ControlPlane1.6.6

Controlplane is a great app. It's one of very few location-based apps that exist for mac. Unfortunately the developer has not been updating the app lately. I am mostly using it to enable/disable screensaver password based on location on my MBP. It stopped working on MacOS Sierra. No word from developers so far on weather they're going to fix it.

Powerful, stable, not intuitive, free. Works well: background changes based on timeofday. UI and documentation limitations make user error more likely. Most of the evidence rules I can think of are there, but I tried only a few. Perhaps there’s a way to use shell scripts to do the others, but if so, I didn't find info on how. Likely bugs: sometimes some actions for a context do not trigger. Maybe bug: wifi evidence never respected.

Cool idea, but it's just way too fiddly to set up, and nowhere near reliable enough to actually use. It's far too spastic about suddenly changing contexts for no apparent reason — e.g. every time I plug in *any* USB device, it changes contexts, even though I only have *one* USB rule (which checks for a USB Ethernet adapter). Obviously it's a bug, and if it was the only one, I'd be willing to work around it until it's fixed, but unfortunately this is just one of many. The "confidence" factor is hard to figure out — I have no idea how it decides that two conditions set to 60% confidence add up to 85% confidence (what voodoo math is going on here?). The inaccurate sliders don't help (why not just use text fields if you're going to track percentage values with one decimal point?), and there's basically no documentation either. None of this "confidence" crap should be exposed in the UI in the first place. Basically these are all problems the developer couldn't figure out, so they just left it up to the user to spend hours tweaking everything until it stops switching contexts at the wrong times. In short, good luck actually getting this to do what you want without triggering false positives and causing more problems than it solves. Buggy underlying technology + terrible UI = lousy experience. I recommend not wasting your time trying to get this working.

v1.3.6 breaks my installation of ControlPane. I had to roll back to v1.3.5 Seems to "loop" to invalid contexts, and end up on the wrong one. Otherwise I love this program.

Not really a review, but according to their website, version 1.2.3 was the last to support OSX 10.6

same thing as happened to me in august: app shows as open in activity monitor, but am not seeing it anywhere else. ???? is there a trick to getting to this?

not showing up here (10.8); nothing visible, but showing as open in Activity Monitor. so no settings, anything...

The latest release is always crashing on my 10.6.8 MBP. I hope the developer is updating soon. It's one of the most handy tools, when you have to switch your working environment a few times a week. In my case it's at least twice a day ;)