User Profile for jdavidsn

Create 14.1.1 (Mac OS X)

Pleasantly surprised!  

I reviewed this product back in 2004 and again in 2006, when I was disappointed in the lack of progress on the basics. I just picked up the latest version for kicks and I have to say am VERY impressed (and surprised) by the huge improvement! For starters, it is way faster with large documents with lots of graphics and the file sizes are way smaller. This alone kills a lot of my frustrations. Tons of other things have been refined. Check out the release notes for the very long list. My favorites include much better text handling and better option-dragging. Create is still not perfect (I still wish it was easier to select multiple items and apply a property to them all. It works in some but not all case), but then no product is perfect. I am once again using Create whenever I need to put stuff on a page in a more flexible way than a word processor allows. I can finally recommend Create again. Thanks to the authors and please keep up the good work! [alert admin]

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Friday, January 11 2008 @ 03:41 PM PST

iKey 2.2.2 (Mac OS X)

Not recommended for Leopard  

It's curious that the developer says that iKey works fine under Leopard and then goes on to describe various workarounds. (The 'type text' workaround will NOT help you if you like to use date or time stamping.) It has now been over 15 months since the product has been updated. While I am an old time user of iKey, I would caution others away from it until a Leopard-compatible version is released. [alert admin]

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Sunday, December 02 2007 @ 10:25 AM PST

Punch! Home Design Studio 11.0.1 (Mac OS X)

Went with Live Interior 3D instead  

We bought Punch and used it for a while. We ended up redoing my project in Live Interior 3D because the renderings were so much better and way better looking. With Punch, the 3D renderings are cruder looking. The lighted, shaded views take 5-10 seconds to render, versus maybe 1-3 seconds in Live Interior. Punch is a port of a long-running suite of Windows apps. Thus it has more features than Live Interior 3D, including dealing with multi-floor layouts, staircases and more. It's also comparatively pricier (though still a tiny cost relative to a remodeling project.) The underlying engine seems like it needs to be modernized for speed, for super fast 3D rendering, and for sharper 2D graphics. (The blueprint views are so jaggy they look like DOS graphics!) For simple one room projects I would go with Live Interior. For complex multi-room and multi-level projects Punch may be more appropriate, but you trade off the gorgeous renderings. [alert admin]

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Monday, July 30 2007 @ 11:41 AM PDT

Live Interior 3D 1.2 (Mac OS X)

Gorgeous renderings  

I bought and used a competitor, Punch Home Design Studio for a while. Punch is a semi-modernized application with a crusty old core ported from Windows. I found Live Interior 3D to be much more satisfying... faster to render 3D views with lighting, walkthroughs in 3D. And the shaded renderings are stunning: everyone including our architects ask us what program we use. The price is miniscule relative to the cost of a home renovation project. We found that it truly helped us to feel what the space would be like and to make dozens of "what if" changes. It is great being able to download 3D models from Google (http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/). We were able to find many models and add them to our design. There are bugs, sluggishness and awkward UIs. But the program is in active development with frequent updates and they seem to listen to customers. So hopefully they will continue to work on stability, performance and UI efficiency. [alert admin]

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Monday, July 30 2007 @ 11:25 AM PDT

Create 12.5.6 (Mac OS X)

2 years later: same story  

I am sad to report that Create has not appreciably advanced in the two years since I wrote my last review. Many of the surface issues I complained about are fixed but many others remain. It's still excruciatingly slow when your documents get long. And by long I mean just 20 pages. (I'd prefer to build 50 and 100 page documents but forget it.) We're talking 2 seconds to select something, 6 seconds to switch tools, 40 seconds to save all. There is a constant lag in doing basic operations. No other app on my Powerbook is so slow. The more documents you have open the slower it gets. I alter my workflow to accommodate it, being cautious about what I open when. Just like I did in the early 90's. I literally wait until I need to go get coffee before saving a document. The files are huge. A 32 page document is 34MB. To give you an idea of how much actual information, it compresses down to 2.9 MB. The rotten UI that prevents you from just selecting ten items and apply a property still has not been redone. You have to contort to get things in the right mode to change the fill color or line color. Editing text and applying text changes to a set of objects is still trial-and-error. Dragging things from the palettes or option- and shift- dragging to copy aligned objects is still not wysiwyg. The thumbnail/slide sorter view is still so slow and quirky I only use it as a last resort. To reorder pages it's often faster to create a new page and copy/paste the content! The art palette still has many graphical glitches as though it's still beta software. Minor 0.0.1 releases trickle out regularly but they only seem to fix distant bugs. These fundamental issues at the very core of a graphics app have been neglected for years. The gulf between Create and modern software like Omni-anything is widening. We need a v13 that is only about modernizing the UI and efficiency. Create is still unique in what it can do, and it's still virtually crash-proof. But it remains too quirky, slow and unpolished to recommend to anyone doing real work. Let's hope for a version 13 that is nothing but polishing the basics and modernizing the UI. I would love to return some day, make this a five star review and have the author get rich off Create. [alert admin]

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Tuesday, September 12 2006 @ 07:09 PM PDT

Butler 4.0b25 (Mac OS X)

Goldilocks and the Three App Launchers  

I've used LaunchBar, QuickSilver and Butler extensively. LaunchBar is fast and smart but relatively spartan. QuickSilver is slick but a memory hog and is too slow. I used it for many months but got fed up with the latencies and hired a Butler. Butler is a good balance and it's still my favorite. It suffers from two deficiencies: 1. Often pauses for several seconds - Occasionall, invoking Butler results in a several second pause before the Butler makes his appearance. - What drives me to complain is the sluggish response when it's finding matches on the first couple of letters. If I pause even minimally after the first or second letter, or if I backspace the second or third letter, Butler halts for an eternal two to four seconds while it fetches the results so far, ignoring the subsequent keypresses that invalidate the work it is doing. (This should be called the Spotlight Syndrome because it's what is ruining the Spotlight experience too.) Perhaps the Butler should allow itself to be interrupted by its master more readily, rather than mindlessly obeying a half-command. 2. Butler is not as smart as LaunchBar. LaunchBar seems to know that the most likely thing I'm searching for is something that I've pulled up often. It is therefore very forgiving in what abbreviations I use. To invoke NYTimes.com I could enter "nyt" one day or "nti" the next day and so forth. LaunchBar just knows what I mean. My dear Butler is not quite as bright. He seems to give priority to letters matching, even if the result is something I have never asked him for before. Butler also shows multiple identical hits that go to the same place. I know it's my fault; because I have multiple links in different places. But a polite and common sensical butler would know not to ask me if I would prefer a biscuit and tea or a biscuit and tea. I don't know exactly what it's doing but LaunchBar's secret sauce seems to be working better and is worth picking apart by Butler's parents. [alert admin]

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Wednesday, July 06 2005 @ 11:24 PM PDT

Quicksilver 1.0b35 (Mac OS X)

Bloated and sluggish  

I started with LaunchBar and was initially impressed with QuickSilver's glitz. I used it for several months but became jaded at three things: 1) it's sluggish. The idea is QUICK access to your stuff but I got fed up with the delays. (1.25GHz/1GB Powerbook) You have to wait for it to load up the nice graphics before verifying that it's going to open the right thing. And even if you trust that it is going to open the right thing and you go ahead and press return, you still have to wait for it to finish loading the graphics. As you quickly type several letters of the thing you're looking for it's loading images for each subsequent match so this is non-trivial... a real annoyance for a task that you will do thousands of times. 2) its pattern matching smarts just weren't as accurate as LaunchBar's. I found myself fighting its heuristics more, forcing and training it to go to the right thing. 3) above all, incredible bloat. Check out your Activity Monitor and see how many megabytes of real memory are chewed up by this monster. The result of this is it took memory away from other productive things, forcing them into virtual memory and slowing other things down. All this for a launching utility? After a good 6-8 months of using QuickSilver I reached a breaking point and tried LaunchBar again. It's less pretty, but I was immediately relieved by its responsiveness and minor system load. I had recommended QuickSilver to a friend and after trying it out for several weeks he also gave up on it. If the QuickSilver folks would return to the roots and make it memory-efficient and lightning fast, (and more self-explanatory) I'd be happy to try it again. In the mean time I'm happy and productive with LaunchBar. [alert admin]

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Wednesday, April 20 2005 @ 11:28 AM PDT

Create 12.2 (Mac OS X)

Great potential; needs more tuning  

Create is very rich and has great potential. It's wonderful being able to just put whatever you want, anywhere you want, on a multi-page document. But Create suffers from two big flaws: <b>1. Scores and scores of small bugs.</b> None is an outright deal-breaker -- the app never crashes or corrupts! But there are so many old flaws which conspire to make the app feel unprofessional and clunky. It's like a car that gets you there but which grinds whenever you hit third gear. Examples: dragging and dropping a copy of an item starts it WAY off from where the original is, and drops it a few pixels pixels off from where you put it. It's hard to reliably drag & drop page thumbnail and have them ordered correctly (but it's easy to accidentally zoom to 800% when trying!) You can boldface a text block when the block as a whole is selected... but to make the text bigger or italicized requires that you select the text itself (something that precludes applying the change to 20 objects at once.) The page sizing, page setup and scaling work in some strange and non-standard way which I have yet to fully figure out. I have problems copying and pasting between Create and other apps that I don't have with, say, Photoshop. <b>2. Create departs from long-established graphical app conventions.</b> Option-drag to make a copy, shift-drag to move something while keeping it aligned, option-shift-drag to do both... these fundamentals are quirky, inconsistent with each other and established standards, and a daily headache to work around. The properties palette is counter-intuitive - you cannot reliably select a bunch of objects and apply changes to them; you have to set one and then copy and paste the formatting. Colorizing text or other objects makes you stop, think, hunt and experiment. The regular, free updates are great, but I wish the developer wouid hold off on fancy new (rarely needed) features for a few months, and concentrate on fixing what's already there and on tuning the fundamentals. [alert admin]

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Tuesday, September 07 2004 @ 08:21 PM PDT

Another 1.5 years later: DIFFERENT story!  

Another year and a half has passed since my review above and I am pleased to report that things have improved dramatically! See my newer review from January 2008.

Original feedback item : Read More

Friday, January 11 2008 @ 03:45 PM PST