User Profile for benrush

MYOB FirstEdge 1.0r5.7.2 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)

Lesser of Evils  

I've been using MYOB Firstedge for about 3 years now for my one-man graphic design studio. I'm still on version 1, because I have seen nothing worthwhile in the new versions. The Good: the app is stable and dependable. I've never lost any data. And, you never have to hit "Save". You're entries are automatically recorded. It's also smaller and less bloated than Quickbooks, which is better for my small business. And much cheaper. The app comes with a pretty decent "Accounting 101" instruction manual to teach the uninitiated about basic accounting terms and techniques. The invoicing and estimating forms are fairly flexible. The Bad: The navigation is HORRENDOUSLY bad! I absolutely hate using this product for that reason alone. it makes me sick every time I launch it. It's impossible to find what you need (I have to keep a cheat-sheet by my computer to remember how to do my most frequent tasks.) And, unlike in Quickbooks, the windows don't stay where you've left them when you quit. Also, there is NO job log, notes feature or time tracking for recording a project's progress. Also, in previous versions, the "import" feature was useless. Not sure if it's gotten any better in v3. I've tried Quickbooks and many other shareware products, but I haven't found anything that is both easy to use and fully functional. Including MYOB's products. But Firstedge is, unfortunately, the LEAST bad of the bunch, I think. So I'm stuck with it until something better comes along. [alert admin]

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Friday, August 17 2007 @ 01:45 PM PDT

FontVista X 3.0 (Mac OS X)

Let's wait to see Version 4....  

This is better than most I've tried, but that ain't saying much. I like the interface and the ability to pick and choose individual files. It opens folder (and subfolders) of fonts pretty fast, even when you're opening more than a thousand at once, and plays well with both active and inactive fonts in almost all formats. You can even see a Layout Preview of the pages. I like the options to hide all the active user and system fonts from your list. And, conveniently, it tells you how many fonts you've selected for printing, and how many pages that'll take. The biggest problem is the gigantic bug that also plagues many competitors: corrupt fonts. If it encounters font that is damaged, missing a resource, or just has a bad attitude, the printing process is cancelled instantly, and the program doesn't even let you know an error has occured: the file simply fails come out of the printer. There are 2 fixes to this that I'm aware of: 1) check the "print pages as seperate files" option in the preferences, which seems to work a little better, or 2) manually scan the Layout Preview and seek out any fonts that are defaulting or bitmapping. Option 1 is much slower, and it's useless if you're saving the file as a pdf, which i prefer so that I can save it for later printing (or take my 800 pages to Kinko's). Option 2 is more than tedious when you're printing thousands of fonts. Also, I've had quite frequent problems with crashing, usually RIGHT AFTER it's imported a whole folder of fonts. And though it is pretty fast at actually opening the fonts, it takes an indecent amount of time to rebuild the font list in the window when you make changes to the list. In fact, I've found it faster (when I'm building a series of font lists) to quit and re-launch the program, rather than wait for it to rebuild the list after I close the previous set of fonts. And though you can control the number of fonts per page, columns, etc, and you can change the preview text, there are really not many layout options. For instance, you can't print a complete character map of a font (a feature that's pretty useful for referencing your dingbats and non-latin alphabets). And you don't have many choices about what information is included on the printout. You can print the screen name OR family/style name, but not both. And there's not option for listing the font format, id#, printer font name, foundry, or other potentially useful information. You can change the page footer, but you have to go to the preferences pane. It doesn't play well with MM fonts, but there's no option for globally de-selecting them. Also, I wish there were a way of screening out expert, alt, and ligature versions of fonts, and a way to detect and deselect damaged fonts. It would also be nice to have process for analyzing duplicate or similar fonts, or organizing fonts by family. Or, better yet, include an option to print each font family on a separate page. And like many competitors, it prints an annoying big black box in the place of missing characters (such as on fonts that have no lowercase characters or missing punctuation). Why not just leave those spaces blank??? You can't view individual fonts. You have to go to the Layout Preview and find it, laid out in order with all the other fonts on your list. And to make it worse, the Layout Preview window shows EVERY font you currently have imported, whether you've chosen them to print or not. I wish this window would update live as you check and uncheck fonts, so you can get a more realistic view of the layout, and use the preview double-check for any problems. I wish the single-page print preference would work even if you're saving as a pdf. And last but certainly not least, I wish you could save Suitcase-like "sets" of your imported fonts, so you can go back and add to or change your font library without starting from scratch. Overall, I think it just barely meets my needs, but there are so many ways it could be better. For now, I reluctantly recommend it. But we'll see if they can improve future versions. [alert admin]

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Thursday, March 23 2006 @ 06:23 PM PST

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