CharView

Sorry, Alex, but I haven't been able to use a version since 1.3.5, which worked great (and still works great!). I use 1.3.5 on an iBook G3/500 and a biege G3 (G4/500 CPU) with OS 9.2.2. Every version since has either crashed on launch, or crashed when a font was selected.

Such a useful and well priced application. Such a shame that the author hasn't bothered to update. Its very definitely unstable now in relation to where it is plaved in the launch order.

Nice price but annoying in some of it's functionality, like slowing boot-up time. PopChar is much better, but at $40 not worth it for the functionality.

Until it is registed, this program pops up a nag window every few minutes (even if it is not being used). It is so annoying that I cannot tolerate it long enough to evaluate. This is certainly not an effective way to encourage people to use and pay for their program.

As a former user of Pop Char in Classic (stopped when it became shareware instead of donation-ware), has anyone looked at "Show Character Palette" included in Panther? It seems to do everything Pop Char did or most of what CharView professes to do. The main difference seems to be the GUI. Character Palette runs from the Menu Bar with some features under the "Unicode" heading in Services. My gut feeling is that in my have other features not included in CharView but I could be wrong on this as not having used CharView. What Character Palette does do is show all Glyphs, Unicode listed in blocks or by hex, gives a visual list of all fonts containing the desired symbol, variants and similar items, a verbal descriptor of each item, its code, insert and favorite capability, groupings, collection groupings, unicode groupings magnification and more. I am starting to get the impression that if I paid for all the shareware and/or commercial equivalents that Panther includes, such as Character Palette, Fax, Labels, Classic Status, utilities, etc. Panther may be a bargain. Let us not forget that much of this shareware was free or donation-ware when it was first released and only became salable after users, just like you, documented most of the bugs and suggested improvements. That at least makes me feel better about having to buy Panther all over again a year after Jaguar at full price. At least Panther has some real value beyond bug fixes and performance, and sets standards that 3rd party developers need to allow for in their future releases.

I'm a long-time user of PopChar Pro, which performs tasks similar to those in CharView--but IMHO CharView does more than PopChar and does it better. I have held off retiring PopChar Pro, however, because CharView has placed an icon in the dock when the application is running, thereby cutting down the available dock real estate. Hacking the application to remove the dock icon is a simple but annoying procedure. But now, with v 2.2, CharView allows the user the option of either having the icon appear in the dock or not (an option, BTW, that I wish were offered by many other applications as well). With this change, CharView has replaced PopChar Pro on my machine. I recommend it most highly!

Nice utility modeled after PopChar, but the problem is that it's a memory sucking hog. Open a terminal window and type in "top". Check the RPRVT column and see what the entry is for CharView. It's taking 15+ Megs(!!!!!) on my system. Way too much for something that just provides alternate characters. Even a browser with 10 web pages loaded doesn't use so much RAM. Something about this thing is coded in an incredibly sloppy manner. It takes more RAM than anything else that normally runs on my system.

Sorry, Alex, but I haven't been able to use a version since 1.3.5, which worked great (and still works great!). I use 1.3.5 on an iBook G3/500 and a biege G3 (G4/500 CPU) with OS 9.2.2. Every version since has either crashed on launch, or crashed when a font was selected.