User Profile for mickey17

Radio UserLand X 8.1 (Mac OS X)

Radio (and Frontier) are the swiss army knives of weblogs  

Radio (and Frontier) are much more complex than iWeb, and need appropriately more time in the docs. Sadly, as the docs suck, you'll need time in the user community forums. What, the forums are mostly gone, withered away by link rot? Yep, true. Userland (and Dave Winer's winning congeniality) have turned enthusiastic supporters, nay, rabid fans, away for many years now. (I've been there, having used both since they were in beta...) So why does anyone still use them? Because they're powerful, more-so than any CMSs currently available. The built-in language makes it possible for you to do whatever you want with your web pages. That is, once you've slogged your way through the machinations needed to get things working. But once that's done it's easy to create new sites and update existing sites. I still use it (almost daily). When something better comes out I'll jump ship, as will the last few remaining users. (Or, as a better legacy to Dave Winer, perhaps they'll make it a **complete** open source product for the ages. The Frontier kernel may be found at frontierkernel.org.) When a company can't be bothered to update web pages, documentation, respond to email, or update the product in two years it's a bit of a hint. Not bitter at all, and would jump with joy if Radio & Frontier were give a bit of TLC, but it's not going to happen. Dave's spending his legacy 140 characters at a time on Twitter, and whatever is left of Userland is in the bunker, in an undisclosed location. So very sad for one of the birthplaces of the modern web. [alert admin]

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Tuesday, February 03 2009 @ 11:05 AM PST

GraphicConverter 6.0.4 (Mac OS X)

Wierd bugs since 6.0.2  

GraphicConverter is an awesome app. I've used it for many, many years, and it's the cornerstone of my graphic workflow. That praise aside, it has its quirks and functional holes (like there's no batch action to change the image label, a useful side-effect to show that you've processed an image). But the biggest issue that I have with GraphicConverter is its recent bugs, since 6.0.2 + Leopard on PPC. Bugs in adding text, dealing with alpha channels, and selecting a portion of an image. Dealing with the developer is an exercise in frustration; I've met with Thorsten many times at MacWorld San Francisco, and his English is too fluent to account for the flakey and delayed responses to bug reports and feature requests. Until I can use 6.0.5 or later for more a few minutes without finding a show-stopping bug is the day I upgrade from 6.0.1. Still, I've checked out the competition, like Pixelmator and Photoshop (which I use for heavy-duty levels), and GraphicConverter has a very comfortable combination of features. (I also echo previous posters in wishing that Sparkle would be used for in-application updates, that manuals would be offered as an optional download, etc.) [alert admin]

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Sunday, March 23 2008 @ 04:13 PM PDT

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