Existing users, 
User Name rcfa
Member Since 2001-11-15
Total number of Feedback Posts: 93
Total number of comments: 22
Last 10 Feedback Posts by rcfa [ Search for All ]
Adobe Photoshop CS3 10.0 (Mac OS X)
The speed increase is enormous: I have not seen a version of Photoshop crash faster than this one. In fact, it crashes so fast, the icon in the Dock doesn't even have time to bounce once. Adobe belongs into the programmers hall of shame. This is at least the fourth major Photoshop release that's "native" to Mac OS X, and still Adobe can't manage to make it run on HFSX (the case sensitive version of HFS+) or any other case-sensitive file system, even though Apple keeps reiterating to developers at WWDC they should not make any assumptions about case-sensitivity or lack thereof, and despite the fact that this bug has been reported dozens of times with previous releases of Creative Suite and its predecessors. Further, if you program cleanly, it automatically "just works". A programmer has to go out of his way to write dirty code to make it break based on case-sensitivity issues. The fact that Adobe can't get something that simple and trivial right gives you a general idea about the quality of their code. If this were a car, it might go fast, but if you'd open the hood, things would be held together by duct-tape, not by stainless-steel clamps. Too bad, it's so difficult for the average computer user to "open the hood" of software. Shame on Adobe, tripple shame! [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 0 of 4 users found this helpful
Monday, December 18 2006 @ 01:17 AM PST
Zinio 2.0 (Mac OS X)
Like almost all apps that use the lousy PDF libraries perpetrated by Adobe upon the rest of the world, Zinio Reader will not work properly on a file system that's case-sensitive, like e.g. HFSX or UFS. Useless! I have to read the stuff on a tiny laptop screen instead of a 23" CinemaDisplay because of this lousy programming. Needless to say, my reading remains limited to things I'm forced to read for work, after all I value my eye sight. Steer clear of software that will only run on a computer that has a file system that has the potential to compromise your system security and breaks lots of open source software. [alert admin]
Friday, December 02 2005 @ 05:57 PM PST
()
I happen to have a folder where I store old software, just for the case that e.g. a new version can't properly open old files, etc. I also have backup folders, where I retain the last N versions of everything I back up. Needless to say, that both locations WILL ALWAYS contain out of date software, and that is intentionally so. VTPro searches the ENTIRE hard drive, not just /Applications, /Users/*/Applications, /Network/Applications and /Developer/Applications as it should. Or alternatively, one should be able to give a list of paths to exclude from the search. Neither is possible, and thus the list of software to be udpated is cluttered to the point of being unusable with software I know and want to be out of date, while not helping much finding the software that is out of date and I want to update. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 3 users found this helpful
Tuesday, November 22 2005 @ 12:37 AM PST
ASM 2.0.3 (Mac OS X)
It's the last free version of the program, and it works flawlessly, from all I can tell, on 10.2.x, 10.3.x and 10.4.[01] If I were a cynic, then I'd say there's a reason that the moment the app stopped being free it requires updates with each OS release... There's nothing I miss with 2.0.3, and it just works, as it should. If you have it, don't bother upgrading to any of the newer versions. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 0 of 1 users found this helpful
Monday, May 30 2005 @ 05:44 AM PDT
DiskWarrior 3.0.3 (Mac OS X)
DiskWarrior is great, but there are two things that are missing: a) the ability to create a new boot CD based on a boot-CD maker and an Apple Software Install CD. All the "updater" needs to do is not update an existing DiskWarrior CD but instead suck the required parts of an existing boot CD of any sort, like e.g. the CD that comes with each Mac or OS upgrade. b) Even though since Panther Mac OS X and even more critically so Mac OS X Server support a case sensitive variant of HFS+ called HFSX, DiskWarrior still has no support for that file system variant. If you run a case-sensitive HFS file system on your server (which is a good idea for a variety of reasons), then you were SOL if something happened to the file system. Just very recently TechTool Pro 4.0.4 jumped as the first party into that opportunity and now supports case-sensitive HFS file systems. If DW would address these two points, it would be darn near perfect for what it's supposed to do. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 4 of 6 users found this helpful
Wednesday, May 25 2005 @ 01:40 AM PDT
Jam 6.0.3 (Mac OS X)
...if Apple starts having ridiculous policies, there's a way around it. Since Jam is there to create red-book Audio CDs, the compressed audio needs to be decompressed for burning anyway. At that point, where the f*ck is the difference between burning a CD from iTunes and then re-ripping it for use in Jam and using the tune directly in JAM? The difference is NONE, unless Apple does additional audio quality degradation when burning red-book audio CDs from iTunes Music Store contents with the iTunes CD burning feature without telling anyone. The whole thing's a joke. It's like insisting that the gate in the fence be locked, while the fence only covers one of four sides of a square garden and the fence is low enough to jump over even on crutches... Big deal, all it costs is our valuable time, but it won't prevent what it's trying to prevent, which is the exercise of fait-use personal copying and mixing with an application that has more features than the limited Joe-Sixpack iTunes. Of course, I still prefer WaveBurner over Jam for some things, but that's a different story. Apple's and RIAA's lawyers need a good whack on their fingers and butts. Heck, why even install the cripple upgrade? [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 2 users found this helpful
Sunday, May 15 2005 @ 01:34 AM PDT
LoginWindow Manager 2.0 (Mac OS X)
Cool app, can't beat the price, but...
...it would be even cooler if this were a Preference Panel, after all, it's exactly for settings like these that the System Preferences application was written. It's already bad enough that TinkerTool is a separate app (different developer, I know, but similarly useful). Also, several of the settings are now accessible in System Preferences standard in Tiger, but there are still a few tricks in LWM's bag that Apple doesn't ship a GUI for yet. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Sunday, May 15 2005 @ 01:19 AM PDT
Adobe InDesign CS 3.0.1 April (Mac OS X)
They write: "What's new in this version: This April 2005 update includes fixes from the original InDesign CS 3.0.1 updates (posted in March 2004 and August 2004), as well as new fixes. Users who installed the original updates will need to install the April 2005 version in order to receive the new fixes. The original updates are no longer available separately." Did they ever study software engineering? Well, one of the prime tenets is that versions be identifiable. If you bring up three patch level updates to a program, call them 3.0.1, 3.0.2 and 3.0.3, that's how counting works. If they didn't learn that in grade school, they should have learned it in college. To issue three different 3.0.1 updates is just utter insanity! Of course, Adobe's software also doesn't work properly on case-sensitive HFSX file systems (even though Apple for years tells people not to make the assumption that Mac OS X runs on a case-insensitive file system), and the bogus installers they use search the entire network file system, thus taking HOURS to install the software. That aside, the software (at this price!!!) ships without printed documentation! But hey, all that aside, maybe there's some use for this software... ...it just annoys the hell out of me, if I have to dearly pay for software that's in many fundamental ways programmed in such a shoddy way. The only thing it has going for it, is that Quark is even shoddier in many respects. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 1 of 2 users found this helpful
Thursday, April 21 2005 @ 09:06 AM PDT
Circus Ponies NoteBook 2.0 (v224) (Mac OS X)
They may have fixed one bug in the license manager, but introduced another one. When I tried to install the software for one of my clients, it wouldn't recognize the license string anymore that we received for him only days before and which works just fine with v223. Had to deinstall everything and retrieve the v223 disk image from a backup to get things working again. Major PITA. It would be nice if they could test things as trivial as these before shipping the app... [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 2 of 7 users found this helpful
Tuesday, April 05 2005 @ 04:57 AM PDT
Freeway Pro 3.5.12 (Mac OS X)
...lack of development is disturbing. I discovered a bug with the software involving it not launching properly if more than a certain limited number of fonts are active, which is often exceeded in a graphics design environment. With my help and the responsive developers at SoftPress we narrowed and nailed the bug. Then came the illusion: I asked when I could expect a patch addressing the bug, and I was told that there was no patch planned anytime soon, and that whatever bug fix would be rolled into the next release. Well, that was over a year ago. Since then there hasn't been either a bug-fix patch or a significant update released. At this point, I have to wonder if I wasted my money. We need laws that companies must refund the money spent on software licensing if there are fundamental flaws to a program. A design oriented software package that dies on launch because there are many fonts active is IMO fundamentally flawed: many active fonts are a standard operating procedure in the design field and to have to invest in a font manager and waste time with activating and deactivating fonts to run a web layout software is certainly not my idea of a properly working software. Also, the program's idea of a "page size" isn't an appropriate paradigm for how the web works. Pages need to be able to resize themselves depending on browser window size, and work on anything from cell phone browsers to 30" CinemaDisplay Kiosk views. Also, to make proper use of the package, you really need to buy the Pro version with all the optional plug-in packages. That they are sold separately IMO is just to create a deceptively low entry price. All their software should be sold in a single package. Kind of deceptive, because you notice that it can't do all you need until you got all the extension packages... [alert admin]
Read Comments (5) | More Info | 0 of 1 users found this helpful
Sunday, March 20 2005 @ 10:41 PM PST
Last 10 Comments by rcfa [ Search for All ]
I had the same bad experience and concur that it's not acceptable that a data recovery product requires an online connection. In a corporate environment you may be concerned about data security, in a private environment you may not even have a second computer from which you can boot and attach the troubled drive by means of FW in Target Drive mode or some other means (No you should NOT continue using the drive. The moment…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Monday, October 22 2007 @ 09:49 PM PDT
Same here. In an age long gone, the widget worked and was very useful. But now, I can't even get it to flip around to enter the ZIP code. All I see is the empty front of the widget, and that's it, no amount of clicking anywhere flips it, nor does it show anything else. Repeated removal and reinstallation also doesn't help. Maybe there's a preference file from an older version that prevents the new version…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Saturday, May 26 2007 @ 10:12 PM PDT
The answer is: YES, you are. Copyright is a legal construct, it's not a technical hurdle. If you can VIEW PDF content, you can steal it, in any number of ways. Heck, you could zoom in to 500%, screen-grab it piecewise, stitch it back together in Photoshop, and then run OCR over the text elements if you're so inclined. Shall we stop selling guns because they can be used to kill people? Shall we stop selling ice picks?…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Monday, March 27 2006 @ 12:21 AM PST
I don't think the idea to link to the original rather than the link would be a positive change. One of the key differences of symlinks vs. aliases is that a symlink is supposed to point to a FIXED LOCATION and is supposed to break if nothing is at that location. One of the problems of several apps is that e.g. in their preferences they do first resolve symlinks before storing a path, which is BAD…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Saturday, October 08 2005 @ 09:50 PM PDT
I know where the privacy exclusions end up, but not where the factory excluded folders are stored. Where? Besides, if you use a tool like PropertyList Editor, then it's pretty difficult to screw up your plist files. And why keep something secret, like that? It's nobody's job to protect people from themselves (unless they are so young or mentally retarded that they require a legal guardian), the only job that anyone might have (read: police) is to…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Tuesday, September 13 2005 @ 01:52 AM PDT
It's not what does it do better than Activity Monitor, it is that it does something totally different from Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor *monitors* the state of applications, as the name implies. You can also kill apps in Activity monitor. This tool is a GUI to pause and resume apps and to adjust their Unix scheduling priorities. Neither you can do with Activity Monitor, last I checked.
Original feedback item : Read More
Thursday, July 07 2005 @ 04:01 AM PDT
Exactly. The utility is a front end (or equivalent) for the nice/renice commands as well as a means to send a program a SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signal, which you could also do with kill -STOP <pid> respectively kill -CONT <pid> Negative priorities require root privilege, and that for good reason, because you can mess things up if a process has a higher priority than some cooperating process that is responsible for IO. You can potentially deadlock a process that…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Thursday, July 07 2005 @ 03:58 AM PDT
development hasn't ceased, but the app, rightly so, doesn't try to become a do-all application. It does what it promises and is supposed to do, and does it well. Unless an OS upgrade breaks the app, there is absolutely no reason for a new version.
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, May 30 2005 @ 05:46 AM PDT
Because Apple wants people to pay for Mac OS X Server Unlimited (@ $999 per CPU) if they want a file server. Samba is open source freeware, so Apple can't cripple that really. NFS doesn't lend itself either. The only real difference between Mac OS X Server and Mac OS X is that Apple uses for some services better freeware than on Mac OS X, ads a few admin tools, and makes AFP serving available. Also, they…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Wednesday, May 18 2005 @ 11:12 PM PDT
Just a small side note regarding the recommendation to use font management programs: In my experience, they cause more trouble, than they solve, and many make my system slower than when I have a slew of fonts active. Of course, that may be a different issue on a memory starved machine (I happen to run on a PowerBook and G5, both with 2GB RAM). Searching, finding fonts, with Apple's font panel (unlike with OS9-inspired font menus), is…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Wednesday, March 30 2005 @ 12:45 AM PST
