University of Adelaide's Collection of Ebooks, even better presented than Project Gutenberg. If you've got extra cash to spare, donate to either Gutenberg or the University of Adelaide. Those are the guys bringing the books to you, not these crooks.  
(Version 1.0.2)

UNCOY  No, but the marketing for Voluminous is deceptive (they don't tell you very clearly where the books are coming from).

Frankly, I don't see the value added in Voluminous. Project Gutenberg has perfectly decent search and perfectly decent display options (.txt, .doc, .pdf).

Voluminous more like someone coming along and trying to charge you for the right to breathe.

Can you say no value added?  
(Version 1.0.2)

UNCOY  Unbelievable direct ripoff of Project Gutenberg. All these books are easily available in text, doc and pdf format here: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

It's clowns like this who give Mac shareware a bad name. Turning freeware volunteer labour into payware for the naive.  
(Version 1.0)

UNCOY  Every time you run Synchronize! Pro , it installs parasiteware in the background of your Mac which is very difficult to turn off. The parasiteware doesn't do much except steal processor cycles (going up and down between 0 and 6% in my experience).

That's a pretty heavy performance price to pay.

Synchronize! Pro X used to be a great product. Then the developer became more obsessed with all the unlicensed copies in use rather than the licensed copies that are in use.

Hugh Sontag would do well to make his customers advocates, knock his price down a bit and sell to a much wider public.

Instead he gives rude answers and cripples our computers.

Look elsewhere.  
(Version 5.1.3)

UNCOY  Annoying and repetitive registration process for trivial programs is exactly why you won't have my $10 today. No thanks. A world of pain for your little utility. Developers like you make Linux look more attractive every day.  
(Version 2.5.6)

UNCOY  XLD froze my computer several times and was very difficult to get off the computer. I don't remember the rest of the details now.  
(Version 0.7.1)

UNCOY  Makes the service menu usable again. Only one of the service menu editors which actually works. Check out Butler and Witch also.

Peter Mauer and Marcel Brink (Tinker Tool and Hardware Monitor) are two of very few programmers whom I trust with system level utilities. Rock solid.

I've donated to almost every product they write and recommend you consider making a donation as well.

Any of their code is better and more useful than 90% of the $30+ shareware apps out there.  
(Version 1.1.4)

UNCOY  After two absolutely serene and crash free weeks (after finally getting Default Folder X off of my system), I made the mistake of installing this monster after picking it up in Macheist.

I do a lot of screen capture so I thought SnapZ might be a help. I was a bit apprehensive when I saw the archaic package installed (since when does an app need an installer package - those are for Apple when I'm building my system).

But like Sleeping Beauty I couldn't take my eyes off the needle.

Immediate kernel panic on launch of Snapz Pro X.

The system ran for fifteen minutes the next time and even allowed me to use SnapZ Pro for ten minutes before another kernel panic. Some nice

Subsequently I uninstalled it using the accompanying uninstaller.

On a hunch, I used Devon's EasyFind to do a search on SnapZ including invisible files.

Everything to the trash. App itself zipped up and original thrown away.

Still another kernel panic.

Nasty, expensive crashware. Stay away.

I've gone back to built in screen capture (to PNG - TinkerTool let's you change the default format) and a quick trim in an image editor before saving out to a small web version in GIF or JPEG. BTW, compression with Photoshop results in GIF files which are half the size of what Snapz Pro X generates. If you need something with more automation (Windows), Snap N Drag from Yellow Mug is a great choice (available in a huge bundle with other useful software for half the price of Snapz Pro).

At this point I'm hoping I've got all of SnapZ Pro X out of my system and that Ambrosia didn't mess something hidden up during the half an hour I was fool enough to allow them on my hard drive.

(This is not a bleeding edge Leopard issue. I'm running good old 10.4.8.)  
(Version 2.1.2)

UNCOY  Max is great - so many codecs - doesn't crash my computer. But the tagging is a mess in comparison to iTunes.

A really pity as the author seems to be a very good coder and is extremely generous creating three high quality freeware audio applications (Play and Tags). I'd rather he charged something and finished up tagging with an option to pull in the iTunes tagging.

After hunting around, I recommend anyone looking for properly tagged Lame encoded MP3's use iTunes-Lame Encoder (now on Google code and open source after Alcor also lost interest).

I have also used/tested Audion (PPC only, also dead) and XLD-GUI (absolutely toxic).  
(Version 0.7.1)

UNCOY  Great, simple, elegant application.

Create wonderful black and white mind maps. Do straightforward

This is like MORE or Word 5.1 or MacDraw, a great Mac classic.

Finally a step away from buggy, expensive, bloatware (the entire rest of the mind mapping category).  
(Version 1.3.2)

UNCOY  Crazy pricing. Not so nice interface.

This fad for mind mapping will surely shake out with some better looking and simpler and less expensive applications.

In the meantime, what works in black and white with nice switching between text and different map modes is MyMind.

Free and elegant.  
(Version 4.1)

UNCOY  I've tried lots of these mind mapping programs. I second the vote for MyMind.

Simple, easy, elegant. The opposite of MindMap. Mindmap is complicated, fiddly and hideous.  
(Version 5.2.2)

UNCOY  If it works as promised that would be great. Sync is a minefield.  
(Version 1.4.3)

UNCOY  I'd be more interested in the full deal which is Printfolio. This just covers newsletters and brochures.  
(Version 2.2)

UNCOY  A great program. I have the Standard License already.  
(Version 2.3.4)

UNCOY  Could it be used to burn DVD's of picture collections?  
(Version 1.0)

UNCOY  Very expensive normaly, but a bargain today, When the finder misbehaves, Pathfinder saves.  
(Version 4.7.2)

UNCOY  Alas longtime users don't look too happy.  
(Version 3.1)

UNCOY  Very pricey for those who don't need it, a steal for those who do.  
(Version 2.0.5)