Existing users, 
User Name C. Maurer
Member Since 2001-09-28
Total number of Feedback Posts: 47
Total number of comments: 5
Last 10 Feedback Posts by C. Maurer [ Search for All ]
Mesa 3.0.9 (Mac OS X)
I just copied two columns of 50 numbers and pasted them into Mesa, Excel, AppleWorks, the statistical package JMP, and a demo version of MarinerCalc. I then used the STDEV function of each. Mesa's results were different from the others'. [alert admin]
Sunday, October 05 2003 @ 03:18 PM PDT
Moneydance 2003 r2 (Mac OS X)
I have not used this for on-line banking but for off-line use, compared to Quicken it is more stable, keeps more straightforward accounts (no special tax categories grafted onto a conventional system), and handles foreign currencies and GST/VAT. It is also less confusing to set up and use. I have found some cosmetic bugs and I found one program-freezer connected with pop-up menus when choosing reports, but after pounding the Moneydance for 30 or 40 hours, nothing major seemed amiss. Importing a complicated Quicken file proved to be easy, once I specified the correct date format, although I did need to delete a lot of empty accounts that Quicken created gratuitously and I needed to clean up a lot of accounts that Moneydance created to deal with inappropriately structured data in Quicken. After the file was imported, I noticed that Moneydance disagreed when calculating the cost basis of a particular mutual fund. When I did the calculations by hand I found that Moneydance was correct. Quicken strikes me as more likely to make mistakes because it seems to maintain a lot more (breakable) structures in its data file. Moneydance seems to retain fewer structures and do more calculations on the fly. A 2.5MB Quicken file became 400KB in Moneydance. Also, Quicken needs to write data files within its own folder, even if that folder is in /Applications. This is not appropriate under OS X and Moneydance does not do so. Moneydance does have one design failing that I found to be a nuisance. When entering the purchase or reinvestment of a mutual fund, you cannot enter the number of shares and the total amount, you need to enter the cost per share and the total amount: because of rounding off, Moneydance is likely to report a different number of shares than the fund house. The workaround is to enter, as the price per share, the arithmetic term <total cost/number of shares> and let the program calculate the number. If you understand double-entry bookkeeping, Moneydance is simple and straightforward. This is fortunate because the program's documentation is just help file that does little except tell you what is in front of your eyes. The is the weakest part of the package. Fortunately, the developer maintains an e-mail list whose members are helpful. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 4 of 4 users found this helpful
Sunday, September 14 2003 @ 10:56 AM PDT
PowerMail 4.2 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)
I have not used PowerMail's IMAP capability but as a POP client it is exceptional. I have found no other POP client that can do so much with such ease and efficiency, no matter how many messages are stored. Finding messages in large files has always been fast in PowerMail but now it is astonishing. Compared to e-mailers that search the contents of e-mail using string searches--all e-mailers save Apple's Mail--well, for large files there is no comparison. Compared to Apple's Mail, PowerMail is faster, feels more responsive, is more straightforward for novice users and is more versatile for advanced ones. The only way Mail is superior, as a POP client, is that Mail's spam filtering, although less powerful potentially, does not require specifying a lot of rules. (Mail will also generate HTML e-mail but I do not consider that an advantage.) For folks who don't like HTML e-mail, PowerMail is remarkably sensible. It can be set safely to ignore HTML within the program but if the formatting must be seen, clicking on an icon will display the message within a web browser. Although PowerMail uses its own proprietary data structures, it allows easy importing from and exporting to all standard formats and several proprietary ones. It also incorporates suitable tools for repairing those data structures and will allow the use of Apple's Address Book. With this release PowerMail has addressed almost every shortcoming of the program, leaving only minor ones indeed. With this release I'm raising my rating from four stars to five. It's only significant deficiency as a POP server is that it cannot cope with network glitches if its database is located on another computer and accessed by an unreliable ethernet. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Friday, September 05 2003 @ 07:02 PM PDT
PostView 1.3 (Mac OS X)
PostView is similar to the Apple's Preview with a few added niceties, the purported ability (I have not tried it) to read PostScript files, and one essential feature that Preview lacks, a "Find" command. The want of a "Find" command makes Preview useless for reading long documents, so the real competition for PostView is Adobe's PDF readers. Compared to Acrobat/Adobe Reader, PostView is quicker, fills less of the screen, and generally feels more Mac-like. However, unlike Adobe Reader, PostView cannot show thumbnails and it cannot display the table of contents of or search for text through PDF files that come locked. Also, PostView can select text only in whole lines, à la 1978. Overall PostView makes reading PDF files more pleasant but is less practical than Acrobat Reader for many of them. My wife and I both prefer it enough to use it as our default reader but we find ourselves opening Adobe Reader for a lot of files. PostView might seem preißwertig even in the face of Adobe's freebees if PostView allowed the user to fill in PDF forms and then permitted something that the freebees do not, saving a form with the text still editable. However, currently PostView cannot fill in PDF forms at all, nor can it even save files under another name (although "Save As PDF..." is available from the PDF menu in the Print dialog) [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 2 of 3 users found this helpful
Thursday, September 04 2003 @ 01:05 PM PDT
PowerMail 4.1.3 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)
Some people think that HTML e-mail is wonderful, others think that HTML e-mail is inefficient when not annoying or hazardous and that it ought to be eschewed. PowerMail is for those of the latter school. It can be set to safely ignore HTML within the program but if the formatting must be seen, clicking on an icon will display the message within a web browser. All in all, I have found this to be the most convenient way of dealing with the stuff. PowerMail's IMAP capability is limited but as a POP client it is exceptional. I have found no other POP client that can do so much with such ease and efficiency, no matter how many messages are stored. Compared to Apple's Mail, it is more responsive, more straightforward for novice users and more versatile for advanced ones. The only way Mail is superior, as a POP client, is that Mail's spam filtering, although less powerful potentially, does not require specifying a lot of rules. Overall, PowerMail seems to have fewer bugs than Mail but in recent releases its address book has been unstable--I recommend the option to use Apple's address book by default--and it cannot cope with network glitches if its database is located on another computer and accessed by ethernet. This is not a suitable product for systems that keep the user's files on a central server. This release fixes some bugs and ameliorates--somewhat--PowerMail's most glaring deficiency, which is its documentation. The documentation has now been improved from woeful to marginal. It still does not explain, for instance, PowerMail's unusual approach toward searching, which attempts, I think with some success, to provide the functionality of Boolean operators to users who do not cope well with Boolean logic. (Multiple words include an implicit "or", relevance scores applied to results incorporate an implicit "and probably", and searching on the results is equivalent to "and". Since all searches are indexed, successive searching is practical.) Although PowerMail uses its own proprietary data structures, it allows easy importing from and exporting to all standard formats and several proprietary ones. It also incorporates suitable tools for repairing those data structures. A few weeks ago I moved out of PowerMail into Apple's Mail because my wife and I had begun to keep a common address book synchronized over a number of computers, and I could not get PowerMail's address book to synchronize properly with Apple's. Using Mail felt like driving a Mazda after a Mercedes, so with this release, I tried PowerMail again. This time, however, instead of merging my address books, as I had done before, I scrapped my old PowerMail address book and started afresh by importing Apple's entire. Then the synchronization worked properly and I could see what was going in. It seems to be necessary to keep all contacts in the folder PowerMail creates called "Apple Address Book Contacts". Now I have, with pleasure, moved back in. [alert admin]
Monday, May 26 2003 @ 07:28 PM PDT
Chartsmith 1.2.2 (Mac OS X)
This seems to be the functional equivalent of CricketGraph for OS X. [alert admin]
Thursday, May 15 2003 @ 08:03 PM PDT
PDF U 1.21 (Mac OS X)
A superfluous product. Just a folder "~/Library/PDF Services" then drag into it aliases of your Mail, PowerMail, Create, GraphicConverter--whatever you use PDF files with. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 1 of 2 users found this helpful
Friday, May 09 2003 @ 12:16 PM PDT
DEVONthink Personal Edition 1.5.3 (Mac OS X)
Like Google for your own hard drive 
This allows the equivalent of indexing a chunk of your own hard drive with Google. It is an amorphous tool that can be configured and used in many ways to suit the user's particular data and habits--and must be so configured. Like any tool, learning how to make efficient use of it requires experimentation. If you can keep track in your head of what information is in what documents and what those documents are called and where they are filed, then you will have no use for the program, but to this user who is organizationally challenged, any single application has ever enabled him to find things so easily. Two concern about using a database of this sort is that it be maintained properly and that your data be easily extracted down the road, when your needs change or the program ceases to be maintained. With DEVONthink, data are easily extracted and the few bugs I've found have been fixed promptly and the developers have been assiduous about informing users off an occasional serious problem that other users have turned up, and posting updates. For the power and quality of this application, the price is absurdly low. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Sunday, May 04 2003 @ 06:39 AM PDT
Mariner Write 3.2 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)
Functional equivalent to WordPerfect 
This is the functional equivalent under OS X of the old WordPerfect. Aside from editing graphics, it does more or less what WordPerfect used to do with a set of commands that are comparably numerous, comparably specific, and stuck hither and yon in a comparable way. This version seems to be stable again and a few hours of testing found only a couple of minor bugs. Compared to Word, Mariner Write is easier to use, offers a set of features comparable to those that actually work in Word (except for graphics), and is more stable. I had started to use Mariner Write routinely before Jaguar left it unstable. Now that the instability has been fixed, I was tempted to go back to it, but I found myself missing the more legible screens of Cocoa products, so I decided to stick with Mellel. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Saturday, May 03 2003 @ 03:47 AM PDT
AquaGrep 1.1.1 (Mac OS X)
of using grep is defining the expressions. A front end that does this would be useful, something comparable to NisusWriter's PowerFind. [alert admin]
Monday, April 28 2003 @ 07:58 AM PDT
Last 10 Comments by C. Maurer [ Search for All ]
Configuration quits under Panther
Here too. From the web site, "Due to a bug in Mac OS X 10.3, symbolic links pointing to itself are causing the LaunchBar Setup Scan to hang. This problem will be fixed in the next version of LaunchBar. If you are suffering from this issue, contact us for instructions how to identify the problematic symlink."
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, November 12 2003 @ 03:05 PM PST
I have never had this problem and have always had responses to e-mails, usually with a day.
Original feedback item : Read More
Sunday, October 12 2003 @ 08:11 AM PDT
PowerMail has never done string searches, it has always done indexed searches. It used to search only for the exact word entered, now it can accept a wildcard at the end of a word. That is not a regression. Note that, although string searches are more flexible than indexed searches, each time a file doubles in size, the string search takes twice as long. With large files, indexed searches are very much faster: that is…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Friday, September 05 2003 @ 06:32 PM PDT
If you can't find contents and reindexing doesn't help, try rebuilding the database. Launch PowerMail with the option- and command-keys down then tick off the first four checkboxes.
Original feedback item : Read More
Saturday, May 31 2003 @ 03:57 PM PDT
'I was looking the reviews that you posted for other applications and would ask if you never wrote one of them that said something like "this is a good app!"' Look at my comments on Powermail, MacSFTP, the current version of Mariner Write. 'Btw, since you seem to be the first and only user saying that iSynCal "did not work", could you be more precise describing here... how the sync options was set, where the…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Thursday, May 15 2003 @ 07:50 PM PDT
