User Profile for coach_wade

User Name coach_wade

Member Since 2006-03-27

Total number of Feedback Posts: 7

Total number of comments: 5

Last 10 Feedback Posts by coach_wade [ Search for All ]

Planbook 1.1.6 (Mac OS X)

I am a beginning middle school applied technology teacher. I had some grandiose plans in mind for developing my own database for lesson plans to keep everything organized when it occurred to me to check out versiontracker and I came across this gem. I've played with it for about five minutes and I'm already drooling. I'm extraordinarily anal-retentive about my lesson plans and practice plans. I want everything neatly aligned and no wasted time. This looks like the software for me! Thanks Jeff. I'll be in touch with further kudos and suggestions as I come across them, but so far this looks fantastic! Thank you! ~D. [alert admin]

Pratchettes 2.0 (Mac OS X)

Free? FREE?!?!

Gary and the rest at Unseen Software have brought us a truly outstanding application here. In fact, my roommate has admonished me for months about my constant "Terry Pratchett quote of the day." As a non-Pratchett reader, he hasn't really understood the depth and scope of Pratchett's social satire. Now when I'm trying to quote the specific Pratchett comment, I can look it up first and get the wording right in Mr. Pratchett's amazing turn of phrase. (Those with the application, look up "Gilt." This software is exhaustively put together, very stable, and extremely well designed. In addition to a staggering number of quotes from an author with highly prolific turnout, the program features a beautiful map of the Discworld, a descriptive discussion of this amazing creatively produced world, and a biography of Mr. Pratchett that is more detailed even than ones I've found online. I am quite impressed with the developers' attention to detail. Another reviewer pointed out some spelling mistakes, however the author was kind enough to provide us an EDITOR for the database, possibly foreseeing the need to fix the occasional OCR scanning mistake or typo. The result is that in a few keystrokes one can fix the quote that pops up with a typo. I have only three requests for future versions: 1) Add Sam Vimes in the portraits along the top of the window. Vimes is perhaps the most influential and effective character in Pratchett's worlds. The cop who knows that the only thing keeping him on the right side of the law is his badge and iron discipline, Sam Vimes is my personal hero. (In addition to Sam Vimes I might recommend adding Rincewind, one of Pratchett's more beloved characters.) 2) This is actually more important: I would like the ability to kill the application window without shutting it down. As an author (non-fiction) I have a number of applications active at any one time on my desktop, from my word processor to my web browser to my notes/organizational software. Although expose' is a great tool and helps keep things relatively organized, anything that can be done to reduce clutter and lower the open window count is a good thing, in my book. Reducing the application to the dock is partially effective, but still provides unnecessary clutter. 3) I would absolutely love a minimized, background version that would pop up the Terry Pratchett Quote of the Day at a prescheduled time. This could be set to pop up on the first log in from screensaver after the user runs the program. I don't know how difficult this would be to implement, but it would be cool as all heck. Gary, if/when you read this, you've done a fantastic job, and I'm highly impressed with the work you do. Please keep it up! (And in response to your comment to the reviewer about the spelling mistakes, I'm willing to periodically send you my updated database with corrections if you're willing to add them to the program. I'll contact you soon.) Pratchett fans, you'll love this program. Today's quote: "...many people in the universe have also had the misplaced belief that they can safely ignore gravity, mostly after taking some local equivalent of dried frog pills, and this has led to much extra work for elementary physics and caused brief traffic jams in the streets below." ~D. [alert admin]

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Monday, May 07 2007 @ 02:14 PM PDT

Sidenote 1.7.2 (Mac OS X)

Finally! Real stickies that WORK!

As a non-fiction author, I do a great deal of internet research. As a football coach, I do a great deal of research, period. When these two things bang together on my desktop, I'm left with clutter. At last count I have thirteen filled spiral notebooks with clinic notes. Stickies are worthless to me. They don't carry enough information (about sixteen lines is the max), and the database is difficult to locate, so if you use the widgets stickies like I did, you need to have a dozen or more open (which completely covers your widgets desktop and makes other applications unusable) and if you have a system crash, any information on those stickies is pretty much gone. (Just happened to me about a week ago.) Sidenote, on the other hand, is EXACTLY the sort of documentation tool every author should have. It's completely unobtrusive-- hidden nicely on the right side of my desktop-- yet it can have dozens of notes available. At the moment I have five notes open: a general one for quick jots like phone numbers when conducting business, book titles I'm interested in looking for, etc; One for each book remaining in my football-coaching series that are labeled volume three, four, and Art of Coaching Football; and a grocery list! I have it linked to a command button I rarely use (command-option-O), and when I need it, it's there! When I don't, I forget it's there! This is the best kind of utility. There are, however, two things I would like to see changed for the future: 1) A reliable autosave that should be triggered whenever the drawer closes and saves across all notes. Immediately after I downloaded and set up this software (and fell in love with it) I had a physical problem with my laptop hard drive that caused me to need to reinstall the OS. While I was able to save my previous systems and recover almost everything, since I had not saved within the application and can't find the stickies database, I may be out several months of jotted research. (I'm blase' about it only on the surface.) An autosave would make life much easier for the user. 2) The second thing that would make this even more perfect is a search engine that searches across all open notes. This might be too difficult to add to a program of such small size, but sometimes notes can be cross volume in nature. Any discussion of football offenses, for example, should include a basic framework of football DEFENSE to give the reader a common framework with the author. The fact that Sidenote has a search engine in the notes is GREAT (I can't stress this enough for how important it is to someone researching for writing purposes! Get this for your kids to use on their next term paper!), but a cross-note search engine would save the user much time and effort. This is secondary, however, compared to the REALLY important thing that I think needs to be added: the autosave feature. (Remember to save your note every time you close the drawer, folks!) As far as a simple organizational device, however, this has my vote for the best software I've downloaded yet. I can't believe that it was free (I encourage everyone to donate to the developer!), and yet saves me so much time. The only thing I give this a four stars on is quality/stability, and ONLY because of the lack of an autosave feature. Other than that, this is a perfect five stars! ~D. [alert admin]

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Monday, May 07 2007 @ 12:46 PM PDT

Finale NotePad 2007 12.0.r1 (Mac OS X)

Does what it says, but problems registering

I can't complain about the price of free software, but one thing that really gets on my nerves is the registration process to download the program. Unlike most of the other developers here on Versiontracker, Coda software requires you to enter your email address and select a bunch of topics you are interested in before they allow you to download the software. There is NO available link where you can opt-out of any mailings on the survey-selected topics. Frankly, I'm on enough mailing lists from people in Nigeria that want to send me a million dollars for helping them get some dead tycoon's fortune out of their country. I don't need yet another dozen unwanted spam mails sent to my email because the developers want to interest me in future products. I strongly recommend the use of TempInBox rather than your own email address for procurement of this software. The URL is here: http://www.tempinbox.com/english/ As to the software itself, I didn't use it, since I'm not the composer. My wife did, and was very pleased with the ease of use. There are a couple of quirky bugs: when trying to copy and paste the entire song, for some reason only the first two and a half pages of the four page song were transferred, so she had to re-enter the last bit. I would also like to see a feature added where the name and composer of the song can be edited from within the song. The reason she had to cut/paste was because when I set up a test song, it was with a random name and composer. Not realizing that she'd be stuck using that as the title and author, my wife transcribed her entire song into the software, and THEN had to open a new document and try to move the transcribed music to it once she'd given it the proper title and composer name. It's minor, but it added about a half hour's work to the project. There were also some relatively miniscule installation issues since I was installing to a multi-user computer. Make sure you install this to the admin user's folder first. I installed to my wife's folder, and then the program wouldn't run without the registration code (sent by email). Entering the registration code in her account did nothing for the software in my account, and required a de-install and re-install from the administrative user account, which propagated to all other accounts in the system. This could be an OS:X issue or a software issue; I don't usually install to my wife's account so it's difficult to be certain. It's good software, and I recommend it, but I hate viral marketing and demanded email registrations for things that are "free." Take those away and I'd happily tack a five start review onto this. ~D. [alert admin]

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Monday, May 07 2007 @ 12:23 PM PDT

Savitar 1.4 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)

Buggy, crashy, nonintuitive, but best in a field of one.

I'm not what you can call a hard core MUDder. Just too many things in my life, but I've always been interested in them. After playing from the terminal I decided to look into clients, and Savitar was the only one still in development. Unfortunately, Savitar has a LOT wrong with it. The program crashes approximately five out of eight times run. Fortunately, this is not usually during a MUD session, but most usually when maintaining your MUD list. Removing a MUD from the World Picker almost always causes a crash. Speaking of the World Picker, this is a great idea, but why can't you find it once you've closed it? Because it's hidden away under "Open New World." Why it would be there instead of in a clearly labeled spot is beyond me. (Actually, I'd prefer that it be left open and not closed when you select a world, but that's me.) Triggers really got under my skin. There is ZERO readable documentation on triggers and as a newcomer to MUDs I really have a problem with them. Here's how I got trapped by one: I wanted to greet someone, so I typed "Greet <person>." Without my knowledge Savitar trapped this text and triggered something. What, I have no idea because it's not listed in the documentation, but my damn "a" key became a carriage return and I had to actually shut the software down to reset. This happened to me several times before I finally managed to remove the trigger (and by the way, that is done with the EDIT menu's CUT command, instead of the common sense DELETE key. I don't know why.) Default font size and background colors make it virtually impossible to read anything. Fortunately, this is something that is more easily found to fix. I'm impressed with the concepts of Savitar, and from what I've seen of other reviewers' comments and Jay's responses, but there's a lot that needs to be fixed before, in my opinion, this should move to a shareware product. Right now I'd consider it in alpha testing, and it shouldn't cost $15. ($5 for Alpha, $10 for Beta, $15 for finished product.) Although I freely admit to knowing absolutely nothing about software development or programming, so the price could be a function of something else. This has the potential to be a really good product (especially with the developer's attitude, which is the best I've seen from a shareware vendor), but as it stands right now, I only recommend this product because it's the best in a field of one. ~D. [alert admin]

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Saturday, April 28 2007 @ 11:45 AM PDT

Freeway Express 4.2.1 (Mac OS X)

Amendment to previous review...

I'm a VT novice and unable to modify my previous review, so I'll have to type a new one. While my experiences with Freeway 4 Express were less than pleasant, as detailed in the previous review, there is one thing that cannot be faulted, and that is the Softpress Systems technical support and customer service. The frustration of some of the software problems I encountered left me less than pleasant, and yet the highly trained and professional Softpress staff maintained a consistent focus and worked hard to deal with my issues (involving the software, at least). There were some bugs that seemed to be flustering them as well, such as the flat ignoring of text codes by the software when I was trying to alter text from bold to plain, or italics to underline, etc. Softpress technical support was as surprised as I was when the software didn't function quite right. (Not their fault. I need only touch a computer to cause a software crash of some form.) Rather than bail on me and tell me, "Sorry. Sucks to be you." Softpress went above and beyond. Since the Express version of the software doesn't feature text formatting removal, they upgraded my software to the pro version for me, allowing me to one-click "remove text formatting" and then reapply the specific bold, italic, underline, font, etc that I wanted. Immediately my frustration level went down considerably. Follow up was also well done. I received an email several days ago from Richard Logan, wondering if things were working better for me. Very considerate, considering my snarling at the beginning of our email conversations. Overall, I'm still not impressed with the express version of the software which did not function in any way as I expected and hoped. However, I strongly recommend Softpress as a company, and the PRO version of Freeway, which truly is the most easily-used Website design software I've found for the Mac. [alert admin]

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Monday, May 22 2006 @ 02:33 PM PDT

Freeway Express 4.1.2 (Mac OS X)

Almost false advertising... half star or less!

Freeway 4 Express is probably not the software you're looking for if you already have a website that you are looking to maintain. It uses a proprietary format and DOES NOT ALLOW THE IMPORTING OR EDITING OF PREXISTING HTML. This is highly significant if, for example, you already have a web site that you are looking to make minor changes to. Since you cannot import the pre-existing web pages into the software for editing, you are forced to RE-CREATE every page in the site. For smaller sites this might not be a problem, but my site contains about eighty HTML documents. Redrawing each individual page is not an option for me. Additionally, documentation is absolutely worthless, since the software is bundled with a manual for Freeway PRO (the $279 version). This manual will take you step-by-step through functions and activities that ARE NOT PRESENT in the Express version of the software. You'll spend, as I did, hours of wasted time trying to do a simple task (like import pre-existing HTML for editing) only to discover on the technical support website that the feature you're trying to use is not available in the version of the software you purchased. This is asinine. It's like trying to navigate New York with a road map of DC. Who wants a manual for a piece of software they didn't buy? Personally, I am extremely aggravated that none of this is listed on the box. The fact that Freeway 4 Express does not edit web sites that already exist should be clearly evident on the EXTERIOR of the package. You should not be forced to purchase the software, open it (making it non-returnable), before discovering that it does not perform the tasks you specifically bought it to accomplish. I recommend NVU. This is a completely free software that allows editing of all forms of HTML in a WYSIWYG manner. Unfortunately it is somewhat buggy, but it's also $99 less than Freeway 4 Express-- and lets you do the most basic web editing task: adjust pre-existing HTML. Furthermore, Freeway 4 Express is supposed to be WYSIWYG. If you select a font and style (bold, italics, justified, etc) you should be reasonably certain that the output format will contain that font and that selected style. Not if you're using Freeway 4 Express. No matter what you select, imported text generally shifts to the default "proportional" font, which is Trebuchet. Setting the default font does absolutely nothing. Checking the HTML codes for the outputted pages shows that incorrect style codes are being outputted, REGARDLESS OF THE STYLE YOU SELECT. The software has an annoying habit of crashing unexpectedly as you work on these issues, and very little is more frustrating for a web author with limited experience that is behind a time crunch than beating your head against software that ignores you. If you enjoy frustration, and fighting software that doesn't do what the authors claim it does, then Freeway 4 Express is for you. If you're normal, however, you definitely want to avoid this product. [alert admin]

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Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:52 AM PST

Last 10 Comments by coach_wade [ Search for All ]

Cute, except that the idea doesn't work :)

Okay Mulder. Whatever you say.

Original feedback item : Read More

Tuesday, May 15 2007 @ 09:02 AM PDT

Wow...

I don't know who is dumber; the guy complaining about NASA's search for information about the cosmos (you're absolutely right: we should just stick our head back in the sand and pretend there's no such thing as other planets) or the libbie whackjob who just HAS to interject his personal politics about the war in Iraq into everything. Anyone else notice that libs will seek any excuse, even a forum that's supposed to be about…

Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)

Tuesday, May 08 2007 @ 06:37 PM PDT

Free? FREE?!?!

Rats, I checked again and realized Rincewind was there all along. I'm not sure how I missed him. I do think that Sergeant Colon should be next to Corporal Nobbs instead of Detritus, but I don't think Detritus should be removed. ~D.

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Monday, May 07 2007 @ 03:19 PM PDT

A terrible application not worth your time

You know, folks, it's rather condescending to assume a problem exists between chair and keyboard when the software is simply not doing what it is advertised and written to do. WYSIWYG software is supposed to place items EXACTLY AS POSITIONED ON THE EDITING PANE. That the text is changed to a different font with different formatting, the graphics are not in the locations you placed them in, and the web page looks nothing at all…