Existing users, 
User Name Hannibal Fortune
Member Since 2002-08-04
Total number of Feedback Posts: 32
Total number of comments: 29
Last 10 Feedback Posts by Hannibal Fortune [ Search for All ]
VLC Media Player 1.0.1 (Mac OS X)
The best, although not perfect 
Aside from playing everything I can throw at it up to and including the wretched RealVideo, it's free and more full-featured than the competition like MPlayer. Both apps have weaknesses, but MPlayer's seem to be more numerous and more egregious. For instance, MPlayer actually seems to have problems with some MPEG-2 files, garbling the picture. VLC and even Quicktime Player have no problems with the same files. As well, MPlayer doesn't have anything near as many features as VLC. No way to adjust audio or subtitle sync, for instance. The only thing MPlayer has that I wish VLC did is a Yadif option for deinterlacing. I keep both apps around since there is the very rare video file that one of them won't play but the other will. That said, while 1.0.1 is a huge improvement, it's still missing a few features that the Windows version has had for quite some time. Slow and fast motion still doesn't work. I wish the preferences were a bit more descriptive than "very short jump," "short jump," "long jump" and the like. Why not just tell us it's 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 1 minute or whatever they are? Don't make us guess! One thing I really like about the new version is that if you're watching a multi-file playlist (say, an old TV show in 3 parts downloaded from YouTube thanks to MacTubes), it now preserves the window size (if you're not watching full-screen) and plays them continuously with not even a hint of stutter while switching files. If not for the onscreen display telling you a new file is being played, you'd never even know it. VLC has been my preferred video player app for years, and with continuing improvements, I think it will retain that position for the foreseeable future. I've donated $15 to Videolan.org and maybe I'll give them another few next year. It's worth it. (Just make sure you enter a comma for the decimal point or don't specify pennies. Trying to use a period on the European PayPal site will get you nothing but grief, especially if you don't read French.) [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Sunday, August 16 2009 @ 10:59 AM PDT
WeatherDock 2.5.1 (Mac OS X)
After suffering through Weatherpop and having Meteorologist begin locking up daily, I switched to WeatherDock to have weather in my menu bar. It seems to be more stable than either so far and has a more pleasing interface than Meteorologist. The menu icons are not ideal, though. They're designed for the full interface, either after you pull up the menu or you open the regular window. They lost a lot of detail and contrast in the menu bar. A couple of suggestions for improvements. One is that there should be a variable refresh interval. The other programs have it. This seems to be refreshing once an hour, and that's way too seldom. Up to once every 15 minutes would be better. And right now, the days and nights in the menu blend together. It would be better to have alternating background colors for the rows, white for day and light gray for night. Just for the text, though. Leave the icon column with a white background so the icons don't need to be changed with transparency. [alert admin]
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Saturday, August 08 2009 @ 06:16 AM PDT
Typinator 3.5.1 (Mac OS X)
enseignes below complains about the slowness of TypeIt4Me. I had the same experience with TextExpander (admittedly an older version from 2007). There would be up to a second of delay before the correction kicked in, which is not good when you're doing about 70wpm. Typinator is blazingly fast with its corrections. It fixes something before I even noticed I typed it wrong and reflexively reach for the backspace key. Well worth the license. [alert admin]
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Saturday, July 11 2009 @ 08:58 PM PDT
Vuze 4.2.0.2 (Mac OS X)
I've tried a whole bunch of Bittorrent clients for the Mac, including Tomato Torrent, Bits on Wheels, uTorrent, Transmission and a couple of others I can't recall, switching from client to client as problems arose. When I read that Vuze was supposedly faster because it got more peers, I scoffed. But it seems to be true. I was using Transmission for a torrent and barely downloaded 500MB over four nights, usually getting one peer and no seeds. Frustrated, I turned to Vuze for the same torrent. Within four hours, I had 500MB of data from three seeds and two peers. Four overnights (14 hours each) vs. 4 hours. No contest! And it's not very resource intensive, either. My CPU meter on a single core Atom netbook running OS X (nice low power consumption machine for extended downloading) only shows about 20% CPU utilization. It's also eating about 200MB of RAM, about the same as Safari as I type this. Not too shabby. [alert admin]
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Friday, May 22 2009 @ 02:50 PM PDT
Transmission 1.60b1 (Mac OS X)
Okay, I now officially hate Transmission
Transmission has locked up on me before, in other versions over the last year or two. And it just did it to me again with the latest version. I used to swear by Transmission, but these crashes have used up all my patience. The worst part is that when it locks up, it REALLY locks up. Force quit as many times as you want. It won't budge from the dock. Meanwhile, the files it was downloading can't be deleted. The only fix is to restart the system. I'm done with this. [alert admin]
Read Comments (14) | More Info | 1 of 8 users found this helpful
Sunday, May 03 2009 @ 01:08 PM PDT
Safari 4 Buddy 1.1 (Mac OS X)
I really wanted to like Safari 4.0. Honest. I gave it a couple of weeks, using it every day. But I really couldn't get used to the tabs on top. Yeah, it saves a bit of window real estate, but I missed being able to read full page titles. Sorry, Apple, but just seeing the first few words are not enough. And with today's big screens, most people don't miss a few more pixels on top anyway. I also definitely did not like the way the tabs kept changing width. Half and one-third window tabs just don't look right. And while I like Top Sites, even though it hasn't been terribly useful yet, I hated the way pages were grayed out for a few seconds when you select a site there. With Safari 4 Buddy, a few clicks and all's fine again. Thank you! I hope either Apple learns their lesson and gives us the old options again, or at least doesn't block apps like S4 Buddy. There's a little bit of promise there. At least Apple finally got rid of SnapBack (except for search results, where it actually is useful). In years of using Safari, I used SnapBack maybe three times. So Apple isn't completely off in its own world. [alert admin]
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Sunday, March 29 2009 @ 07:04 PM PDT
MPlayer OSX Extended rev8 (Mac OS X)
Not the greatest thing since sliced bread
I can't say that I understand the rave reviews here. MPlayer does some things better than VLC, but overall, it's nowhere near as capable. I threw a couple of AVIs that befuddled VLC and Quicktime Player (with Perian) at MPlayer. It managed to play them, although the first time I dropped one of those videos onto MPlayer's dock icon, the app immediately locked up and I needed to force quit. That's great. But compared to VLC, MPlayer lacks a lot of features and is also un-Maclike in many ways. For one thing, there's no "Open recent..." submenu like most Mac apps have. Finish playing a video and it disappears from the playlist, so if you want to play it again, you have to go find it again. There's no control over audio sync, so if your audio doesn't match perfectly, you're out of luck. Go through the menus for a little too long (about 15 seconds) and the playback freezes. And there is no quick jumping through the video. With VLC, I can make short, medium, long and extra long jumps through video at the press of a key combination (actually at the press of a key on my wonderfully programmable Belkin Nostromo N52 Speedpad). That's very useful if I'm searching for a specific point in a video or I miss a line of dialog and want to jump back. Press a key and I've jumped back 10 seconds. Press another and I can jump 5 minutes forward instantly. No such luck with MPlayer. It has barely more controls than Quicktime Player. I use VLC's extremely configurable prefs to set the audio volume to very fine grain control, another option not available in MPlayer. MPlayer is a useful addition to my video arsenal for files that won't play back any other way. But use it as my primary player? No, thanks. MPlayer is more of a basic tool, while VLC is a power tool. [alert admin]
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Sunday, February 01 2009 @ 06:27 AM PST
RapidoResizer 1.1.1 (Mac OS X)
I was looking for a quick resizing option for those times when I want to shrink a graphic but don't want to fire up Fireworks or Photoshop. As somebody else noted, this uses an installer, which doesn't make sense. Small, single file applications are typically drag and drop. The only time you should need an actual installer is when it's installing multiple files in different locations. More to the point, it lacks one important feature, namely the ability to set the quality of the output. I tried it on a 250kb 1024x768 JPEG file, reducing to 256x192. The output file, with 1/16th the area, turned out larger than the original by several kilobytes! That's ridiculous and unusable. I tried ResizeIt as another review suggested. That does the job much better, but that's not perfect, either. It won't automatically constrain proportions, so you have to calculate the correct height yourself after you set the width. Still, that program at least works. [alert admin]
Saturday, December 20 2008 @ 06:27 PM PST
Transmission 1.41b3 (Mac OS X)
One of the best Mac torrent clients 
I like Transmission. It's quite Mac-like in its interface and it gives quite a bit of control to the user. That said, I recently gave it up after hearing that µTorrent (also known as uTorrent), one of the premier clients on Windows, was finally available for Mac. µTorrent does use quite a lot of CPU, but the speed! I don't know if I'm just on popular torrents lately, but µTorrent seems to find a lot more peers and gets me a lot more download speed than Transmission ever did. Sometimes, download speed approaches what I get on the newsgroups. That increased speed is more than a fair tradeoff for the CPU utilization, in my view. [alert admin]
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Tuesday, December 09 2008 @ 08:05 PM PST
Meteorologist 1.4.8 (Mac OS X)
I used Weatherpop for years before switching to Meteorologist. In that time, I've put up with Weatherpop's instability, the way it locks up every few days or just plain up and quits without warning. Meteorologist has been rock solid so far. Not one freeze or quit from the app. The only thing I don't like is that the interface needs a lot of refinement. All this displaying is submenus seems worthless to me, forcing a lot of additional mousing, so I turned all submenus off. But displaying the forecasts on single lines is very messy and hard to read. The main information (temp and precip) should be on the main menu for each line, with submenus for the less useful information. Does anyone really think they can accurately forecast the wind speed for five days from now? And how about a better name? Meteorologist is not only a mouthful, it's a pain in the neck to type. Luckily, I know how to spell, but I feel sorry for those less knowledgeable or hunt and peck typists. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Friday, February 15 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
Last 10 Comments by Hannibal Fortune [ Search for All ]
Never mind. I found the force save button.
Original feedback item : Read More
Saturday, September 19 2009 @ 07:27 AM PDT
Happened to me twice in a week. Wish there was a way to force save the notes. It appears that the data is not saved until you logout or shutdown normally. If the system crashes, you'll lose all changes. I'm also not hopeful that this will still work under Snow Leopard.
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Saturday, September 19 2009 @ 06:50 AM PDT
Nostromo Array controller 2.0 aplication aware - thank you!
As far as I know, v1.1 had application specific settings because I've been using that for years.
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Sunday, September 13 2009 @ 06:52 PM PDT
I'm glad I don't need your "support." The way you casually throw obscenities around and generally have a bad attitude about everything, as shown by your comments. Wait, that probably does mean that you do work in a call center providing tech support.
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Sunday, August 16 2009 @ 02:50 PM PDT
Okay, I now officially hate Transmission
I just stopped using it, that's all. Besides, don't you know that there's no problem? You and I are just stupid users who know nothing, that's all. Just ask "versiontracker2007." I guess companies just love to allow know-nothings beta testing their software. (I'm referring to registered beta testers, not public betas.)
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Sunday, August 16 2009 @ 02:46 PM PDT
Very good with one serious annoyance
That's started happening to me on a daily basis recently. Very annoying. I've switched to WeatherDock for now.
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Tuesday, August 04 2009 @ 07:50 PM PDT
Use menu option to "open Weatherdock," click on Favorites button to open drawer. Select location to delete and click on minus button.
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Tuesday, August 04 2009 @ 07:46 PM PDT
Okay, I now officially hate Transmission
uTorrent works fine for me. Except for the 100% CPU bug that hit 0.9.1.1 and just fixed in 0.9.1.2RC, it's been faster and more reliable than any version of Transmission I've used in the last couple of years. Even Tomato Torrent and Bits on Wheels gave me fewer problems than Transmission. So call uTorrent a joke if you want; I'm using that instead of sticking with something just because that's what you're familiar with. I'm…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Thursday, May 07 2009 @ 11:10 PM PDT
I mean previous versions of Transmission, not non-beta since they never left beta. If they couldn't stomp the bug over the course of two years, just how long am I supposed to wait? Do they think they're Google, who has legendarily perpetually beta apps?
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Thursday, May 07 2009 @ 11:04 PM PDT
I fully understand what a beta is. I've been a registered beta tester for quite a few applications and I've been using Macs for over 20 years now. You're making unfounded assumptions that you know a lot more than I do. For instance, I, for one, know that there's no such thing as "where-with-all." It's "wherewithal." What you seem to have skipped over in your zeal to criticize is that I have had this exact…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Thursday, May 07 2009 @ 11:01 PM PDT
