Existing users, 
User Name Eric van Beest
Member Since 2002-01-22
Total number of Feedback Posts: 12
Total number of comments: 0
Last 10 Feedback Posts by Eric van Beest [ Search for All ]
Diablotin 1.3 (Mac OS X)
Excellent utility to manage system extensions 
Diablotin is simply an excellent utility for those who "need" to manage their installed base of preference panes, startup items, fonts, contextual menu items and the like. Normal users can enable and disable items installed in their user accounts, and with an administrator account you can toggle those in the Library folder (and even the System folder if you like). Diablotin is over two years old now, and the fact that it still works is testament to the quality of the programming. But then, if it works...why fix it. And really, I can't think of features I would need to see extra in this. If you regularly try out new extensions (preference panes, contextual menu items, etc.) you need this. It's free. It's great. No doubt about it. [alert admin]
Monday, June 29 2009 @ 02:15 PM PDT
FruitMenu 3.7.1 (Mac OS X)
FruitMenu brings a hierarchical menu to the rather empty Apple menu. You can add folders for recent applications and documents, system preferences, and your own favourite folders. In addition, FruitMenu expands the set of system commands available to you. Given the amount of "work" an applications' menu does for you, it seems strange that the Apple menu is such an anaemic affair. FruitMenu expands on this much like the hierarchical menu of Mac OS 9, or like BeHierarchic in Mac OS 8. It gives you access to your favourite applications and utilities, which you can put in the main menu or conveniently in submenus. There are also system commands, which can also be accessed with keyboard shortcuts. This gives you great access to your applications and utilities without being forced to put them in the Dock, or having to go in to the applications or utilities folders. It also gives you "one click" access to your favourite files and folders. There is also a mechanism to access this through a contextual menu, but I don't use this function. FruitMenu relies on Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE), which intercepts a variety of interface actions and run "alternative extensions" or haxies. Leopard broke this mechanism well and good, so much so that haxies relying on APE were out of action for a long time. If anything, it made me realise how much I rely on FruitMenu – and how much time a shareware developer can spend supporting this. With the re-vamped Leopard compatible FruitMenu, I have experienced few if any problems. My only qualm would be that FruitMenu does increase the start-up time, and can be a slouch the first time a menu is used. Maybe I'm set in my ways in that I like to be able to get to all my applications and utilities in a visually non-intrusive way. Well worth $12, I'd say. [alert admin]
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Sunday, June 21 2009 @ 01:16 PM PDT
MacPilot 3.3.1 (Mac OS X)
Tinker with Mac OS X's innards
MacPilot is one of the many utilities crowding the market for managing low-level Mac OS X parameters. What sets MacPilot apart from the competition is its expanding library of hidden settings of third-party applications. Like *censored*tail, TinkerTool or Onyx, MacPilot, can change low-level Mac OS X settings to customise your OS X experience. It does this through an interface from which the developers are working hard to remove the clutter, hardly surprising given the sprawl of options. MacPilot also continues to expand its ability to change hidden settings in a large number of third-party applications. This helpfully removes the need to mosey into the terminal to type arcane 'defaults write' commands. MacPilot is not cheap, but then it also isn't for everybody: you have to know what you're doing when you're fooling around with OS X's innards. MacPilot executes well on its premise. I have used *censored*tail and TinkerTool before, but MacPilot does it for me. [alert admin]
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Sunday, May 24 2009 @ 08:28 AM PDT
Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection 2.0 (Mac OS X)
Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) is Microsoft's solution for remotely logging on to PCs running Windows XP and later. It works very well showing that Microsoft can develop quality software if they want to. RDC works just like VNC with the adition of a few features, such as sound and the automatic mounting of host drives. To log on to a remote PC you need to be administrator or have specific access rights. RDC handles screen resolution, screen depth, keyboard mappings and all the other settings. Unlike VNC, you can copy and paste text between Windows running in RDC and Mac applications, often preserving formatting. RDC obviously requires you to have a PC to log on to. I use it to log on to my work computer from my personal laptop, and for me it works great. Well done MacBU. [alert admin]
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Sunday, May 24 2009 @ 08:24 AM PDT
Microsoft Office 2008 12.1.7 (Mac OS X)
Unfocused, unforgiving, unimaginative 
Microsoft Office is the document creation package that dominates the business world. Office 2008 is the first incarnation using Xcode, future-proofing the code-base. Unfortunately, Office remains marred by continuing bugs that Microsoft seems unable to fix, focusing instead on implementing VBA (virus basic for applications), which few people care about. Office has been the de facto standard for interchanging documents for, oh, 20 years - as long as I have been using Mac Word and Excel. Despite its Mac heritage, Mac versions have been lacking in terms of features, stability and usability in that time. The many iterations of the code-base are to blame, no less than 4 in the last two decades, which hardly inspires confidence. In real terms, Microsoft's MacBU could have gone for a complete overhaul of the programs, since really the only thing that needs to be compatible is the file format. They chose to maintain visual familiarity instead, which sometimes hinders program usability (remember, it works just like Word 4 or Excel 2.2). We're stuck with a 90's vintage interface when they could have reworked a good deal of the interface. After all, they did have 4 years to work on this. Office 2008 doesn't introduce any notable new features compared to the previous version, but then, few "new" features have survived since Word 5 and Excel 3. As said, this version appears mainly to achieve future-proofing. Office 2008 does bring better Exchange functionality in Entourage, but that is for business users (see below). Entourage introduces "Projects" which helpfully boxes emails, contacts and files in a single workspace to focus you on the task at hand. Shame it's Mac only and has no comparison in the Windows version. I'm not going to complain about the bugs. There are so many of them that despite the 7 Service Packs (to date) that purported to fix bugs you can still count on Office crashing on a daily basis. Office is also incompatible with Mac OS X 10.5's Spaces, so beware. Is this for you? Unless you really really really need document interchangability without compatibility issues, then maybe yes (although the increasing pressure of open document standards will change this "RSN"). Otherwise, save your money and get one of office-like packages (OpenOffice, NeoOffice), or check out Apple's iWork package, which has 99.9% of the features at HALF the price. (If it's VBA you want, stick with Office 2004!) Talking about price: Microsoft happily continues to shaft business users by overcharging them. After all, the only tangible difference between the Home/Student Edition and the Standard Edition is Exchange connectivity (controlled through the license code). There is no physical difference in the program code or the install CD. Thus, Exchange connectivity costs you at least $140 extra (i.e. more than the price of the Home/Student Edition). [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 5 users found this helpful
Sunday, May 17 2009 @ 09:47 AM PDT
Apple iPhoto 8.0.2 (Mac OS X)
Photo management application for home users
iPhoto is a capable application for managing your home digital photo library. This version introduces face recognition and geotagging, which integrate it more tightly with iWeb, the website builder for me.com. iPhoto's objective is simple: manage your digital photo's. iPhoto can import photo's from any digital camera, perhaps with the exception of the digital SLRs introduced today. It has simple photo editing tools, quite capable for the average user. Photo's can be sorted into "events" (or folders), and iPhoto is smart enough to split what seems to be different events when importing photos. On the output side iPhoto has several nifty tools for producing printed product. There are templates for photo albums, scrapbooks, calendars, etc all of which work very well. It certainly beats trying to do something similar in Word or Powerpoint. Where available, iPhoto can also upload your photos to have a professionally printed album made for you. iPhoto also has shortcuts for sening pictures by email. Geotagging (adding location information to a photo) works well but really needs iWeb to shine as a function, like travel maps. Face recognition ditto. Actual recognition accuracy is very poor, quite embarrassing really, although correcting mistakes is easy without lifting fingers from the keyboard. On the upside, iPhoto loads much faster (feels like 3x) than previous versions. Is iPhoto for you? Not if you're a professional photographer with ten of thousands of images - iPhoto's features are too limiting. But it's great for the average home user, and the price (part of the iLife package) is unbeatable. That said, it is quite a tepid update from the previous version, and given that this app gets updates every year, you may want to skip this one. iLife comes free with every new Mac. If you have "an older" Mac (pre 2008) you may well want to consider upgrading. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Sunday, May 17 2009 @ 09:14 AM PDT
RipIt 1.2.5 (Mac OS X)
Rip your DVDs to your hard disk
RipIt is a one-trick pony for ripping DVDs to your hard disk, and it's quite good at it. RipIt's concept is simple: read the data on the DVD and "copy" it to your hard disk. It can retrieve the name of the DVD from the internet. It saves an "image" of the DVD as a package that you can open with DVD Player. In copying, it also removes many of the irksome copy-protection schemes publishers use to prevent their DVDs being ripped into video by for instance HandBrake. The only qualm I have about the product is its error reporting. It has only one error report: telling you your disk may be unclean or damaged. This error also appears if the region code of the DVD is not compatible with your DVD drive, so check the region codes first. I bought RipIt long time ago to help me move my DVDs into iTunes and my AppleTV (particularly, the ones with copy protection that prevent HandBrake from working). I'm well pleased with it. [alert admin]
Wednesday, May 06 2009 @ 12:25 AM PDT
Bento 2.0v3 (Mac OS X)
Bento is an attractive and simple list manager that integrates neatly with Address Book and iCal. It has a zero learning curve because, well, there is nothing to learn for lack of features. It has an unbeatable price tag, but for the same money you could ask yourself: is this it? Bento is a list manager, not really a database. Its interface is uncluttered, and its set of themes is distinctly better that Office's idiot offerings. It has live connections to Address Book and iCal, and you can connect the database with Mail. It automatically lays out fields, and has a table function. It even has decent scriptability. But that really is it. It has no real calculation fields (being able to concatenate text or do 4th grade math is not "calculation") which lack even a rudimentary IF function, it has a checkbox field that holds only one value, and its layouts and tools are hamfistedly uncustomizeable. My background is as a 20-year FileMaker veteran from Nashoba times. My personal database needs are however getting further removed from FileMaker Pro's expanding feature set and associated price tag. I am in the market for an alternative, but Bento is not it. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 5 of 5 users found this helpful
Saturday, May 02 2009 @ 02:54 AM PDT
You Control: Desktops 1.3.1 beta 1 (Mac OS X)
Spaces for the rest of us... or: what Spaces should have been
You Control Desktops (YCD) does what Spaces does, but has way more options and works in Mac OS X 10.4. I have been using YCD for more than a year, in OS X 10.4 and now in 10.5. When Leopard's feature set was reported, it struck me that the Spaces function was the answer to my cluttered desktop. (I had used Jonathan Sav's Virtual Desktop before, but was turned off by the buggy nature of the product) YCD lets you set up several virtual desktops, or workspaces if you like, along the lines of Spaces. But it allows you to have much more control over what appears where than Spaces. Unlike Spaces, you can set certain windows to appear in every window – handy for instant messaging apps as you move from window to window. You can also collect windows to whatever desktop you want. Different desktop pictures works well for me, reminding me of which desktop I am on. Working with YCD in 10.4, losing the functionality for a while after upgrading to 10.5 (until You upgraded the program) was a real pain. Spaces is quite hamfisted, and there are serious compatibility issues with, amongst others, Microsoft Office applications which have yet to be resolved, never mind the bizarre window behavior (random disappearances, flipping desktops...). YCD is not for everyone. But I'm quite happy with this product. Maybe Spaces will grow up in 10.6. Until then, I'll be using You Control Desktops. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Sunday, March 22 2009 @ 03:08 PM PDT
Compost 1.9.5 (Mac OS X)
Excellent trash management utility
Macs have had a trash can for over 25 years, but the OS still has no means for you to control what happens with the contents...other than just a manual "Empty Trash". Compost goes a long way to correcting this. Windows' trash management at least provides you with options as the size of the trash. Mac OS never did, which may be considered odd, or perhaps it was just left as an opportunity for the likes of Compost. You can tell Compost how long to leave stuff in the trash before it goes funky and has to be deleted. Or you can tell it how large the trash may be, in total or as a proportion of disk size. It can delete files securely if you need this. And, you can have different trash behavior for every connected drive. $20 for a one-trick pony? It's worth it for me. [alert admin]
Sunday, March 22 2009 @ 02:17 PM PDT
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