Existing users, 
Advanced SearchUser Name Pres!
Member Since 2003-11-19
Total number of Feedback Posts: 67
Total number of comments: 20
Last 10 Feedback Posts by Pres! [ Search for All ]
Transmission 1.22 (Mac OS X)
Powerful and easy to use: A good combination 
Transmission is just what I've needed in a BT client: fast, tight, elegant. Easy to use. The UI just makes sense, and it does all that I need it to do. I used Azureus for a long time before, and I don't find myself missing anything enough to launch it again. I guess that says something! The developer keeps on improving Transmission, and is quite active on the support forum. Can't say enough good things about that. There are also interesting test builds if you want to trade stability (I don't think I've ever had a crash, though YMMV) for the features that haven't yet made it into the release version. Or stick with the official releases and just happily enjoy the ride! I'm very pleased with it. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Friday, July 25 2008 @ 06:24 PM PDT
Readiris Pro 11.0.3 (Mac OS X)
ReadIris has done a journeyman (i.e. not spectacular) job for me except for a few issues. First, the 50 page limit is a pain, and they send too many promotional emails. But given that... Its ability to learn and improve seems to be poor. If I partially OCR a document and correct it as it goes, then abort it and start again, then it surely remembers the corrections I made -- basically I only have to continue my corrections from the point where I stopped. However, this learning appears to be so supremely specific to the particular OCR'ed glyphs that even if I save that dictionary and reload it after opening different pages from the same scanned PDF, it's as though ReadIris has had no training whatsoever. e.g. it again confirms with me what the numeral "3" is, and similar basic questions that I've definitely covered before. It is apparently pathologically unsure of its recognition of punctuation. I have been asked to confirm quotation marks, dashes, periods, semicolons, colons, and parentheses more times than I can count. And even though it's correct 90% of the time, no matter how many times I say "Yup, you got that right," it still asks me 300 more times. I'd much rather correct the occasional mistake when I proofread the document after the fact, than waste my time having to go through this confirmation step endlessly. If you load a document, OCR it (theoretically training ReadIris), then load a second document, your previous correction dictionary apparently just disappears and it starts from scratch. Of course that's not much of a loss, given my comment above, but that's a pretty nasty user experience. I won't even mention that it just crashed on me today on the final page of an OCR job (oh wait, I just did... Never mind!) Basically if I hadn't already bought it (over a year ago), I'd spend the $70 to upgrade my DevonThink Pro to DevonThink Pro Office to get the same (IIRC) OCR engine with a less-painful interface, by a company that actually speaks to its users. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Thursday, December 13 2007 @ 08:48 PM PST
Submerge 1.2 (Mac OS X)
I literally had my credit card out to fork over the $9 until I ran across the mention on the author's support page that they used an activation system with their registration code. That was a dealbreaker for me. I'll buy software that has to phone home only when a) there's no competition whatsoever (like Adobe) b) the company is gigantic enough to likely be around in 20 years (like Adobe) and c) I don't mind having no warm feelings toward the company that by this system is treating me like a criminal (like...you know). I don't like anything that puts itself between the serial number I paid for, and my full use of the software. It just feels creepy. The app itself I like quite a bit. It could use a few tweaks (like support for per-title italic tags rather than just a global italics setting for the entire movie, a bit more customizability for title placement on the image, and a WYSIWYG font selection system) but for $9 it's a steal. If supporting the spread of software activation doesn't bother you, then I'd recommend Submerge since the software itself seems to be very well executed. Sorry for the rant. [alert admin]
Read Comments (3) | More Info | 0 of 1 users found this helpful
Friday, October 19 2007 @ 05:13 PM PDT
GraphicConverter X 6.0 (Mac OS X)
GraphicConverter has two main faults, that I can see. The first one is more transient, and is not about the app itself as it is with the upgrade process: The author releases so many incremental updates that users get into a years-long habit of automatically downloading the new version and trashing the old one, which means that on those rare occasions (2002, 2007...) that the new version requires an upgraded license, the author uses the same old upDATE dialog. Users get fooled into overwriting their old version with the new one, and are only then greeted with an unexpected "pay up" screen. The second fault is that over the years that GC has been developed, the user interface has not grown in elegance. The Preferences dialog especially is labyrinthine and unwieldy -- searching for a way to set a specific option among the nigh-infinite possibilities strains patience. Additionally, as a previous reviewer commented, I have to agree that the interface looks like an application from the late 1990s that's been recently carbonized, instead of a mature cocoa app waiting for Leopard. The toolbar has only the most primitive Microsoft Word-ish customization interface (and its new "large icons without labels" option in the browser is somehow an odd size vertically...), the Preferences dialog has no tooltips to help me with its myriad options, and (although this is embarrassing for a user registered since 1998) I still can't quite figure out when and where the toolbox palette is or is not going to show up... XD There's something just wrong with that... The author has made a number of interface tweaks in v6.0, but they appear to be totally random, at the author's whim (the toolbox icons are now gigantic, the tool area at the bottom of each image window is now half-again as tall as the scroll bar and noticeably reduces the real estate available for displaying an image). As far as I can tell, the author has either never read, or understood the reasoning behind, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines documentation, even 6 years after the release of OS X. The GC6 interface has changed a bit, but since the changes are in no particular direction, it hasn't really improved things much. All that said of course, paying $20 once every 4-5 years is a no-brainer. There are times I just don't want to fire up the behemoth Photoshop (though at 94MB, GC is itself well into the same category), and GC is consistently a welcome tool in my toolbox. The two faults above only add up to one star off of my rating. [alert admin]
Read Comments (2) | More Info | 23 of 23 users found this helpful
Sunday, August 05 2007 @ 04:26 PM PDT
PithHelmet 2.6.6 (Mac OS X)
You know something's weird when...
...you realize you've begun holding off on installing OS updates just because you want to wait for your ad blocker to be updated first. :) I do it! Admit it, you're considering it too! "PithHelmet: More important than the OS." [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 6 of 7 users found this helpful
Wednesday, June 28 2006 @ 07:21 AM PDT
FLV Viewer 0.4 (Mac OS X)
The good thing is that it play the files I've thrown at it, but there are a few caveats:
• Its method of scanning a folder instead of handling files in a normal manner is profoundly inconvenient.
• It doesn't accept files dropped on it, and .flv files assigned to it in the Finder's Get Info panel receive no icons.
• It can't handle Japanese filenames, not only displaying them as gobbledegook in its list, but also refusing to play them until they're renamed.
If the author would give it a normal user interface and let it access files like a regular application, this would be convenient to use. As it is, it's just useable. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Saturday, May 27 2006 @ 08:03 AM PDT
Keyword Assistant 1.9.1 (Mac OS X)
Glad to see it working with 6.0.2! [alert admin]
Tuesday, March 07 2006 @ 02:43 AM PST
Apple iPhoto 6.0.2 (Mac OS X)
To reply to my own comment below: yes it's faster than iPhoto 5. The loading time for an iPhoto library with lots of pictures (99% jpegs) is very noticeably faster. Quite nice. For me it was worth getting iLife 06 just for this -- it's finally convenient enough to actually start organizing all of my photos that have been languishing on backup disks hidden away all over creation. I'm currently using iPhoto Library Manager to wrangle multiple libraries, but with this v6 speed boost it might even be useable if I combine all my libraries back into one mega-library. Haven't tried that yet, but it might be worth a try! [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 4 users found this helpful
Saturday, March 04 2006 @ 10:13 PM PST
Virtual ][ 5.0 (Mac OS X)
Don't just remember your youth -- Emulate it!
I can't believe I haven't reviewed this before now... Oops! As an Apple ][+ user from way back (I was half of the "team" that frankensteined Castle Smurfenstein from Muse's classic Castle Wolfenstein), it's great to have an emulator that truly recreates the 8-bit experience. Little details, like the accurate reproduction of the sound of the disk drive mechanism shuffling back and forth as it loads from the disk images, while totally useless, are utterly cool. It wouldn't be an Apple ][ if it just loaded up without a peep! (And yes you can turn if off if you've had enough nostalgia...) It allows you to save the state of the machine so you can resume where you were, or always start a given game at the startup screen without all that disk shuffling if you like. You can print in fully-accurate dot-matrix glory and save the output to a PDF file. It comes with a slew of virtual cards to fill its virtual slots so you can be the envy of all your friends 25 years ago. The price of the full license feels a bit high at first, but then again thinking about all the karma I've accumulated from the games I copied back then...now that I'm a grownup with an actual income, I can certainly afford to pay the price of one game (then or now, the prices haven't changed a whole lot) to help balance the scales a bit! It took me about two seconds to fork over the license fee, and I've had that warm fuzzy feeling ever since. It's 80's-tastic! [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 3 of 3 users found this helpful
Saturday, March 04 2006 @ 09:59 PM PST
Inquisitor 2.2 (Mac OS X)
Looks great, but unfortunately it's not shareware because you don't get to try and see if you like it -- the download page requires you to make a payment before you recieve a download link. You're allowed to pay as little (or as much) as you like, but as a comment below says, "pay before you try it" makes this a commercial product rather than shareware. A mandatory donation is not a donation; it's a price tag. On a more practical note, how am I supposed to know how much to donate if I haven't ever used it? And if I like it, how likely am I to go back and give addtional money to the author if in the back of my mind is a vague memory that I've "already paid?" It's nice to see people experimenting with creative payment models, but this one doesn't really make sense. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 3 users found this helpful
Monday, February 20 2006 @ 06:49 PM PST
Last 10 Comments by Pres! [ Search for All ]
I feel for your problems with the update...I'm still trying to figure out if I want to install it myself or not. One thing that might help you a bit: there's a free PreferencePane called RCDefaultApp that lets you change the default browser without launching Safari. Give it a shot!
Original feedback item : Read More
Saturday, December 22 2007 @ 12:01 AM PST
why this app? (there are free ones)
For me, one word: Interface. Having two panels like Transmit's "your stuff" and "their stuff" is very convenient. Also having a columns view is extremely comfortable for a hardcore OS X user like myself. Other FTP apps work; Transmit is comfortable too.
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, October 31 2007 @ 10:29 PM PDT
Update 5.4 -> 5.5 breaks license
That's odd, I'm not having any unwanted effects with my copy, so it doesn't appear to be all V]['s fault. Hmm...
Original feedback item : Read More
Sunday, October 08 2006 @ 06:18 AM PDT
You can use it to set your app's mouse sensitivity in two ways; either setting the speed directly (from 80 to 1400 dpi) or tweaking its acceleration (between 1 and 200%). That should give you a lot more control over how your game responds. And that's aside from all the button-customization stuff you can do.
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, June 26 2006 @ 10:15 PM PDT
Thanks for the tip - it's always been a pain to have to scour the Real.com site for the correct download link!
Original feedback item : Read More
Sunday, May 14 2006 @ 06:14 AM PDT
It runs as smoothly as ever on my machine...
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, March 13 2006 @ 06:10 PM PST
...so you don't have to click on anything to see the information you need? Works great for me!
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, February 22 2006 @ 03:34 AM PST
I don't know about trying to pressure them by avoiding the stand-alone, but that said, the effect for me is the same: I'm already running BOINC in the background all the time that I'm not doing something processor-intensive. If they released a version that worked with it, I'd happily give F@H its share of my processor time alongside the other BOINC modules.
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, February 06 2006 @ 12:58 AM PST
That's why they said it's an early release. From their November newsletter, concerning "NovaMind 3.0 For Early Adopters": Our development team are dedicated to resolving the remaining issues with NovaMind 3, and will continue to release updates on approximately a weekly basis, and publish a list of known issues so you know what we are already working on resolving. These upgrade releases will be numbered 3.0.1, 3.0.2 etc. Each of these releases will have a panel…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Tuesday, January 24 2006 @ 10:46 PM PST
As the installer tells you, just re-run the installer and you can revert your buttons to their default states.
Original feedback item : Read More
Sunday, January 15 2006 @ 08:41 PM PST
