Spyder for Mac2.2.13

After a year I'm still impressed with this software and even more impressed the developers have kept up with it considering MySpace virtually killed themselves with their website change awhile back. It's true a lot of people have abandoned MySpace for Facebook but as a music producer MySpace is still nice free repository to share my music and promote it. This app really does have the only working song play increaser that improves your chart ranking, I highly recommend it for any new bands.

This is by far the most complete MySpace marketing tool out there. I was using oCommunity a few years ago and it got several of my accounts deleted. I wish I had searched harder for Spyder because it's been nothing but pure satisfying success since I started using it to manage all my MySpace accounts. I can't even begin to image all the hard work that's gone into this application, I spent weeks writing my own scripts after I ditched oCommunity to do only a small fraction of what Spyder can do. If you need results from MySpace then I highly recommend Spyder, it's worth every time saving cent. I was stupid and paid $300 for the full version of oCommunity which is not even a Mac native application. Spyder which is a native Mac application only costs $79 for everything, and by everything I mean everything any other MySpace tool can do and then some, like the mp3 song plays increaser which actually works towards increasing your rankings in the charts, and I've tried them all. Sure every application could use more features or do something better but we'd be waiting forever and as it stands this application is the best in its class and a better price.

I don't think rearranging the UI for messages would be beneficial to most users. There's a good reason Apple Mail doesn't use the "wide" style. First it takes up a lot more space on the screen and if you're on a 12" macbook that's inconvenient . Second I think it looks ugly, and I don't think Apple got it wrong. Obviously if I'm off my rocker on this one and enough suggest it as a feature request I could make it an option. Until MySpace finalizes their new layout there will be some quirks to work out, such as with newlines in messages and bulletins format. Eventually the auto-update will work how it does in Flirt. There are some permissions issues that need to be ironed out. If nothing shows up in Spyder from a search, you'll get the same result on MySpace. If otherwise I'd like to see an email from you so I can fix it. Keep in mind that Spyder does require frequent updates to stay compatible with MySpace and a lot of the cost is associated with support. If MySpace never changed anything the support cost would be much less and the price would be much lower.

The App does what it claims, it still has some little drawbacks: The GUI is not really perfectly streamlined but it will work. On the mac we have seen better. Examples: - MySpace Mails: the user always has to pull up the message content window to be able to read message contents. Better would be to put them on the RIGHT of the screen vertically because that's how mails are read (and why people use WideMail to change OSX Mail's behaviour). - Message/Posting Previews are not accurate: in MySpace posted messages look totally different, you have to insert extra html like to make linebreaks work, no real preview is available. This takes the user a lot of time fixing messages and trying them out in MS via the browser until they look good. - Bulletins have also no real previews. In MySpace (at least in MS v2.0) the bulletins have a fixed width which Spyder does not reflect. - Autoupdate: there is an automativ update checker. It loads the new Spyder version to the standard Downloads-folder, unpacks it and leaves it there for you to move. There are better systems (like Sparkle). - The user really has to know a lot about MySpace etc. to make any use of this app at all. I am using it since several months and still have no idea why some search functions won't work (maybe MySpace restrictions?) or some tasks need many steps to achieve. There is room for usability improvements. - Wishful thinking: german translation (and others?) would be nice. - I find the app a little costy. There is just no alternative. There are more examples but I think you get the idea. I am sure much work went into this app and updates come regularly as promised and quickly. Whenever MySpace changes something you got your Spyder update only hours later, maybe a day!

Great program..! Am very much enjoying the ease of use & feel it is worth the $. Thanks, Couple of Q's: -How does the Proxy host feature work for the Increase Song Plays Function.. Not sure of the steps to take here. -There was mention of a Facebook / Youtube booster in the preview. Are there any functions here? Look forward to hearing from someone shortly. Thanks..! Ron

I've been using Spyder since the beginning of the year and it's come around quite a bit since then. Right after I started using it version 2.1 came out and it included all these useful features like searching people's comments for active users and support for groups. Now with the latest version I'm able to add real song plays and bump myself up in the charts, something the mp3plays program doesn't do! I'm truly amazed at how quickly the developers fix and improve this program. I'd recommend it for anyone trying to conquer myspace land.

Spyder is really helping me kick a** and save a huge amount of time in band promotion. I use Spyder everyday for multiple accounts and I can't even imagine going back to managing my MySpace accounts through a web browser again. I just upgraded to the elite license and am very happy with the new proxy support. I've found that setting the delay isn't much of any issue when you use the proxies because they are all typically very slow anyways. When ever I had any questions they were answered quite quickly and the few problems I had were fixed just as quickly as well. Each update gets better and new features seem to spring up frequently.

as a user of this program almost daily for well over 2 years, i can report that i've found the developer very responsive and willing to hear and help track down bugs and issue updates. this program is not for the causal myspace user. but for who it's meant, it's a great value and time saver. very well worth the money. if you don't understand why you'd want to spend money on it, then it's not intended for you and your uses. it CAN get a little crashy with databases containing hundreds of thousands of records. i've never lost any data or work.

I finally got a reply from the developer who sent me my unrecoverable code. Upon entering it, Spyder sent me to a webpage asking me to upgrade for a grand total of $130 to continue using the software. This is obviously a scam. My Investigative Team has submitted the developer's information to various groups we're associated with including the Better Business Bureau.

When I first purchased this software, I could not activate it. I had to contact the developer who emailed me a code that fixed the problem. Now I have a brand new computer that I just bought recently. Once again, the activation would not work. I contacted the developer. Instead of troubleshooting, he emailed me 2 links pertaining to pages on the support page. ...Pages I had already read through and failed to have success with. I forwarded the developer previous emails with him including my proof of purchase receipt from PayPal. Since that last email I have heard nothing back and my software is still paid for and not activated. I would hate to call this a scam... perhaps it's just really terrible tech support. Regardless, it doesn't work and the developer doesn't seem very interested in helping the paying customers. ...or at least not this one.

I am now getting an error when trying to log into the account I maintain with spyderx. The error says "Login failed. Either a server error occurred, the login or password is incorrect, or the account does not exist. Try again?" When I actually logged into the real myspace, I saw that my account had been blocked, likely due to the spydex activity, but I entered a captcha and unblocked it. This happened several times. Could this be the problem? Has MySpace somehow shut me down from using spyderx? I tried to log into my personal account and even a third account that I maintain and I got the same error, even though I did not maintain these particular accounts with spyderx. Have they just shut down this software completely? Any ideas?

So the consensus is that this App is horrible in its current incarnation. Soooo.. what alternatives do people recommend for MySpace Management Apps on the mac?

Looks like it's gone from $35 to $40. Good luck again! Even if you have huge numbers of friends, after trying this out, I've concluded that it isn't going to save you that much time compared to doing it on the site itself - for free.

For what this program is designed for... adding and managing large numbers of myspace users, it's really the only Mac native solution. I have a premium license with free lifetime upgrades. Version 2.0 is worth looking at if you have only used 1.4.x. There are a lot more features and the program is MUCH faster and efficient. The developer has been amazingly helpful and responsive whenever I've had problems, sometimes releasing an update addressing my issue mere hours after contacting him. The program has been and continues to be too crashy, but some of that, he tells me has to do with Apple's Core Data framework and how it scales when dealing with hundreds of thousands of records (Myspace users) 2.0.9 is vastly more stable and improved over the initial 2.0 release. So to sum up, the program can be frustratingly unstable, but it's improving, it's a Mac native solution, and the developer is super helpful and responsive.

Sadly, the app doesn't do what it's designed to do-- add friends. I had no problem with the older version and I thought this would be a worthy upgrade since it was so clunky before only to find out it doesn't work at all. bumma!

I'm a registered user of SpyderX 1.4. I have to say that initially, given all the MySpace spam it seemed like a good idea at the time. But over time I found that version 1 was very clunky: slow to fetch data even on a 6M/s DSL connection, and about as complex as using MySpace just from the web page. I basically gave up on SpyderX. For my needs I now run FLOCK, the web browser. The UI is a lot more simple [friends sidebar] and you can do everything necessary from a SIDEBAR. And not only with MySpace [read on]. So if you add Glimmerblocker [to filter ads] + AdBlock Plus [to get the insidious stuff] to Flock you pretty much have an effective social network wrangler that does not only MySpace, but Facebook, Flickr, and a bunch of other services. Maybe the author has done some improvements, maybe he's more accessable to his users [this time], maybe... well, for me, as far as version 2 goes, unless it's a free upgrade for me.. I think maybe [based on previous experience with the app, keychain bugs, etc] it's a pass this time.

35 bucks? Ha. Good luck.

For all the people who can't find and email. I managed to find one hidden in the website: help@spyderx.com.

I'm annoyed because my computer died and I had to reinstall everything from a backup, Spyder doesn't work with the registration number I bought, and there doesn't seem to be a contact email address where I can get in touch with them about this issue... which obviously is why I'm writing here. I'm with the others on this one, Please provide an email contact address. Thanks p.s. Please help me out by emailing me! Thanks Richie

It would be helpful if there was a contact email address on the website.

yeah.. drop the price and add facebook.... and my orders in :-)

now if there was a facebook version ;)

I just put my friends myspace in my address book. and I can go to there myspace from address book, in the book marks menu, in Safari.

The connecting problem seems do be solved. So, now it's a worth. ;)

I've paid for this and I lovED this app because it really helps people with a lot of friends. BUT, now it's a CRAP! Just because it does not connect to myspace anymore!!! So, you can't do nothing at all! Don't even download this cause it doesnt work. I mailed the developer and got nothing back. The "support" don't even answer my e-mail. I think the developer is planning to fix the problem in version 1.5 and charge for it! But this is just my opinion.

i don't understand why somebody would pay $35 for this when they can use the website for free??

Try turning off the error messages in the preferences?

You know what would be nice? A feature to delete the dead profiles from your friends. Every time I sync my friends, I get at least 5 drop downs telling me the profile doesn't exist, and I'm far too lazy to delete them myself.

This program is a classic example of a really bad implementation of a really good idea. It is a very nice looking program, with only some minor changes I'd make to its UI. Its feature set is nice and is growing with new releases. The main problem is that this program has astronomical RAM requirements. I have a Quad 2.66GHz intel Mac Pro with 1GB of RAM. Even with nothing else running, launching Spyder throws my hard drive into constant HD paging. The computer goes almost completely unresponsive. Loading friends of my friends takes over a week. I understand that it is scraping web pages and so there is a limit to it's speed, but that is not the bottleneck here. This app is trying to use 2-3 GB of RAM all by itself. This is the type of program that should be able to run in the background almost unnoticed while you do other things, and while it loads data etc. But instead it brings your system to a hault and keeps it at bay until you give up and force quit it, or until it crashes, or until you've waited over a week and it is done. When I first started using it, and saw that it uses an internal SQL database, I thought that would make it highly optimized, more so than any other program that deals with storing thousands of records of data. The developer does release updates often, but they are always to small bug fixes. I'm a paid user of this software, and I'm beginning to think I may have wasted my money. I really want this program to work... it just doesn't.

Definitely a bit faster. Good choice on the update/sync button. Multiple views are nice. For some strange reason though every time the focus changed to the main pane (ie. clicking any of the headings in the left column, or even Cmd+Tab-ing out of the program to check my email and then back in again) my user picture and profile name would appear hovering above the left column, covering the Music and Strangers buttons and overlapping into the main column. Clicking pretty much anywhere on the screen made it go away again. I also received this error within a few minutes: Profile download failed because required data was not supplied by the remote server. Try this operation manually in a web browser if you continue to have problems. Try again? I checked the profile in a web browser and it opened quickly and without problems. I guess I'd be tempted to put this down to MySpace just being it's usual difficult self. Finally, at the bottom of the Details view where it lists Profile Link: Found, etc etc. I was initially confused as to what that meant, as it wasn't obvious you should click on it. It also didn't bring up the Open Link / Copy Link dialog on every click. It seemed kind of erratic, more like every 3rd click or so. This program is definitely getting better, and I hope it continues to do so, but it's still not at a stage where I'd use it beyond as a quick demo.

Until I can perform most myspace functions and/or tasks from the client... - read/post emails - read/post comments - read/post bulletins - read/post blog entries - edit/change photos (with iLife integration possibly) - and have a searchable record of all these postings, and changes whether they were done through the client, or directly on the myspace.com website... and be more obvious as to how these things are done/tracked... This client will not be ready for prime time...

First thing I noticed was that it was fairly slow at updating the info (admittedly though, I've got a little under 2000 friends) and so at first I thought, because it was a demo, all it listed was the names and profile links of people on my friends list. Then I noticed the little "1 of xx selected" at the bottom, which was slowly going up. Suggestion #1 - Make some kind of a universal status bar to let you know it's doing SOMETHING and/or how close to complete it is. Even just the standard OS X spinny thing at the top of the window or something would be sufficient. After running for about 15 minutes, it has only provided the info and photos for about 1/3 of my listed friends. The rest are simply filled with "Not Found" tags. That seems pretty slow. Of course it is a fair amount of data to go through, and given that it saves it locally I suppose it should only be a major one time update. It was about this point that I figured out there was a Tasks and Connections set of windows to let you know what it was doing. Finally! Some status bars to let me know it's doing SOMETHING. Suggestion #2: Given the fact that the GUI has some great similarities to Apps like iPhoto, it might make more sense to add toolbar buttons at the bottom and have these two windows pop up in the bottom left corner a la the Calendar, Info and Keywords buttons in iPhoto. I shut down and restart the program to see if it would auto update and it didn't. After a minute or so of waiting to see if anything would happen, I hit the home button and after a few seconds it started synchronizing again. Suggestion #3 (and 3b): If not outright making it auto sync on startup, at least put the option under the Preferences pane. The Home button itself seems to be poorly named. Generally (at least as far as I'm concerned) it's related to web browsers, and returning you to your starting position. Since there's only one view (as far as I can tell) there isn't a new view to return to, or a real starting position as such. Maybe rename it the Log In or Update button so it makes more sense to first time users. The overall look and feel of the program is really nice (for people who like iApps) with a few minor exceptions. 1. the group creation method is pretty poor. Once again it would benefit from options similar to iPhoto, iTunes, etc. ie. Make a File > New Group option. Had I not read about it on the website I wouldn't have even known it was possible to create groups. To be honest, though the filters are pretty good to begin with, custom groups does a lot to bump up the functionality and value of this program. 2. Listing the raw URL to Show Profile, Show Friends, Send Message, etc. is pretty ugly for an otherwise attractive application. And further is simply reinforces the idea that this is nothing more than a fancy local GUI for MySpace. Maybe create a button, or link the title text itself. Overall, while it has some great features for browsing/organizing large friends lists, such as the filters and groups, and it's also very convenient to be able to send messages and update your friends requests from one window, this program didn't really blow me away with what it could do. That combined with the fact that everything you can do through the program you can also do for free from the MySpace website (in, I would estimate, about twice the time) and especially the fact that a heck of a lot of programs designed with similar ideas (such as local LiveJournal updating clients) are freeware, makes a $30 price tag a bit steep for me. Granted convenience stores can double their markup based on the convenience factor, but in my opinion double the markup on "free" is closer to $10 without the benefit of some serious added features. (such as cross site support, maybe update friendster, tardcore, myspace and more all in one?) As donationware I'd love this program, as is I'll stick to the old fashioned way of being a trendy nerd. Incidentally, I've left the program and this review open for about half an hour now and it's STILL got about 800 friends to update on my list. For those with 10 000 page friends lists (who would most benefit from a program like this) you're probably looking at a day long initial setup process!

I wasn't very impressed. Upon initial run I had to access the help system to find out how to actually log on. The accounts menu provided no "Log In" option! Finally I found out you have to press the Home button to log in... Then I started messing around. I found no ability to change the view from a list-style to a more useful iPhoto-style gallery. Short of going directly to a user's profile in Safari I did not find any obvious way to view a selected user's pictures or videos. Clearly, a good amount of work has been put into this program. But, except for the minimal usefulness in being able to sort through your entire friend list, I found this program to be of little extra value beyond what MySpace already provides.

A very intuitive and handy application for anyone using MySpace as a networking tool. Although it can be a little slow at times, it is much faster than using the conventional means of MySpace networking.

The only feature that requires a license is that ability to add users that aren't your friends. You can still perform any of the other actions such as messaging and commenting with out a license.

not quite sure what this does.. I downloaded it, installed it.. and so far its a gui for myspace, but not sure why id pay for it, since all the features are locked until your register.. so much for try before you buy..

Spyder is competitively priced. Other products that offer similar yet lacking functionality cost 50% more than Spyder such as FriendBot Messenger Mac. One product even charges $35 per account you want to use with their product, Spyder allows you to use an unlimited number of accounts, and you don't need a license for this feature. If you compare the price/features and quality of Spyder versus other similar products I think you will agree that the price is reasonable. Similar products on other platforms cost more and sometimes much more than Spyder. If you are looking to simply browse, send messages, and post comments to friends of your account(s) Spyder will do all of that for you for FREE with out requiring a license.

What possible value for the consumer can this (myspace)browser deliver that will have us cough up $40? None...

$40... That's all I gotta say.