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User Name Jimmy Sparks
Member Since 2002-08-04
Total number of Feedback Posts: 23
Total number of comments: 16
Last 10 Feedback Posts by Jimmy Sparks [ Search for All ]
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
WeatherPop Advance 2.6.1 (Mac OS X)
It's time for me to leave Weatherpop
I've used Weatherpop for years. I've also found it frustrating for years. It would unexpectedly quit (without any kind of error message) often, as well as lock up. So I'm going over to Meteorologist. It's more of a mouthful, the interface is not as pretty and it has fewer data sources, but so far it seems much more stable. Haven't had one problem after a couple of weeks. [alert admin]
Friday, February 01 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
PandoCalendar 7.0.5 (Mac OS X)
I've been using PandoCalendar for years and had no regrets. I don't have any need for the complexity of iCal, only an occasional reminder. Everything was fine until I upgraded to version 7 a few days ago. They never bothered to tell me that v7 uses a new database system that's incompatible with the old PandoCalendar. In other words, you lose all the events you ever programmed in. Fortunately, it's possible to re-download the old version and write down all the old recurring events. (Hopefully, you won't have too many.) But the new way of adding recurring events is confusing, forcing you to add it to one day then set it to recur regularly after that. I didn't like it. On top of that, there's no easy way to clear a day's one-time events like in the old version, where you could command-click on a date and it's instantly clear. The straw that broke the camel's back came today. A recurring event set off an alarm and PandoCalendar went berserk, sucking up virtually all processor cycles on both my processor cores according to Activity Monitor. I did a force-quit, but PandoCalendar went nuts again almost as soon as I started it up. I repeated twice more before giving up and reverting to version 6 for the duration. It's a shame because version 6 is not Universal Binary and it seems that its use of Rosetta continuously keeps my Mac from sleeping properly after inactivity. I like PandoCalendar a lot, but I hate version 7. [alert admin]
Thursday, December 27 2007 @ 07:34 PM PST
VMware Fusion 1.0.51348 (Mac OS X)
If you're going to charge full retail price for a product, don't say it's being beta tested. People shouldn't have to pay for the privilege of losing hours of work. This, from a company that claims on its own website that "VMware Fusion is backed by nearly a decade of proven, high-performance virtualization technology." Proven? If it's proven, then it shouldn't be having all these problems. It just seems this "beta" label is a cop-out. I've had to recreate an XP virtual machine three separate times. Fusion also seems to have a problem releasing disk space after you delete a virtual machine. Gigabytes of space don't seem to reappear afterward no matter how often you empty (or force empty via BatChmod) the trash. Important tip: Do not under any circumstances leave anything important on the Windows side. I learned that after the first crash. If the VM file gets corrupted, which seems to happen fairly easy given the large size of the single file and the unreliability of Fusion, there's absolutely no way to rescue any data in it, whereas at least on a real Windows PC, you may have some option of repairing Windows. I now work on data that's kept strictly in the Mac folders I share on Fusion, since I know OS X is much more reliable than Fusion and if something strange does happen, I have options to recover the data. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 6 users found this helpful
Saturday, November 10 2007 @ 04:15 PM PST
MacPAR deLuxe 3.7 (Mac OS X)
One really annoying thing I've noticed about version 3.7 is that it hogs file associations. Once it's installed, it takes over associations for files with Par2 and split (such as .001) extensions. The first isn't bad, although it's annoying. I can manually change one Par2 file to use another program, but if I try to change all files of that type, MacPar instantly grabs it back. The latter is very annoying as MacPar can't handle split files. They're supposed to go to Split & Concat. Apparently, the developer just assumes that we will repair before concatenating, but that's not correct, as many people create Par2 files before splitting, so we have to join before repairing. In other words, I have to manually launch Split & Concat instead of just double-clicking on the .001 file to do the same. Pain in the neck. The only way I know of to eliminate the bad file associations is to delete MacPar from my system, but then I can't create Par2 files. [alert admin]
Saturday, September 22 2007 @ 06:54 AM PDT
ForgetMeNot 3.0 (Mac OS X)
Is it just me, or does this occasionally have the incredibly annoying problem of forgetting (ironically) whether it's supposed to reopen the tabs? So I have to check the prefs before quitting to make sure it'll come back when I restart. I almost might as well just drag the URLs to the desktop and drag them back to Safari when I've restarted. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 09:39 PM PDT
EyeTV 2.4 (Mac OS X)
Using this with Miglia EvolutionTV. I'd heard the Miglia software was awful, so since the Evolution was only $70, I bought the EyeTV software, which supports the Evolution. It's nice and easy to use, mostly intuitive. I do like that it's easy to remove commercials, a simple five minute process. Not so thrilled with the low resolution of the scrubbing. Even in "fine" mode, it jumps 15 frames at a time, or a half second. I guess I've been spoiled by the frame-accurate scrubbing of other packages including iMovie. Overall, though, it works fine and I have no real complaints. [alert admin]
Friday, June 15 2007 @ 08:03 PM PDT
ForgetMeNot 3.0 (Mac OS X)
There are times when I have Safari running continuously for weeks while I have several tabs open, working on projects. The problem is that Safari has a notorious memory leak and it doesn't look like Apple will have that fixed anytime soon. Thanks to ForgetMeNot, I can quit Safari every so often to reclaim that memory. Also, every once in a while, when I have important tabs open, I quit Safari just to save the session like that in case Safari crashes. [alert admin]
Monday, March 12 2007 @ 02:26 AM PDT
Skype 2.5.0.85 (Mac OS X)
I use mine for SkypeIn and SkypeOut only, to replace a landline since unlimited incoming and outgoing calls cost me about $80 for the whole year. Seems to have lots of bugs. With an incoming call, there's no way for me to answer since there's no button to pick up. I have to wait for the voicemail and call them back. It's frustrating. Skype tech support claims there's such a button and I should delete my prefs, but that didn't help. The history often seems to keep the number of events (missed calls, voicemails) around long after I've deleted them. Only quitting and restarting Skype clears the number. Skype occasionally crashes when it's just waiting in the background. Still needs more development in the Mac version, I think. I don't have the PC version so I don't know if we're lagging behind that. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Sunday, March 11 2007 @ 12:01 PM PDT
XShelf 1.1.3 (Mac OS X)
I've been using this for years and have found it indispensible. Even with multiple large screens, it can be a pain to move things between desktop and finder windows. There's nothing else this program needs and I applaud Karl for migrating it to UB when he didn't have to. There's an attitude among some developers (thankfully few) of "Hey, it's free. Just accept whatever I give you and shut up." I don't use this all that much, but when you need it, you need it. Maybe if OS X emulated Windows' option to cut and paste files, this would be obsolete, but I don't know if Apple will ever add that to the current option of copying and pasting files. In any event, thank you, Karl. [alert admin]
Saturday, September 30 2006 @ 11:07 AM PDT
Last 10 Comments by Jimmy Sparks [ Search for All ]
Insalled (?) 2.8.2 w/safari 3.1; does nothing at all 
I've had the same problems with the installation "trick." For now, I've switched to Safari Adblock. Not quite as good as PithHelmet, but it does work without hacks and is free. I hope I'm not stuck with it forever, but it does seem like PithHelmet hasn't seen an update in months.
Original feedback item : Read More
Tuesday, April 15 2008 @ 12:11 AM PDT
You didn't give any details. What version of Handbrake are you running? 0.9 was known to be very crash-prone. Make sure you download 0.9.1 if you're still running Tiger.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, March 28 2008 @ 10:18 PM PDT
Weatherpop is a buggy piece of crap
Useful recommendation. But in the future, you should just tell people to visit the application's page here at Versiontracker instead of providing a direct link.
Original feedback item : Read More
Tuesday, January 29 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
Sometimes useful, always irritating.
Your criticism would be useful if only it were true. Once a week on Sunday morning is hardly "always." Nobody's forcing you to read it, either. I've long since fallen into the habit of barely noticing it when it pops up. Then I close it without reading it. Is that so hard?
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Thursday, December 27 2007 @ 07:40 PM PST
Just because you don't understand the issues doesn't mean you can dismiss them or change your rating because of them. That's just plain stupid. I would rate according to my own experience, not because of what anybody else says. And in fact, I do have the same problems as others do, through several years of using Weatherpop Advance on several Macs and from 10.2 through 10.4. It does lock up and stop updating until I…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Sunday, October 21 2007 @ 05:58 AM PDT
That makes no sense. The Par2 set knows what files it's supposed to work on. That's why if you rename the RAR segments, Par recovery programs can't find them. There's no reason why MacRAR should have to do any searching whatsoever. UnRarX has no such problem. Neither does SmartPar on the Windows side.
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Sunday, October 14 2007 @ 07:25 PM PDT
No problems on my Intel Mac. Installed and runs fine.
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Monday, September 03 2007 @ 09:05 PM PDT
The BEST of the BEST...Please Create Safari 3 Version...I Will Donate Again
Just like you, the fact that it doesn't work with the Safari beta is the reason I stick with Safari 2.0. Even though 2.0 has an annoying habit of crashing and quitting. It's a web browser, Apple! Browsers should never crash! At worst, it just shouldn't display a page properly.
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Sunday, July 08 2007 @ 09:53 AM PDT
Oh, and I forgot to mention...
Or you can always use Option-click on the link to download the file instead of displaying it. It's a basic Mac operation.
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Wednesday, May 16 2007 @ 10:30 PM PDT
Besides, as of now, there's pretty much no such thing as malware on the Mac.
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Sunday, May 06 2007 @ 11:35 AM PDT
