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User Name Stormchild
Member Since 2002-06-18
Total number of Feedback Posts: 173
Total number of comments: 114
Last 10 Feedback Posts by Stormchild [ Search for All ]
Apple Aperture 1.5 (Mac OS X)
Although it suffered initially from performance problems and other shortcomings, Aperture has really matured into a great product.
A lot of people were frustrated and disappointed with the initial 1.0 release; I actually thought it was a pretty good start, but I'm not a professional photographer. My basic point-and-shoot camera doesn't shoot RAW, and I'm not producing high quality prints for clients or anything like that. Nonetheless, even version 1.0 was already a great tool for organizing photos, applying metadata, and creating web galleries and such, and for the most part, I find its editing functions sufficient. I've only had to turn to Photoshop for maybe 1 out of every 100 images I shoot, and even then, the integration is quite good -- when you're finished editing in Photoshop, a new master image appears right next to the original in Aperture with all the metadata intact.
In addition to dropping the price, which was initially too steep, but is now quite reasonable, Apple also worked hard to fix the bugs, refine the usability, and improve the performance of the app. Version 1.1 was a significant upgrade; it resolved most of the problems of the initial release, and provided several important improvements as well. As of 1.1, I've been able to recommend it to other people as a worthy tool for at least intermediate photographers. I would recommend reading the very thorough reviews of Aperture 1.0 and 1.1 on Ars Technica for an excellent overview of how things progressed from 1.0 to 1.1...
Ars Technica Review: Aperture 1.0
Ars Technica Review: Aperture 1.1
That brings us to the new version 1.5. Like many others, I've been looking forward to the update ever since it was announced on Monday, checking Software Update several times a day throughout the week. Since I had to pay $20 each for the updates from Logic Pro 7 -> 7.1, and 7.1 -> 7.2, it was a welcome and refreshing surprise that Aperture 1.5 would be a free update. Now that I've got it in my hands, and had a chance to play with it for awhile, I can say I'm quite happy with all the new and improved features. Apple has clearly been working hard, and I think they've done a great job.
The ability to store photos in multiple places is a welcome addition, especially for pros that have libraries that are hundreds of GB in size. My library is much more modest -- a mere 10 GB -- but even for me this is a great new feature, as my PowerBook's internal hard drive is only 80 GB, and I've got more than 20 GB of audio files on here as well, so there really isn't much more room for things to grow. Because Aperture 1.5 now creates full quality previews of each image, it means I can move older photo projects to an external drive, keep the newer ones available for editing, and still be able to view all of them (and use them in iLife/iWork apps) even when my external drive isn't connected.
Meanwhile, Adobe's been working on their answer to Aperture -- Lightroom -- and I've been checking out the betas of that as well. Overall, I think it pales in comparison to Aperture, but one area in which it's (not surprisingly) quite capable is image editing. The latest Lightroom beta (b4) added new "curves" algorithms that I find very impressive, and so I was definitely hoping to see some image editing improvements in Aperture as well. Aperture 1.5 doesn't have anything that matches Lightroom's curves yet, but it did add an excellent new edge sharpener, which gives *much* better results than the previous sharpen filter, as well as individual hue, saturation and luminance adjustments for each of six ranges of hues, for very precise color adjustments. I recently discovered several important uses of this feature in Lightroom -- for example, when you increase the exposure of a photo, reds tend to get quite hot, and you can use these fine tuning controls to pull back the reds and make them look natural while improving the overall exposure. You could also, say, adjust the blueness of the sky without affecting other color ranges in an image.
These are just a few of the new features in Aperture 1.5, and by now I think it's really matured into a great product that I would recommend to anyone looking for a powerful took for organizing and editing photos. I'd still like to see some more editing capabilities, such as curves that can match the quality of those in Lightroom, but based on the direction it's been going so far, I feel confident that Apple will continue to raise the bar with each new update.
[alert admin]Read Comments (1) | More Info | 4 of 4 users found this helpful
Saturday, September 30 2006 @ 05:17 AM PDT
JEDict 4.1.1 (Mac OS X)
Actually, 4.2 is out now (w/ Intel support)
Interesting to just see the 4.1.1 announced on VT today. That's been out for weeks, but 4.2 just came out today, and is the first Universal release. The link isn't up on the site yet; I got it by email from the developer, but I'm not sure if it's okay to post the download link here; just thought I'd mention it. If you're looking for a Universal version, keep checking jedict.com and it'll pop up there sooner or later. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Monday, September 18 2006 @ 10:46 AM PDT
BBEdit 8.5 (Mac OS X)
Warning: long! If you don't live in your text editor all day, you probably won't find most of my comments interesting; save yourself some time and just skip over this! I've been looking forward to the next BBEdit update for quite some time. I thought BBEdit 8 was a great new version, and it finally got me to upgrade from BBEdit 6.5 (I found version 7 very disappointing and didn't go for it). I've been using this program for 8 or 9 years now, and until recently, there was really no competition for it. Other editors existed, of course, but to me none of them even came close. One day, along comes this new one called TextMate. I tried out version 1.0, and thought "well, they did a lot of nice things, but there's no way I could drop BBEdit for this." It was simply missing too much of the functionality that I rely on. But the developers worked hard on it, and a little community formed around it, and when I came back and had another look at it, around version 1.5, a lot had changed, and it started to look *very* good. While still missing a lot of BBEdit's features, they had added some truly innovative ideas. What really caught my attention were the editable bundles, with which you can define snippets, language style conventions, scopes & contexts, and a lot more. This feature alone leapfrogs BBEdit in a very significant way, promising to save me enormous amounts of time. BBEdit's "Glossary" feature absolutely pales in comparison. It's like comparing a tricycle to a motorcycle. Sure...they're both cycles, but don't plan on winning any races -- or even just getting somewhere much faster than walking -- with the Glossary. Okay, let's shift our focus back to BBEdit, since that's what I'm supposed to be commenting on. Here we have the new BBEdit 8.5 upgrade. It's clear right off the bat that Barebones has been paying attention to what people are saying, and took a very close look at TextMate. We've now got text folding -- one of TextMate's coolest features -- and BBEdit has done it quite nicely. Each program handles certain aspects of this better than the other, but on the whole they're about even. Another nice new display-related feature in 8.5 is the ability to maintain indent levels for soft-wrapped lines; this is very helpful when reading code and text with markup. I requested this feature several years ago, and I'm sure many others have been asking for it too. Much appreciated. Barebones always provides a detailed list of changes, even for minor updates; I very much appreciate these, and I always read the whole thing. The full list for 8.5 is quite large indeed, and I found myself nodding and giving a mental thumbs-up repeatedly as I made my way through this list. I definitely agree with most of the changes, and it's clear that BBEdit is still growing in a positive direction. So, now to the crux of the matter. The "bundles" in TextMate still hold a very significant advantage over BBEdit. Clearly Barebones realized how important this feature is, and how antiquated the Glossary was, as it got a new name, a bit of a facelift, and is now context-sensitive to the current language. I'm glad to see this feature is getting some attention, but in reality, the usefulness of it hasn't really progressed that much yet. You could say it's been upgraded from tricycle to a bicycle, but it's still left in the dust. While this feature might get turbo-charged in BBEdit 9, that's a big "maybe" that looms somewhere off in the future, and in the meantime, I'm now trying to decide whether to jump ship to TextMate or ride it out until the next major BBEdit upgrade. This is a huge decision for me, as this is probably the most important tool I use for my job. I work with HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL. I'm so used to BBEdit, and I'm interested in all the new goodies in BBEdit 8.5, but for the first time, there's another program out there that I suspect might be quite a bit more powerful for the kinds of work I do. It's going to be a project just to compare the latest versions of these programs, point-by-point, and see which one comes out ahead. I've started doing this, and I plan to share my findings in a thorough review. Until then, I thought I'd at least share some of my thought process on this so far, for the handful of users out there that might find it relevant. [alert admin]
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Friday, September 08 2006 @ 08:46 AM PDT
Barcode Blitz 2.0 (Mac OS X)
Nobody will ever pay $80 for a program that does nothing but generate a barcode. If it was April 1st, I'd assume this was a joke.
Here's a program that does it for free! barCode Creator
There are probably quite a few others; I just did a quick search of VT and found that one.
(Submitting the same comment again since the VT comments system isn't smart enough to detect HTML and has to be explicitly told.) [alert admin]Post a comment | More Info | 0 of 2 users found this helpful
Tuesday, September 05 2006 @ 07:22 AM PDT
Barcode Blitz 2.0 (Mac OS X)
<p>Nobody will ever pay $80 for a program that does nothing but generate a barcode. If it was April 1st, I'd assume this was a joke.</p> <p>Here's a program that does it for free! <a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14350">barCode Creator</a></p> <p>There are probably quite a few others; I just did a quick search of VT and found that one.</p> [alert admin]
Tuesday, September 05 2006 @ 07:21 AM PDT
Counterpoint 1.0 (Mac OS X)
This is a cool idea. I tried it out for about half an hour, and enjoyed it. It gets pretty challenging, and you have to know your music pretty well. I found it best to stick to my "4+ Stars" playlist in iTunes, since I have a lot of music in my library that I can't really identify cause I don't hear it often enough. Amusingly, the first time I played, one of the randomly-picked songs was an experimental electronic one that itself sounds like a mish-mash of songs being played at the same time. That was pretty funny. I think this game might have a pretty limited appeal, but I'd say give it a whirl. It works for me. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 4 of 4 users found this helpful
Saturday, September 02 2006 @ 01:15 AM PDT
Script Debugger 4.0.4 (Mac OS X)
This is hands down the best tool for developing in AppleScript. It has everything you need to write and test complex scripts, which can otherwise be a real pain with AppleScript. Everything about the app is very polished, and it's quite enjoyable to use. Unfortunately, for a development app that can only be used for one language, I can't possibly justify paying $199. Like most people, I just want to write scripts to automate some repetitive tasks. I'm not setting up complicated workflows, and since the whole goal of scripting is to save time, I don't intend to write and debug scripts all the time. All I wanted is a better tool for the job, and this is clearly the best one, but the pricing is unreasonable for anyone who isn't writing scripts every day, so the tool remains inaccessible to what is probably the largest part of the AppleScript user base -- people who just want to automate their own processes. The high price tag simply doesn't make sense. Although the text editor isn't the main purpose of it, it's a key part of any development environment, and (e.g.) TextMate runs circles around this aspect of the program, supports dozens of other languages -- and only costs €39. Okay, you might say "well, TextMate doesn't have a full breakpoint debugger". Fair enough. But XCode does, and -- although it's not an AppleScript debugger -- it is in fact a much more fully-featured debugger, and is *free*. My point being, similar tools of equal or greater capabilities cost a great deal less, and that's the problem here. For what this does, this is a $50 app at most. I might have paid $99, though I would have thought that was a lot higher than it should be. But I was absolutely stunned to see they're asking $199 for it. In short, this is a great tool that I would love to use, but for what it does, and the value it offers me, simply isn't worth the overinflated price. For the very few people who spend enough time writing AppleScripts to justify the high price tag, I highly recommend this program. Everyone else, including myself, will have to look elsewhere. [alert admin]
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Wednesday, August 30 2006 @ 11:41 AM PDT
VirtueDesktops 0.53r212 (Mac OS X)
Although this is still alpha software and unlikely to be considered stable enough for regular use by anyone yet, I would question the value of mentioning every tiny little update on VersionTracker, since each one seems to break two things for every one thing it fixes. We've had some 4 or 5 new versions in the past couple of days, each one just to fix a new bug in the previous update. Probably wouldn't hurt to have a few people test each update rather than immediately releasing each build.
By the way, I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I think this is a really nice implementation of virtual desktops. I've been exploring it lately and very much looking forward to a stable version because I really like it, and it's actually only a couple issues away from being usable.
Although I can't wait to see what Apple has done with Spaces, it remains to be seen whether it will have the same level of control and flexibility as VirtueDesktops. It doesn't have all the features of CodeTek VirtualDesktop Pro, but in many ways I think it's quite a bit more elegant and Mac-like than CodeTek's implementation. I would encourage people to try it out, get involved on the forum, and post any issues to the tracker.
[alert admin]Read Comments (1) | More Info | 2 of 5 users found this helpful
Saturday, August 19 2006 @ 02:43 PM PDT
Corripio Artwork Finder 0.4.5 (Mac OS X)
This is a potentially useful tool. It initially did not work at all for me, and I discovered it has to be in the main /Applications folder, or it will just "ding" and give up immediately everytime you try to find artwork, without actually searching. After moving it into /Applications, the searching now works. The user interface has several issues. You cannot disable any of the info columns (or show ones other than what it comes with). The window size and position are reset to default everytime you launch the app, as are all of the info columns -- and the 'Kind' column is (for some reason) about 800 pixels wide by default. When the window has been maximized to use the whole screen, it does not resize to accomodate the info or queue drawers when those are shown, leading the user to believe the info and queue toolbar buttons are not working. You have to click the window "zoom" button again after enabling the info or queue drawers. When you select an item that does not yet have artwork, the info drawer's image well says "no artwork" (as expected). After searching for and selecting the cover, however, it does not update to show that the item now has artwork. You must unselect and reselect the item for the change to be reflectted. A more bothersome usability issue is that when you "skip" an item (because it didn't find the artwork you wanted), you must also press "cancel" (and then, for some reason, wait for awhile) to get out of search mode. This means it takes two button clicks and a wait of a few seconds to cancel a failed search. Even worse, if you were searching for the artwork for an entire album, and had selected all of that album's songs, you'll have to repeat the entire above procedure for each song, even though you obviously wanted the same artwork for all those tracks. I sometimes even had to "skip" a blank set of results, and wait again, before being able to fully cancel out of a failed search. This is the weakest area of the program and needs attention. Minor cosmetic issue: The progress "spinner" is in the same spot as the cancel button, and appears overtop of it. I don't see the point in showing a vertical "selection" when sorting the list by one of the column headers. It's not really a selection (you cannot apply any commands to just that one column of information), and therefore is an unnecessary visual distraction that should be eliminated. As for the actual results, it seemed to do a good job most of the time. I noticed I got some book covers in one situation; perhaps the filtering needs to be refined a little, although I don't know the details of how it's done, so may it isn't possible (or at least not easy) to do this automatically. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 4 of 4 users found this helpful
Thursday, July 20 2006 @ 01:48 PM PDT
JEDict 4.1 (Mac OS X)
Nicely done! Just a few days after I posted my last review, a new update is released that addresses pretty much all the issues I had. It is now possible to drag Kanji and components, the Kanji size can now be changed for the large buttons on the Kanji page, and Romaji transcriptions are now completely hidden when that option is set. I'd still like to see an option added to look up characters by the Heisig index, since it's now possible to search by most of the other indices. About the only gripe I still have is that there's no upgrade price for current users. There should always be a cheaper upgrade price for new versions of software. But oh well, I'll pay the full price again, and support the developer for his ongoing work on this very important tool. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Saturday, June 03 2006 @ 12:16 PM PDT
Last 10 Comments by Stormchild [ Search for All ]
I bought the program for ~$30 as well. I wouldn't have had a problem with paying an upgrade fee for major new versions, but to be forced to pay the full price again is BS. He could have simply asked for another $10 to upgrade from v4 to v5 and I would had no problems paying that. Instead I'm stuck with version 5.0.x, and I certainly won't be paying again.
Original feedback item : Read More
Sunday, September 24 2006 @ 09:58 AM PDT
Why would there be, in a minor version? 
Seems a bit silly to expect a significant new feature in a minor version update. Although Omni hasn't promised to add it, they have certainly acknowledged that it's a highly requested feature (check out the forum on their website). In any case, if a particular application doesn't have a feature you need, simply don't use it and find something that does meet your needs. That's really no reason to give this a poor rating, as…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Wednesday, September 20 2006 @ 09:18 PM PDT
...by another clueless idiot. Good old VersionTracker.
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, September 13 2006 @ 11:01 PM PDT
Sorry man, can't agree with you there. I've been using BBEdit for at least 8 years, and I'm really familiar and comfortable with it, but TextMate clearly has leapfrogged it in several very significant ways. The "Bundles" in TextMate are extremely powerful and easy to customize, and that feature alone would make such a huge difference in my productivity. The "Glossary" in BBEdit is the closest thing to that feature, but compared to TextMate's bundles,…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Thursday, September 07 2006 @ 07:32 AM PDT
Now there's a solid set of reasons to pay $80. You don't have to add a couple extra digits manually. And wow, it outputs in CMYK. Outstanding! That'll save you the 10 seconds it would take to change the color mode yourself. By the way, you don't "typeset" barcodes. "Typesetting" means "setting type".
Here's another freeware option, updated more recently.
Ray's UPC A Creator
To be fair, many of the other barcode programs cost twice as much,…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Tuesday, September 05 2006 @ 12:33 PM PDT
I've seen a lot of visualizers on Windows that are MUCH cooler than this. Don't get me wrong, I've been a G-Force fan for years (and was into Whitecap in its day too), and I think it's great that it keeps getting improved. However, I recently decided to stop paying the annual fee, because honestly, even though the new features and configs are nice, it's really just the same old thing over and over. I'm satisfied…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Thursday, August 24 2006 @ 01:27 PM PDT
Well, actually, this feature is in there, it just doesn't work a lot of the time. There are a number of problems with switching to apps on different desktops at the moment. There are open tickets on these and I imagine they'll get sorted out before 0.6.
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, August 23 2006 @ 10:09 AM PDT
Yeah, that's a pretty stupid comment. There's really no point in sharing your lack of first-hand knowledge about a product on a public website. How does that help anyone else? If you don't want to try it, by all means, don't try it. There's no reason to announce your decision here though.
Original feedback item : Read More
Tuesday, August 15 2006 @ 12:25 PM PDT
Although I've not yet had a chance to try out iRatchet very much, I can say that I've been looking for an alternative to iBiz for a long time now. I started using iBiz when it was still called iWork. It seemed really nice at first, but I soon discovered several bugs, and unfortunately, even though I reported these bugs in great detail to IGG support and on their forum, many of them were never fixed,…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Sunday, August 06 2006 @ 03:13 AM PDT
That's your opinion, not a fact
Words are just sounds. Your interpretation of words may differ from that of others. I hear the word "Nazi" used quite commonly -- e.g. "Forum Nazi" -- a moderator who jumps on every situation in which someone isn't following the rules to the letter.
Original feedback item : Read More
Saturday, June 03 2006 @ 09:35 PM PDT
