Existing users, 
User Name grh-svo
Member Since 2005-09-07
Total number of Feedback Posts: 147
Total number of comments: 27
Last 10 Feedback Posts by grh-svo [ Search for All ]
Picturesque 2.1 (Mac OS X)
Way too expensive. And that's hjust the start! 
The implementation of this tool is more or less ok and it does what it does with ease. However, what it does is almost useless for any serious image editing person. Rotate and elevate can be used to fix some unintended distortions introduced by, say, using a wide-angle lens for a portrait (an unforgivable sin in my book) but those corrections are better made in Photoshop with its greater control over things. But the other effects are trivial and a waste of anyone's time and money. And guess what, folks. Use the rotate and elevate controls on an image, quit the application, re-launch it a while later and...those controls are completely gone. Vanished. As if they never existed. This utility was a waste of my time. Make sure it doesn't waste yours. Avoid it like the plague. It's unnecessary, bug-ridden and way too expensive ($5 is more like it). [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 1 of 2 users found this helpful
Wednesday, January 21 2009 @ 08:25 PM PST
Vocab 1.2 (Mac OS X)
The first thing that happens after the download is a dialog telling you the widget is incompatible with the application! Wow that's intelligent authoring! The second thing is a stunningly-EMPTY window. There are no words in this vocab, folks. It looks as though you must insert your own. Handy. The app claims it "helps you learn words..." How? If you're typing in a word, you already know it. "ANY European language"? "Greek"? How about French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin. That's it, as far as I can see. And the widget? What does it do? nothing, as far as I can tell. Plonk Hey, I checked "Review" where is the ratings area? I was going to give it one star but VersionTracker screwed up. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 1 of 3 users found this helpful
Sunday, January 18 2009 @ 08:55 PM PST
Apple iWork 09 (Mac OS X)
Apple getting as bad as Microsoft and Adobe.
This package behaves badly. It places aliases in the dock without asking permission first. This is not like Apple and it's crass hubris and arrogance. I haven't gone further yet. I felt a need to point this out immediately. I mean, I'm already grumpy that Apple, just like Microsoft and Adobe, chooses to package more than one app in a suite. Too bad if someone wants just one of the three apps. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 4 of 5 users found this helpful
Wednesday, January 14 2009 @ 05:45 AM PST
MacPool 10.7.1 (Mac OS X)
Cute enough as a kids' game but not "realistic"
Why is it that every friggin' game is un-mac-like? It seems so unnecessary to reinvent the wheel. (In many cases — not in the case of MacPool but common enough to stick in my craw and make me indulge in catharsis here — something as simple as "quit" demands several mouse-clicks in unexpected places. Grrr.) In the case of MacPool, what should be pull-down menu items are instead at the top of the game window. Click "Settings" (which would, in a compliant Mac world, be "Preferences") and you see several fields in the window. Some are "Click to Show" so you are forced to click again to see a pop-up list of choices. Damned annoying. Specially when the sort-of intuitive click-away does not close that list. One field is "Country" but only USA is possible. Irritating nationalism. Your licence will, in theory, apply to only the first computer. The developer requires you to "re-set the registration" if you ever want to shift it to another computer. Fortunately, savvy users will easily discover for themselves how to avoid the nuisance of sending and receiving emails. This app can never be called "realistic". Yes, the balls collide more or less as expected and they roll more or less as you want but, somehow, the movement is not realistic. I can't put my finger on it (he he) but it might be that there is inadequate friction with the table-top. Maybe a variable control setting would fix this. The balls just seem to float over the table, coming to a stop slower than I expect although they probably travel the correct distance. I really don't know what to say about this deficiency but it is so annoying i feel like not playing the game again. I've returned here to update this comment: I have now decided that, indeed, the problem is insufficient friction. After a collision, say, the balls keep drifting longer than real life would suggest. And slowly, so the many milliseconds you must wait are annoying. The balls are way too big for the pathetically-small table. And the graphic of the table itself is childish. The appearance in no way simulates a real table. And the balls have a strange "halo" around them. Why? If it's a simulated shadow, the lamp must be only a few centimetres above the ball. I'm viewing the game on a quality two-monitor set-up. G5 dual, 4.6GB ram, OSX 10.5.6 and third-party graphics cards. The monitors are calibrated by sophisticated hardware and set, of course, to millions of colors. Yet the overall appearance of the game window makes it look like a 256-color configuration. Terrible. Applying spin to the white ball is complicated. It should be possible to relocate the "line of attack" to reflect a wish to hit off-centre. At present, you must click-drag-and-hold the cue then use the arrow keys to relocate the strike position. Well, the click-drag-and-hold of the mouse is done by my right hand. So is the use of the arrow keys! When a ball rolls down into a pocket, again the video is childishly unlife-like. I've seen my kids play a competing game online where the illusion is vastly-superior. Furthermore, as well as a line of attack from the cue to the white ball, there are also guide lines showing where the white will travel. This might be undesirable for an experienced player but is surely helpful for either a learner of pool/billiards in general, or a learner of this particular game in try-out mode. Even-better would be further guide-lines showing where the balls will travel after being hit! Sorry, this game is not ready for prime-time. How can it possibly be version 10? Beta 1 is more like it. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 4 of 5 users found this helpful
Friday, January 09 2009 @ 03:10 AM PST
Adobe Media Player 1.6 (Mac OS X)
1 Try to move the app into your preferred location — need user codes to authenticate! 2 Try to rename it to (for example) include the version number and/or remove the manufacturer's name from the app, both of which I prefer to do — permission denied! Also, the user interface is ugly, boring and un-mac-like. Mid-grey type on dark grey background...are they mad? Look in vain for a preferences menu item. Scroll triangles don't work. Good thing I have a scroll wheel on my mouse. No elevator in the scroll bar either "sign in?" Why should I? Oh yeah, it's those Adobe asholes again. I have a simple remedy for such hubris and arrogance... plonk [alert admin]
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Wednesday, January 07 2009 @ 09:45 PM PST
Color Oracle 1.1 (Mac OS X)
(a) Developer gives the appearance of being out of business. Download link doesn't work. However, a little research revealed that the app can be found at <http://colororacle.cartography.ch/> (b) After installing, a test is the obvious next thing. For some bizarre reason the developer has decided that this app, likely to be used once a year or so,must be a menu commend. There, in glowing multi-hue, is an icon in the menu bar. Click it and choose, for example, "deuteranopia (common). One might hope to then be presented with a display designed to test if the viewer suffers from this affliction. Instead, all you get is a dialog box that says I should click F5 of F6. Pressing either produces...nothing! Now, if this means that I do not suffer from the two afflictions covered by those keys, i should at least see something that enables me to confirm same. I once had a hard copy book-thing to test for color blindness. It was extremely well-designed and useful. About 50 pages of complex tests. Because of my experience with it, i believe I can conclude that color-blindness is as complex as any other medical problem and this app is a shallow, even glib approach to testing for it. Certainly way inadequate! Not even a hint of a manual, for example. [alert admin]
Saturday, January 03 2009 @ 01:16 AM PST
FontAgent Pro 4.0.2 (Mac OS X)
I really want this app to work for me but...
4.01 at least, does not behave in a civilized way. Making sets involves some non-intuitive steps. Or maybe I should say the dialogs and descriptions are not intuitive. The app tells you that it will delete the originals you are moving so make sure you have copies. But isn't the new collection that FontAgent is about to make, a copy? I think rather than the app itself being faulty, the wording is unhelpful. FontAgent promises to check all my fonts looking for corruption. And it does find some. So why must I put up with endless notifications during actual use, that this or that font is corrupt? I do a re-start for example and I then must tolerate endless irritating dialogs that a dozen or more fonts conflict with system fonts. Well, don't activate the dammed things then! I didn't ask you to activate them and they are not in my start-up set. Besides, they behave ok after those warning dialogs have gone. Auto-activate notifications are a pain. They ride on top of everything else and I must wait for them to disappear. I moved all fonts except the system/library/fonts to a separate location to avoid inadvertently activating more than just my preferred start-up set. Yet my apps sometimes show me the entire set of fonts. Thousands of them! (On other launch occasions, FontAgent will randomly activate nothing, leaving me with only a dozen system fonts available to use. Very annoying.) I also think the interface is poorly-designed. Panes too small to be useful, Appearance is boring system 9 style. I have been using Macs since 1988 and I am not any sort of novice. Yet I am constantly confused by fonts in general and management apps like this one, in particular. i really really need a strong, professional font management tool. FontAgent Pro is not it. Unfortunately, I don;t know offhand of one that is what i want. But I'm determined to find it if it exists. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Tuesday, December 30 2008 @ 04:54 AM PST
Quay 1.1.1 (Mac OS X)
The App and the Help file, even the installer itself, appear only as aliases. Where the hell are the real files? Why be so secretive? And for sure, a ReadMe file would be helpful because the VT description is rather opaque (i.e. the author does not have a way with words). Yes, there is a Help.rtfd alias but, once I've put the folder where I want it, the alias can no longer find its master. So I have only a vague idea of what this thing does and that's not good enough for me. Now I want to uninstall it but guess what... Anything like this that tinkers with the system, even if it "calls no private system interfaces" (whatever that means) should come with an uninstaller. This thing does not, so I am not happy. [alert admin]
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Tuesday, December 23 2008 @ 07:23 AM PST
Microsoft Office 2008 12.1.5 (Mac OS X)
Of course I meant 1.1 GB not TB [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 0 of 1 users found this helpful
Tuesday, December 09 2008 @ 11:49 PM PST
Microsoft Office 2008 12.1.5 (Mac OS X)
This (and all previous MS Office) installers are all too STUPID to find the apps to be updated, if you've changed the name or moved them. I want my app to be called "Word 12.1.5" not "Microsoft Word" so i change the names. Now, as before, this installer is too damned stupid to find the app. "You cannot install Office 2008 12.1.5 Update on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume." And if I try to change the names back again, I'm rudely reminded that the (in this case) overly-protective features of OSX prevent me unless I log in as root. Grrr And changing the names is still not good enough if I've moved them away from the root level of the Applications folder. Insane! And, after all this circus, the installer froze. Can you imagine the heart attack it would've had if I had moved the app to another _partition_, as I used to do? Wow. Then there's the fact that, in order to get this far with MS Office, you've had to download and install an app and six updaters totalling over 1.1 TB of software. Are they mad? Oh and, even after reverting the name of the apps to their original names and putting the folder back in its original location, the INSTALLER STILL CANNOT FIND THEM! I must start from scratch with version 12.0.0 And people wonder why legions hate MS. [alert admin]
Read Comments (2) | More Info | 0 of 5 users found this helpful
Tuesday, December 09 2008 @ 11:38 PM PST
Last 10 Comments by grh-svo [ Search for All ]
Montage - A review and comparison to Storymill
Planning to write for a living, huh? Don't give up your day job. Your rambling waffle was tough to wade through. Stylistically, your text sucks. Sorry.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, June 13 2008 @ 08:59 PM PDT
When submitting comments of this nature, it's best if you also tell us your set-up. For example, I use Toast regularly on a MacBook Pro core 2 dual, driven by OSX 10.53 and I have no such problem. Suggestion: rebuild permissions. Run DiskWarrior. Check your Toast prefs. I'm sure the problem you're experiencing is not caused by Toast.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, June 13 2008 @ 04:55 PM PDT
Onyx---not better than IceClean
IceClean is one of the most dangerous pieces of shit it's ever been my misfortune to test. A full flatten and reinstall followed.
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, June 09 2008 @ 08:15 PM PDT
Kontakt 2.0.1 was released in April
Surely the timing of a mention in VersionTracker is down to the software developer, not VT. VT must merely be a semi-automated database reflecting posts made to it, as and when they are made.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, May 02 2008 @ 07:39 PM PDT
...that Adobe is very frustrating and often viciously anti-Mac, and while it's true that they did not put any data in the "What's New" field, this time your criticism is blunted by the fact that what is new with this version is adequately-mentioned in the "Product Description" field. Sadly, on this occasion, they would be justified in pointing out that only moron would've missed this.
Original feedback item : Read More
Tuesday, February 05 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
Who on earth is running Nutopia?
Link doesn't work (presumably because we go direct there instead of via some other page first)
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, January 23 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
Skype is owned by eBay which makes it a brother to PayPal, one of the most vilified bunches of assholes on the web. Look at <http://paypalsucks.com/> <http://paypalwarning.com> <http://www.aboutpaypal.org/> <http://www.screw-paypal.com/> <http://switchersblog.com/2006/08/20/paypal-is-an-absolutely-miserable-operation.html> <http://blog.centresource.com/2007/04/25/bad-paypal-when-security-becomes-ridiculous/> Skype can be known by the company it keeps.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, November 30 2007 @ 12:19 AM PST
Instead of asking a dumb question in the middle (and the beginning, and the end!) or your "review" why not just search for Growl. You just might leasrn something useful.
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, November 07 2007 @ 01:42 PM PST
The software was developed with Artificial Intelligence. It can detect when you are at work and it disables all sporting broadcasts.
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, November 07 2007 @ 01:37 PM PST
One of the more absurd, illogical posits I've read this year. Just suppose you are unlucky emough to have 120GB of duplicate files and you spend $40 to delete them. Ok. Now you no longer have your duplicae files but you still have the app. Suppose you are _really_ unlucky and you have 120GB of duplicate files on every one of your 200 disks. Now would you argue that you got $800 value from the utility so…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Wednesday, July 04 2007 @ 10:25 PM PDT
