Existing users, 
User Name mikirby
Member Since 2007-06-12
Total number of Feedback Posts: 26
Total number of comments: 22
Last 10 Feedback Posts by mikirby [ Search for All ]
TextExpander 2.5.1 (Mac OS X)
almost works as described = FAIL 
I need to be able to expand abbreviations whenever I type them, not when the program decides to expand them. As it is, it requires you to place a delimiter- a space - before each abbreviation. For instance, lets say I tell it to expand the abbreviation 'an' to 'anti'. If I type 'I bought an anque lamp' it automatically expands to 'I bought an antique lamp'. But if I type 'I am going to sanago', it does NOT expand to 'I am going to santiago', in fact it does nothing at all, because there is no space before the abbreviation. There is no way to turn this behavior off. It even does this is you set it not to use delimiters. Very poor design. Now, it does give you a way to include a backspace in the abbreviation (it displays as %<) - so you could set the expand text to to '%<anti', and then type 's aniago' to have it automatically backspace over the space, so you get 'santiago ', except, this feature doesn't actually work at all, and what you get is 's %<antiago'. I actually need to be able to expand shortcuts in the middle of words, in fact what I want to do relies on it, so this program is worse than useless: it actually made my work slower than just typing out the full word every time. Add to that the time I wasted setting it up and testing it for nothing, and I feel like I should be sending a bill to the developer. 1 star, only because it won't let me choose 0 stars. [alert admin]
Read Comments (2) | More Info | 4 of 7 users found this helpful
Monday, February 02 2009 @ 04:58 PM PST
BusySync 2.1.6 (Mac OS X)
I your notification settings suddenly dissapear, YOU'RE SCREWED
If your Google Calendar notification settings suddenly disappear, as happened to me, GOOD LUCK because your only choice is to go through your hundreds or perhaps thousands of clanear events by hand and re-set them. The combination of BusySync and Google Calendar provide NO WAY for you to delete a calendar's events en masse, set the default notification settings, and re-upload all your events for that calendar with the proper notification settings turned on. I tried deleting my existing Google calendars recreating them by hand with the correct notification settings, and re-syncing, and instead of populating the ones I created, BusySync created identically named ones which it filled with my events, with, you guessed it, the notifications turned off. I then tried exporting my events from iCal, deleting them from my calendars, hitting BusySync's various "Reset" settings, and re-syncing to have BusySync create the calendars but without any events, so I could set the notification settings before restoring my events from backup. I even tried changing the names of my calendars. No matter what I do, all my old events reappear on my google calendar witgh, you guessed it, the notifications turned off. Then, if you keep trying, you run into a nasty little surprise... google sets unadvertised 24 hour limits on creating new calendars and on pushing events to existing ones. I am now stuck without my Google calendar for the day, and, because one of my calendars was a birthday calendar which I could only clear by backing up and deleting all my address book entries, without my contacts. Thanks, BusySync. I thought it was a good product until this PITA. I'm furious at having to waste two hours of time like this over something so stupid. [alert admin]
Read Comments (4) | More Info | 1 of 6 users found this helpful
Tuesday, September 02 2008 @ 11:10 AM PDT
coconutWiFi 2.0 (Mac OS X)
This would be a great app.... but all it shows me are the networks that were available somewhere were I was hours or even days ago. I move locations and it still shows the old location's networks. Oh well. [alert admin]
Wednesday, August 27 2008 @ 06:03 PM PDT
AlmostVPN 1.6 pre (Mac OS X)
More complicated than doing it via CLI
I cannot for the life of my understand why a GUI SSH app would be more complicated to set up than a command line to do the same thing in terminal. True, once you've puzzled out the unorthodox interface, you can start all your needed ssh services with a click of a button** (**once you wrap your mind around the local client process being called "AVPN Server".) But the same thing is true if you use the freeware CLIX to set up a terminal command to do it, or one of several other free, lightweight utilities. And believe me, if you don't already know how to set up a terminal SSH command to to what you need to do, you're not going to be able to figure out how to get this app to do it. It's a shame, because the programmer obviously put a lot of work and care into this and the basic idea is powerful. But this is a case of a solution being much more complicated than the problem it's supposed to solve. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info
Monday, August 11 2008 @ 11:00 PM PDT
xGestures 1.73 (Mac OS X)
Good but could use improvement in handling gestures
There's a few things this program doesn't do well, all related to tracking the mouse. 1.) It seems to track mouse movement on screen, not your movement on the trackpad, so if the pointer collides with the edge of the screen during the gesture, the gesture may not work because you lose subsequent movements in the direction of the screen edge. 2.) It doesn't allow consecutive movements in the same direction. For example, I want to create a new email by drawing an "E" with my finger - which would be down, right, right, right. It doesn't allow that... only down, right. 3.) It can't handle diagonal movement. I want to draw an "X" for Cut and a "W" for "Close Window". It interprets the diagonal lines as stream of consecutive movements up, right, left and down (depending on the direction), and never interprets them the same way twice, so they don't work. Drawing an X or a W using boxy, up-down-left-right-only strokes with right-angle turns between them works, but is unnatural and much slower that simply drawing them as I am used to writing them. In fact, I realize this is tough from a programming perspective, but ideally it should recognize circles too... the circle or loop is the most basic shape, the easiest to draw with a finger, and is a natural control gesture. 4.) The "gesture timeout" is a good start, but what really needs to happen is, as soon as it recognize that your current gesture couldn't possible match any of the gestures you have defined, it should timeout the gesture immediately. Is it is, I have it activated by a keystroke, and if I bumble a gesture, I have to either hit the keystroke or wait for the timeout before I can try again. As soon as it's bumbled, I should be able to try again. 5.) Similarly, there should be a user option to allow it to act on any gesture as soon as it's recognized as a valid one. I don't like having to hit my keystroke to both start and stop gesturing. I realize not everybody will want this, as it will prevent any gestures that contain the same movements as other shorter gestures, but it should at least be an option for those who do want it. 6.) Since my trackpad hardware (I'm on a macbook) recognizes two-finger scroll wheel emulation, I'd like xGestures to recognize two-finger gestures too. Rather than hit a key to begin a gesture, I'd like the option to have it automatically consider any two-finger movement as a gesture and any one-finger movement as ordinary mouse control (which would end any previous gesture), so I don't have to hit a keystroke to start and end gestures. Alternatively, I'd like "two fingers" to be an option for any movement within a gesture. IE, I'd like to be able to define a gesture as "one finger right, two fingers right, one finger right". 7.) It should recognize a tap on my trackpad as a control gesture, and even be able to tell between a tap with one finger and a tap with two fingers. I think that about covers it. This is a great program, it's just not all the way there yet - get this better control implemented and it'll be worth far more than the low, low $5 currently being asked. Perhaps there needs to be an "xGestures Pro" for more money but with these advanced features? [alert admin]
Read Comments (2) | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Wednesday, May 28 2008 @ 01:43 PM PDT
PictureSync 1.8r15 (Mac OS X)
This version does not have the problem I complained about below, but it refuses to upload all my pictures to flickr - it tells me that a run of pictures in the middle of my set have "failed" but gives me no more information. The included documentation is no help whatsever. I keep trying to upload these same pictures and it keeps failing without any further information, end of story. Since they were in the middle of a huge set, I have to delete all the uploaded pictures and reupload them all again using some other program in order to keep them in the right order on Flickr. So trying to upload them with Picturesync was a complete waste of my time. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Saturday, March 15 2008 @ 12:10 PM PDT
Cyndicate 1.1 (Mac OS X)
Full featured, reliabe, I like it
This feed reader does everything I want a feed reader to do. Easy, intuitive, I ike it. One criticism: It says it's a 21 day demo, but on day 18, it starts giving you nag screens every 30 seconds, making the app functionally unusable. [alert admin]
Tuesday, February 26 2008 @ 05:44 PM PST
Shrook 2.62 (Mac OS X)
Confusing, ugly and poorly documented - can't remove items!
Right out of the box, this butt-ugly app has got me wasting time and scratching my head. Near as I can tell, you can either set it so items disappear when they drop off the original feed (which means you can miss items if you don't read regulary or don't know how oftem the feed is updated) or they disappear NEVER EVER EVER and there's no way to get rid of them. There's a setting for "Expire items manually" but nowhere does it say how to do this! There's an option called "Expire New Items" but all this does is change the status fo the items. I need to be able to remove items once I've read them! The Help menu just gives a vague FAQ and there doesn't appear to be support forums anywhere online. [alert admin]
Monday, February 04 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
PictureSync 1.8r13 (Mac OS X)
Broken "upgrade"! DO NOT DOWNLOAD!
Thi s "upgrade" version is completely broken. All it does is show a dialog box over and over again that says "Where is GrowlHelperApp.App" like very 5 seconds. DO NOT OVERWRITE YOUR WORKING VERSION OF PICTURESYNC WITH THIS ONE! You have been warned. One star for posting this downgrade and removing my ability to use this crucial program at all. [alert admin]
Read Comments (2) | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Sunday, October 28 2007 @ 10:55 AM PDT
RiffWorks Standard 2.1 (Mac OS X)
Unlike every single other OS X audio program under the sun, it cannot output sound through a Griffin iMic. It'll recognize the iMic, and allow you to set it up as an audio device, and the input meters show that it can accept input through it, but as far as output all you'll get is stone silence. Pretty stupid, if you ask me. [alert admin]
Thursday, October 04 2007 @ 08:52 PM PDT
Last 10 Comments by mikirby [ Search for All ]
but wait... it gets even MORE idiotic!
So, since the cursor-positioning features don't function as advertised. I though I'd try an applescript snippet. I used this: tell application "System Events" to tell process (path to frontmost application as string) to key code -- the above is a backspace, to backspace over the required pre-abbreviation whitespace that they don't tell you about anywhere tell application "System Events" to tell process (path to frontmost application as string) to keystroke "q" which works fine in script editor.…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Monday, February 02 2009 @ 10:57 PM PST
Ouch! Freezes my MacBook Air Finder
Just for future reference, you should be able to boot in 'safe mode' by holding down shift until you reach the Finder, which will disable all third-party software and allow you to remove a buggy prefpane.
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, February 02 2009 @ 05:01 PM PST
1 last try = 1 last frustrating failure to work right
So, after typing the above, I noticed that the "location" field in the calendars was filled in with technical gobbledygook created by BusySync (I assume.) So, I deleted the calendars full of the notification-less events, created new calendars with the exact same names, and entered the appropriate "location", which I had copied down for each calendar before deleting. Then I opened BusySync.... and on the Google pane, next to each calendar, it said "already on google"…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Tuesday, September 02 2008 @ 04:56 PM PDT
One more try with completely new Google account, same exact problems
Well, after waiting a few hours, I thought I'd give BusySync one more try. I have waited several hours. I have deleted all events from my calendars. I have deleted all contacts from Address Book. I have restarted my computer twice. I have reset BusySync and erased my Sync History. I have created a completely new Google account to try this with. And so, I try syncing and... BusySync uploads all the old, deleted events and birthdays -- hundreds of them…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Tuesday, September 02 2008 @ 03:14 PM PDT
According to <http://groups.google.com/group/google-calendar-help-howto/browse_thread/thread/a0dec1bd334b3e4d>, once you are locked out of your google calendar as I have been, it takes A WEEK before you can use it again. Thanks, BusySync. I won't be using your application anymore. I can't have my business disrupted like this.
Original feedback item : Read More
Tuesday, September 02 2008 @ 11:18 AM PDT
BTW: SSH volume mounting is easier with MacFusion
By the way, to mount a remote volume in Finder via an SSH connection, I installed MacFuse and MacFusion. Much more painless way to do the same thing, and mounts FTP volumes, too.
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, August 11 2008 @ 11:05 PM PDT
8.) Keyboard activation should allow you to star t a gesture with a double-press of a modifier key all by itself, as Quicksilver allows you to do - I bring up my Quicksilver window by pressing "Control" twice, I'd like to be able to start a gesture in a similar way.
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, May 28 2008 @ 01:46 PM PDT
UPDATE, several months later: I have so many problems with this software, and the developer has been so unresponsive to bug reports, that it actually makes me ANGRY to see someone claiming that this is something better than a bug-filled piece of abandonware. Gotta go - off to restart my computer again to get rid of the 3GB of swapfiles that this horrible program deposited on my hard drive in the last 18 hours.
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, February 06 2008 @ 12:00 AM PST
Other users report the problem too
Sorry, "MemoryStick" not "RamStick". I also forgot to mention, is you search the official soulseex forums, run by the developer, for the word "Memory", you'll find still more people complaining about the problem. See http://forums.slsknet.org/ipb/index.php?showtopic=9514&hl=memory
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, December 19 2007 @ 05:58 PM PST
Forgot to mention... I had ramstick open, and checked the number of new VM swapfiles this morning... Soulseex had generated 28 new swapfiles overnight.
Original feedback item : Read More
Wednesday, December 19 2007 @ 04:53 PM PST
