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User Name khiltd
Member Since 2006-11-17
Total number of Feedback Posts: 14
Total number of comments: 6
Last 10 Feedback Posts by khiltd [ Search for All ]
Linkinus 1.2.1 (Mac OS X)
Looks great in screenshots, but try actually running it, and oh boy. Aside from the terrible networking code, they can't even get their views to draw themselves without constant white-outs and flickering. Smells like somebody's first Cocoa project. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 3 users found this helpful
Saturday, December 08 2007 @ 01:09 PM PST
VueScan 8.4.49 (Mac OS X)
As far as the backend responsible for pulling bits off of CCD photosites goes, VueScan is as good as anything out there, if not better. Unfortunately, the author wouldn't know a comprehensible UI if it fell out of his ear and this makes figuring out how to make effective use of said backend a needlessly laborious process of trial and error. There was at one point a fairly simple means of disabling all gamma encoding and color adjustment to produce a "raw" scan suitable for profiling in a dedicated profiling package. Where this option went, I have never been able to figure out, and the documentation on VueScan's often times bizarrely counter-intuitive interpretation of color management is spotty at best. Contacting the author with a request for clarification of the application's under-the-hood color space translation behavior resulted in nothing more than a curt response stating that he was unwilling to answer any of his customer's emails. I remember long ago when the author halted development of the Mac version only to resume it after a deluge of pleas came pouring in. I don't think his attitude toward Mac users has improved at any point since then, and while I really wish I could recommend this product to my clients, I am only able to do so where there is absolutely no alternative for a particular model of scanner. All those controls are great, but if their behavior isn't going to be comprehensively documented then I want to be able to turn them all off and get to the raw sensor data myself. At this price point, I should be able to. [alert admin]
Read Comments (8) | More Info | 3 of 14 users found this helpful
Thursday, December 06 2007 @ 12:10 PM PST
DNS Enabler 3.0.1 (Mac OS X)
You just can't put a (good) GUI on BIND 
I have mixed feelings about this utility. It's great for quickly roughing in some working BIND configurations, but its simplicity encourages a set-it-and-forget-it sort of attitude in users who might not be well versed in BIND administration, and this can leave them vulnerable to certain forms of attacks that could be easily prevented. The configurations generated by DNS Enabler display full version information and allow full zone transfers to any and all who request it. Both of these things are easily corrected by adding the appropriate directives to the options section of named.conf, but such changes are immediately obliterated as soon as you restart the server. It is necessary to descend the application's bundle hierarchy to edit the template file directly if you want to secure your server--something most people in this application's target audience are probably not apt to do. It also enforces some undesirable requirements on the NS records it will allow you to create, and no configuration changes will survive its "error" checking process; make a single mistake in dozens of entries and they are all wiped out as soon as you click the Restart button. This is frustrating and genuinely unnecessary. While it does allow you to vend static Bonjour services (provided you know exactly how to create them from scratch anyway), it does not allow you to do what most people who are interested in leveraging Bonjour will likely expect, namely facilitate dynamic updates. Of course, it's simply impossible to put a (comprehensible) UI on every option BIND has to offer, so a little slack has to be cut somewhere. What I think would be the most beneficial to everyone would be to have the default config files include other files (possibly in ~/Library/Application Support) that would permit the user to override or extend the default configs to suit their needs, but then again, anyone who knows how to do this will probably just use BIND directly. Still, for quick-and-dirty setups, it's extremely handy and I've never seen it crash. Just beware that if you're running a public server with it you should probably run your zone through Cricket Liu's free config/security auditor at least once to make sure you know what you're broadcasting. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 4 of 4 users found this helpful
Wednesday, December 05 2007 @ 10:35 AM PST
MYOB AccountEdge 2007 2008 (Mac OS X)
Another year another lack of effort
Here we are approaching 2008, and MYOB is still shipping code that was written for System 7. I had high hopes that this would be the year that I finally ditched QuickBooks, but once you scratch through the ultra-thin veneer of Aquafied buttons, it doesn't look like MYOB has changed a single thing about their application. From the controls that can't draw themselves properly to the hideous icons, the whole thing looks like some Java nightmare that was only tested on Windows, and it's convoluted to boot. Bugs I reported in 2002 are still there, and I'm hard pressed to come up with a reason why I should ever give this company more money. QuickBooks blows, but it's at least somewhat usable. [alert admin]
Read Comments (3) | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Wednesday, November 28 2007 @ 09:47 AM PST
UUID Generator 1.1 (Mac OS X)
You wrote a command line wrapper for a command line tool that already exists on the OS? [alert admin]
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Friday, October 19 2007 @ 05:30 PM PDT
Delicious Library 1.6.5 (Mac OS X)
Remember when you were a kid and laid all your toys/comic books/records/what-have-you out on the floor so you could just sit there and look at them until your mom saw what you were doing and made you pick them up and put them away? Delicious Library aims to recreate that experience for lonely nerds who never grew out of this phase and have nothing better to do with their time than admire their collection of anime soundtracks and classic 80s television DVDs. I personally own thousands of CDs. They sit on racks, in alphabetic order, and whenever I want to listen to one of them I walk over to the rack and pull it out. This takes an average of about 30 seconds to accomplish, but Wil Shipley thinks that's way too simple. I should run out and buy a webcam, hold every single CD up to it until it picks up the barcode and then let Delicious Monster slow my machine to an absolute crawl as it struggles to display pictures of virtual copies of the same CDs I'm holding right in my hand. What does this accomplish? Who benefits from this in any way? Why would you pay $40 to waste your own time doing anything this irrelevant? Insert a picture of Wil Shipley's mid-life crisis sports car here. Kudos to Omni for firing his useless, pill-popping fanny. [alert admin]
Read Comments (6) | More Info | 5 of 23 users found this helpful
Friday, October 19 2007 @ 11:48 AM PDT
CSSEdit 2.5.2 (Mac OS X)
This is a pretty neat little app, but two problems are keeping me from buying it: 1: No FTP/SFTP support. Sure, you should be working on local copies anyway, but man, what a pain this is. 2: The application consumes 20-30% of my CPU time just sitting there with no windows open. This is a sure sign of extraordinarily poor design under the hood. I was tempted to blame WebKit at first, but that doesn't seem to be the problem at all. Maybe 3.0 will be a winner. [alert admin]
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Wednesday, October 17 2007 @ 08:51 PM PDT
Daylite 3.5 (Mac OS X)
If you aren't embarrassed by something you wrote 10 years ago you've stopped improving
Marketcircle is comprised of displaced NeXT developers, and like all NeXT developers, they stopped learning somewhere around 1988 and lash out violently at anyone who dares to suggest that maybe the way they’re used to doing things isn’t best. I came to know Daylite by hearing other consultants talk about it incessantly. I tried it out, fell in love with it for about two days, and then fell out of love with it once I started attempting to exercise some of its more “advanced” features and found them to be so horribly implemented as to render the application completely unusable for me. I submitted detailed bug reports; no response. I submitted support requests; no response. I took their “Certified Partner” exam; no response. Finally, after four months of constant email hounding and phone calls, someone at Marketcircle actually looked at my test and told me I’d passed. Being a “Certified” Marketcircle “Partner” entitles one to join a private mailing list where one can actually communicate with Marketcircle employees directly, though in reality, Alykhan Jetha, the company’s founder, is the only active internal participant. Finally, I had a chance to get answers to some of my nagging questions, like “why can’t I print appointments, events AND notes on the same report?” The response I received was a little disheartening; although Daylite developers know a lot of programming buzzwords like “polymorphism,” they do not know how to put them to practical use in a real-world application. Even though all of your calendar, appointment, to-do, and note objects implement a subset of identical messaging protocols which would allow any sane developer to allow users to easily print object of heterogeneous types out on a single report, this is heresy for Mr. Jetha. His actual response was something along the lines of “if you make everything polymorphic, why even have an app?” Why have an app? Well, because most people can’t type syntactically correct SQL queries as quickly as they can click on items in a list. The real question here is “Why buy this app?” and that’s the one I couldn’t answer, for myself or for my clients. Granted, one can achieve my lofty goal by writing some really ugly F-Script (the implementation of which is little more than a cop-out for developers who are too lazy to build an actual AppleScript dictionary in this case) or by (surprise, surprise) giving Marketcircle even more money to build a custom report for me. Call me kooky, but I’m of the opinion that applications which cost hundreds of dollars per seat should live up to their price tags in terms of quality, and Daylite’s convoluted DIY UI simply does not. And what about those “Certified Partners” you might be tempted to hire to evangelize you back into the Marketcircle way of thought? I was only on the list for about a month, and I most certainly did not have an opportunity to converse with every member, but most of the messages posted to it indicated a profound lack of even the most rudimentary Mac troubleshooting knowledge, and frankly, I was a little ashamed to be a member of this secret society of sad little salesmen. Then 3.5 rolled out and the list was awash in reports of people’s iCal calendars and Address Book contact lists being obliterated thanks to Daylite crashing non-stop and all Mr. Jetha had to say was “Hurrrrr you runned out of memories hurrrrr...” He and his engineers are, in my opinion, idiots, and one should not expect Daylite to improve anytime soon. Unless you’re already completely entrenched in the product, don’t give them money and don’t hire their partners to come over and convince you to give them money even though their software sucks. Oh yeah, and don’t bother reporting bugs. [alert admin]
Read Comments (2) | More Info | 6 of 7 users found this helpful
Tuesday, September 25 2007 @ 11:25 AM PDT
Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0 (Mac OS X)
Works well, terrible interface
Apart from lacking somewhat in the feature department, 3.0 brings us a magic, floating progress sheet that is not brought to the front when switching applications and is not considered an application window by Exposé. This is incredibly annoying. [alert admin]
Wednesday, September 19 2007 @ 09:02 PM PDT
Toast Titanium 8.0.1 (Mac OS X)
Roxio engineers are much too good for Apple's human interface guidelines, and common sense as well. While they've added a handful of genuinely helpful new features to this release, they have also chosen to make certain that no window displays anything that is not in constant motion. Now aside from the fact that this is both ugly and distracting, why on earth would a person developing an application which will likely be taxing the CPU and struggling to avoid underruns throughout the course of normal usage choose to throw away as many spare cycles as possible scaling and fading some lame graphics nobody wants to look at anyway? Maybe a lot of that work is being dumped on the GPU, but still, it's ridiculous and tacky. What's worse, they couldn't even get their alternative UI elements to work properly. If you're going to replace the default button drawing code, at least make sure you get your pixels lined up, and believe it or not, most people don't want to look at text that looks like it's been run through a gaussian blur filter repeatedly. Anti-aliasing is one thing, but this is plainly unforgivable. It looks like they're drawing the text into one image and then scaling it up before blitting it to the screen or something. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 7 of 8 users found this helpful
Tuesday, May 29 2007 @ 12:48 PM PDT
Last 10 Comments by khiltd [ Search for All ]
Why on Earth would any previews be drawn anywhere when no windows are open? Why is every other WebKit browser able to draw the full-size versions of complex animations without tipping 12% when this one can't handle idling at less than 30%?
Here's a Shark report of all the screen drawing activity taking place even when nothing is actually being drawn on the screen:
# Report 0 - Session 2 - Time Profile of CSSEdit SharkProfileViewer # Generated from…Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Wednesday, November 28 2007 @ 05:10 PM PST
Another year another lack of effort
The restart is completely unnecessary. If you look at the contents of the installer packages you can see that the reason it requests admin privileges is so it can dump a bunch of ancient Aatrix fonts into /Library/Fonts (and a version of Palatino from the early 90s). Whoever builds their installers simply doesn't realize that it hasn't been necessary to reboot to get new fonts to work for a good decade now and just checked…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Wednesday, November 28 2007 @ 04:23 PM PST
If you aren't embarrassed by something you wrote 10 years ago you've stopped improving
And just in case you think I'm insane, here are some choice excerpts from a very long and very angry email I received from a Marketcircle partner who thinks he's going to sue me for the crime of posting a negative review of his little clique:
Need a custom report ... hire Marketcircle, hire a report-certified consultant (which we are) or take their class on report writing. This is nothing new! Report writing has been a…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Monday, October 01 2007 @ 11:19 AM PDT
If you knew it was a problem then why didn't you "optimize" it before you released it? Has anyone there ever heard of a peer review? There is nothing excellent about Jon's Phone Tool, unless you consider horrible UI design that teeters on the brink of unusability and breaks every HIG rule in the book "excellent." Oh wait, I forgot you wrote Daylite. Yes, it's very excellent.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, September 28 2007 @ 08:46 AM PDT
Some sort of conflict with another menu item
The only people who seem to experience these problems are people who have no clue what an ICC profile is yet like to indiscriminately install thousands upon thousands of them onto their computers, most of which were built by questionable means, and describe devices they neither own nor use. While I'd very much like to figure out why ProfileMenu is hanging in these cases, they're not conditions I can reproduce easily, and frankly it's just…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Monday, March 26 2007 @ 03:00 AM PDT
Some sort of conflict with another menu item
It isn't really possible for it to conflict with anything unless one of those other applications is patching ColorSync routines somewhere. At any rate, I'd need a lot more information to go on to even begin to diagnose what is happening here. What version, what OS, what hardware, etc.
Original feedback item : Read More
Tuesday, November 21 2006 @ 05:57 PM PST
