Existing users, 
User Name Pen Dragon
Member Since 2001-03-24
Total number of Feedback Posts: 217
Total number of comments: 65
Last 10 Feedback Posts by Pen Dragon [ Search for All ]
Google Earth 4.3.7284.3916 (Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 2000)
Google Earth is Cool, But Present Security Risk.
While Google Earth is totally cool, Google has lost common sense. They are programming like MS---lots of features, but no respect for the users. They want to control when and how you update Google Earth. Because the content changes, they want to keep you current, but they are not smart enough to figure a better way than running as root. This shows a lack of basic understanding of unix, Mac OS X, and the Mac market. Mac users are smart and don't need Google to hold our hands. We can update when we need to. Also, desktop processes should never run as root. The potential risks are too great. I will not run the new Google Earth 5 because Google apparently does not understand this. Sad, but apparently true. If running as super user is the only way for them to update they have lost my respect for their programming skills. They are not skilled enough if they need to run as root. This is just wrong thinking and has terrible security risk potential. . No one but Apple and me are skilled enough to manage root on my computer, and Apple has it disabled by default. Send Google Earth 5 packing. Save yourself some misery. Avoid Google Earth 5 and later. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 13 of 14 users found this helpful
Friday, May 08 2009 @ 08:58 PM PDT
Coda 1.6.3 (Mac OS X)
I develop and maintain several websites, one with 150+ pages, using Coda. Coda provides all of the tools I need to develop the web pages, including support for multiple sites and excellent support for css. If I need to change content across all of the pages of a site, the find and replace feature is fast and accurate. Coda's support is good, but sometimes a little sluggish to respond. However, this has never created a major issue, because, at least in my experience, the software is responsive and stable with no major bugs. One problem: sometimes files get marked for updating when no updates have been made, but that is really a minor issue. If you need a WYSIWYG tool, Coda is not the one for you. iWeb, part of Apple's iLife, is excellent for this and actually provides very good WYSIWYG tools, even for small businesses in many cases, but not all. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Friday, April 03 2009 @ 10:45 AM PDT
MainMenu 1.7.3 (Mac OS X)
http://www.santasw.com/ [alert admin]
Friday, January 02 2009 @ 10:15 AM PST
iMaginator 4.1 (Mac OS X)
Great Image Processing for Everyone 
There are more than 100 effects -- all of those of Core Image, plus some plug-ins added by the developer. The effects are easy to find, easy to use and easy to edit. If you have an older machine there is an option to not update an effect until you release the mouse button. Otherwise, the effects are done in realtime. I am using Imaginator on a 800 MHz G4 iBook with 640 MB of RAM and its works great on images destined for the web. On a 1.6 GHz MacBook Air, Imaginator is very fast. It is likely a screamer or an iMac or Mac Pro, but I don't know that.
Layers are easy to add with four commands:
- Add another image
- Reuse base image
- Add text
- Add paint layer
Effects can be applied to each layer. You can, for example, place blurred text on top of a crisp image. Or put the text behind a translucent image to shine through. This is all done by applying effects to the layers individually.
The documentation is concise, and, where needed, visual. For example, the documentation about various color blends includes visual examples to give you a good idea of what each blend does.
About support: On a Sunday evening, I contacted the developer because Imaginator would not open Pentax RAW images---although it did fine with "generic" raw---and he fixed the issue by Monday morning. BTW, because of their size, RAW images are pretty sluggish on my older iBook, but that is not really an Imaginator issue.
For $49 and life-time free upgrades, I cannot image a better deal.
[alert admin]Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Monday, March 10 2008 @ 09:53 AM PDT
ROT13 [de|en]code 1.1 (Mac OS X)
Fvzcyr Vagresnpr, Gjb Rapbqvatf, Svanyyl n Hfrshy Jvqtrg
Guvf vf cerggl pbby sbe yrneavat EBG13. Vg urycf zr gnyx gb zl xvqf. Zvffvat srngherf: vPung vagrtengvba. Translation: Title: Simple Interface, Two Encodings, Finally a Useful Widget. Text: This is pretty cool for learning ROT13. It helps me talk to my kids. Missing features: iChat integration. PS Can someone tell me if this is really a good translator? [alert admin]
Wednesday, August 29 2007 @ 09:23 AM PDT
StuffIt Expander 11.0 (Mac OS X)
Stuffit Expander is Back -- Good Features, Works Great
Well, I feel a little out of step with all of the complaints, but this product is great. It has the feel of the OS 9 days when Stuffit had no competitors and was doing a great job at keeping customers happy. Expander has good preferences (surrounding folder as an option, etc.) works well on all sorts of encoded files, including base 64 and zip (zip with no license requirement as in the past, how cool is that?). As a test I dropped in an email containing a compressed file. If you looked at the source you saw base 64 code (normal for email source) with the standard beginning and ending headers and footers. Expander skipped the text and found the encoded part and unencoded it perfectly. No complaints. Expander is great for unencoding files from the developers who insist on using .sit files and hqx encoding. Why are they still doing that? And it does well with unix archives as long as you don't need to keep the original file permissions. If I did not know the command line I would probably purchase Stuffit Standard or Deluxe. But that depends on whether those programs were trying to take over OS X, like they did several years back when I quit using Stuffit. Here are some things to consider about my archiving style: (1) I don't use Stuffit for compressing. For that I use the built in the archiver in OS X or the command line Darwin tools. (2) I don't use Stuffit for expanding unix archives where I want to keep file permissions. Duh! (3) I normally don't use it to unzip files, but instead use the Finder for that, although Expander is fine for unzipping. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 3 users found this helpful
Tuesday, October 10 2006 @ 10:08 AM PDT
Eusing Free Registry Cleaner 1.0 (Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 2000)
Free, Easy to Use, and Fast Registry Cleaner
I don't much like Windows software, being a user of Mac OS X. But I must use a PC some at work and it gets progressively slower day after day. So I cleaned the registry to see how it works and "poof" it's faster, at least a little. Also, this registry cleaner is one of the few that is actually free. At one time it cleaned only the first few entries and required a fee to clean more, but that has changed and now this product is totally free. But at startup is displays a nag screen asking for a donation. I don't believe freeware should display a nag screen, but that's the developer's choice. In my case I am not counting off for the nag screen because the product works so well. It is also fast and appears to do its job, that is removing garabe from the registry. [alert admin]
Monday, June 19 2006 @ 11:19 AM PDT
Nisus Writer Express 2.7 (Mac OS X)
Good Features, Great Price, Performance, Stability: Nisus Re-Arrives
Nisus 2.6 and larger is most excellent for entering and editing text. This version seems to keep up the improvements. While its features are not yet equivalent to classic Nisus, Nisus Writer Express is now worth using on OS X and I have started using it again after several years of false starts.
Especially useful are the non-contiguous selection, easy to use regular expressions for find/replace, on-the-fly word count, very easy to use keyboard mapping, the thesaurus and multiple clipboads---all good features for a professional writer.
I do almost all of my print and web publishing using the tools of TeX (see http://www.tug.org/mactex/) so I really don't care about Nisus styles, tables of content (can Nisus do one?) tables, footnotes, endnotes, headers/footers and the like. But it appears Nisus does these very well (I know how to use them, I just don't). You can even mix footnotes and endnotes in the same document, which could be useful when doing specialized publishing of educational documents (footnotes on the page and discussion questions in the endnotes), for example.
My son uses Nisus at college and transfers files back and forth with that nasty word processor developed by Microsoft. So Nisus apparently does this well, too. It certainly preserves much of the formating when opening Word text docs, but sometimes skips graphics. The file exchange is good enough for collaborative work on text docs, but probably not good enough for sharing docs with lots of images. I would just use Nisus and dump Word, but that is not always realistic.
So, if you need a great text processor with the features already mentioned, plus more, you might want to give the 30-day trial a look. The price is great and you can get a family license for $40 more.
[alert admin]Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Saturday, June 10 2006 @ 08:17 AM PDT
Videator 1.02 (Mac OS X)
Professional Effects, Beginner Easy, Low Price
For a first release, this software is most excellent. The interface is clean and intuitive. The feature set is very creative. If past behavior on other products are any indication, support will be excellent.
The number of its effects make you think of professional software with professional (that is expensive) pricing. But the price is very reasonable.
You can combine effects to make your own custom ones. And preset "instant effects" have multiple selections similar in use to those of iphoto.
Working with the timeline is easy. You select what you want to change and then do it.
The default interface is brushed metal, but you can select the aqua interface as a preference. How cool is that?
In imports video or records directly from a camera. You can also import stills by dragging and dropping from iPhoto or the Finder.
As with other Stone software, much attention is given to details and innovative features. I tried it out for several hours then purchased a license. My sons are currently making movies from DV content shot at the San Diego zoo.
Summary: Lots of fun. Great features. Excellent pricing. High-end quality. Excellent support. Beginner ease of use. Great product from a long-time OS X developer.
[alert admin]Post a comment | More Info | 4 of 5 users found this helpful
Monday, June 05 2006 @ 05:39 PM PDT
Apple iWork '06 (Mac OS X)
Makes Terrific Professional Content 
The whole point of iWork is to make nice looking documents, something Word, PowerPoint and friends cannot do because of MS's hideous concept of typography.
So, what's new in '06?
- 3D charts.
- Reviewer's comments that go back and forth with Word.
- Inline tables with calculations--for the most part, who needs Excel if your tables calculate?
- Address Book integration for mail merges--for the most part who needs Access if you can use your address book for content customization. Very well done!!
- Free-form shapes and curves.
- Image masking.
- Image relection.
- Cinematic transitions.
- Very nice new themes--something Word and PowerPoint cannot do because of MS's concepts of graphics and typography.
Using the font palette is difficult, but if you set up styles, which you should, this is not a serious problem.
Integration with iLife is very cool. Dang, Apple is good.
iWork seems to run slightly slower than '05, but it still waits for me more than I wait for it and, as is typical, it will be likely be speeded up with the first maintenance update.
Some professional reviewers say iWork is not professional. That is a matter of opinion. If they mean by professional no spread sheet, no database, then okay. But, really? Consider this, what do most of us do with a spread sheet? Data storage. Pathetic data storage, but data storage, none-the-less. And what do we store? Contact info such as names, addresses, phone numbers, comments and such. Use Apple's address book and you get it all. And what do we do with a database? Web stuff! Can you say My SQL? It runs fine on OS X and is a real database. But do you really need a database. For most of us, probably not.
So, overall, 4-stars. Points off for font palette, rough help docs, and slighly slower speed. The features are the best.
[alert admin]Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Monday, January 30 2006 @ 05:46 PM PST
Last 10 Comments by Pen Dragon [ Search for All ]
What are your hardware, software configs?
Need more info to provide help. Could be anything from hardware additions to third-party kernel extensions. On Apple hardware with no third-party stuff this update works fine.
Original feedback item : Read More
Tuesday, May 19 2009 @ 02:24 AM PDT
The Leopard issue has been addressed. Visit developer's website if you want details.
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Tuesday, April 28 2009 @ 01:17 PM PDT
Cross Platform = Junky Software
At one time Canvas was the best illustration program on the Mac---tons better than Illustrator. Now? Run, Forest, run! Cross platform means developed on Windows and ported to the Mac. Or, even worse, it means lukewarm Java. Ouch! It means junk software. Been there, done that. As an alternative, try Intaglio, ZuesDraw, or any of the new school drawing apps. The time of Canvas has past. Let it go and be a Windoze app.
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Tuesday, April 21 2009 @ 10:23 AM PDT
You wonder, but have never used it? Then do the right thing. Control yourself. Don't comment. Coda is excellent and well worth its price.
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Friday, April 03 2009 @ 10:29 AM PDT
Titanium PowerBook—1 GHz, 1 GB RAM, OS X 10.4.10—is marginal for today's software. Performance for Mac will improve with the release of Snow Leopard, but maybe not for PowerPC machines. I know of other lower end PPC machines that struggle with performance today.
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Wednesday, March 11 2009 @ 08:07 PM PDT
Installs a kernel extension, so I quit using it
I used Snapz for years, but have had to quit using it since they started using a kernel extension--several years ago--because of repeated kernel panic. Now I use the built in screen capture and edit the images using Imaginator, which gives me better control over the images anyway, including batch processing of screen shots. I loved Snapz, but the X version was causing system-level instability. When I removed the kernel extension, stability returned. Sigh!…
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Wednesday, February 06 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
Not free, but iWork '08 is Cheap
iWork Pages is not totally compatible with Word, but works well with documents not using Word's quirky page layout features. iWork is stable, does nice word processing, good spread sheets with a much smoother interface than Excel (but not as many features) and excellent presentations with Keynote, which leaves PowerPoint in the dust. It's really time to start doing work in programs made for, rather than ported to, the Mac. iWork is not free,…
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Thursday, January 24 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
Contact Stone for Quick Support
This developer is very responsive, one of the best I have ever contacted.
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Thursday, December 06 2007 @ 06:25 AM PST
Before running an app such as this, always back up your drive. If you use Carbon Copy Cloner, you will get a restorable backup for the entire drive. Some copy protected apps (Illustrator and other commercial apps from Adobe, for example) might need to be reinstalled, but that is expected. If you don't have a backup drive, then don't use apps like this. You can manually remove languages through "command-i" info on each app.
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Thursday, November 08 2007 @ 04:30 AM PST
only guys with tiny, ah, egos, look at p0rn.
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Friday, July 13 2007 @ 08:41 AM PDT
