JobOrder - 11.0.14

I feel compelled to offer another review for 2 reasons: 1) My first review over a year ago was for the OS 9 version. 2) I would also like to reply to the legitimate issues raised by the reviewer below as I can speak to these issues directly as a customer and user of JobOrder for over 2 years. I believe VersionTracker users would benefit from hearing both sides of these issues from 2 customers so they can decide for themselves. Charges of developer unresponsiveness to customer needs are serious and if the comments go unanswered some may accept them at face value. First of all, JobOrder is the best investment I've ever made in my business, period. I could not be happier with its performance, the people at Management Software are wonderful to work with, I am more organized and more productive now than I've ever been, and it's helping me grow my business despite the weak economy. "The interface is ugly and terribly unintuitive (even when they give you GIANT buttons) but that's just par for the course for these types of software." While this is subjective, my opinion is that it has a nicer interface than most of its competitors that I've checked out. I encourage readers to judge for themselves. "I wouldn't recommend this software to anyone not just due to all of its little quirks and oddly chosen 4D core. . ." I could not disagree more. I'm not a programmer, but I do know that developers have 3 main choices for building serious data-driven desktop apps for the Mac: FileMaker, 4D, and Omnis. 4D & Omnis are much more robust than FileMaker, and between 4D & Omnis, 4D has by far, the most active developer community for plug-ins, etc. Just do searches on VersionTracker to see this for yourself. Reviews of these 3 database development platforms in the Mac press also confirm the wisdom of developing apps on 4D. If I were a developer I too would have chosen 4D for a richer feature set and longevity on the Mac. As a shopper I was actually wary of business management apps built on less robust or less widely supported database platforms; I actually narrowed my search to apps built on 4D for those very reasons. "but also because of the terrible organization that puts it out and supposedly supports it. When I purchased it, it took them 4 tries (!!!) to send me a correct activation code. Oh well... add to that the broken promise of an OS X version before my purchased year of free upgrades ran out and you've got a company who could care less about the needs of its customers." I too was frustrated with the time it took for an OS X version, but I decided to communicate with the developers to find out why. Apparently it was held up by 4D which took a while to Carbonize 4D for whatever reasons. Based on my own experiences with the people at Management Software I'm sure that if the other reviewer/customer had worked with them they would have accommodated him regarding the upgrade period. He didn't say in his review if he talked to them. I've never had a problem with them; they were flexible with me regarding payment terms and are very responsive to feature requests. They return phone calls and emails rapidly, often the same day. As you can see by looking at the pulldown version menu, they update JO frequently, averaging about twice a month. They also fix bugs quickly, within days after reporting a bug. Compare that with other developers of large apps! As you can see, they have earned my loyalty, which is why the negative review below surprised me. My experiences with them have only been positive. The other reviewer is certainly entitled to his opinions, but it seems to me his criticisms are hasty and ultimately unfair. It took many, many developers a long time to produce OS X versions of their software. This was part of the transition pains in moving to a better OS, which was likely made worse because of bad economic times. But now that the OS X version is out, check out the demo for yourself. But I do have one warning: Once you try it you'll be spoiled; it will raise your standards for how businesses can and should be managed. You'll never want to go back to whatever you're using now!

Jeff Nailen
President
BioFit Consulting
Santa Fe, NM

This may be the best product of it's kind, but the world will never know due to an extremely bloated price tag that makes this product unattainable by most smaller organizations.