User Profile for tnicolakis

ChronoSync 3.0.2 (Mac OS X)

Stellar, FAST, and reliable--just rocks  

One of the things I've always liked about Windows 2000 and later is the ability to auto-sync files between a server or other volume. Unfortunately, to date there's no feature-rich built-in solution for the Mac OS unless you script it yourself.

I have been in need to keep over a thousand documents and projects synchronized on my PowerBook across multilpe Windows 2000 servers, a home firewire drive, and a Mac OS X server at home. For years, I've been looking for solutions and purchased You Synchronize from You Software. It had gotten very good reviews and, for the most part, I had been happy with it. However, with the volume and complexity of synchronization as well as the need to instantly automout and dismount shares it was not only becoming a pain to work with, but was incredibly slow and crashed often.

So, a few months ago, I re-hit the net and came across ChronoSync and it's great reviews from MacWorld. Since the demo version was limited to only about 500 files, I emailed the developer and they gave me a full-featured unlock key for 30 days. WOW. Fast, stable, auto-mounted and (optionally) dismounted network shares and I could schedule each folder or location to synchronize at specific intervals or build a master scheduled that I could then pick and choose what to synchronize and when.

Synchronizing and having up-to-date copies of files is key to what I need to do. Chronosync has been for me the missing utility and it's been the utility that I've been waiting for. I'm looking forward to using 3.1 (which is what brought me here) and the new features.

The ONLY drawback with the application that I've been able to find is that it will not synchronize files who have names in Unicode (multi-lingual) characters. It will error out on those files. So, if you need to synchronize files whose file names are in not in English but in Unicode, you will have problems. I have not emailed the developer of this problem, but if that issue get's fixed then in my opinion this application really is the perfect sync solution on any platform. Kudos and in case you can't tell, highly recommended :-) [alert admin]

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Saturday, August 27 2005 @ 12:05 PM PDT

PocketMac GoBetween 1.1 (Mac OS X)

Not perfect, but not bad  

I just bought GoBetween last week-Thursday--so I've been using it for about 4 days or so. I read the reader comments here and elsewhere. I purchased the program because I have been using Mail and iCal and I wante do use Office 2004's project features. With the way i'm doing my synchronizing, I'm still keeping address book and iCal as my PRIMARY contacts and calendar managers. So, I'm possibly in a slightly different situation than some. Consequently, I'm more interested in keeping iCal and Address book as my primary points of entry, but I wanted a way to sync with Entourage in order to be able to use the project feature as I said. So, after looking at the Apple script options, I decided to go this route. Yes, the program is not perfect. 1) You cannot choose which calendars to sync from iCal to Entourage. 2) There are serious issues with all day events synchronizing from iCal to Entourage--they end up as duplicate entries in Entourage However, the application does the job otherwise. I synchronize data between my Mac, iPod, Motorolla phone, and Lotus Notes. I thus use iSync and Kissworks' LipSync and now GoBetween--so I have quite a few "bridges" in my synching. But again, if you're willing to live with the issues the application has, it's not bad and I'm pretty happy with it. That being said, however, I do hope that they fix these issues soon. [alert admin]

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Sunday, October 03 2004 @ 08:17 PM PDT

Trapeze 1.0.3 (Mac OS X)

Not bad  

I'm very interested in the prospect of what this app does. It appears that if you have a PDF file that has text in a straight-forward manner, this does the trick (there's an occasional issue with spacing). <p> Where the application had issues was with PDF files I had created from web pages that had used tables. The application choked on converting the two files I tested. On the one file, it only converted the title of the article--and at 72 point! It errored out on the second article. <p> So, I can deduce that it needs some work with oddly formatted files, but should work OK on basic files. It needs some additional tweaks to really make it a stellar application. For a version 1.0 it's not bad at this point. [alert admin]

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Tuesday, June 01 2004 @ 09:03 PM PDT

Aladdin StuffIt Express Enterprise Edition 1.1 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)

Does the job extremely well  

I've been using this product since it's release for both OS X and Windows. It does the job extremely well and you can build automated drop boxes in minutes. Whether you need to automate simply routines or create complex applications for non-technical users, Express does it. We've been using it to automate FTP uploads of files. The drop box takes the file, initiates the FTP session, will renamte the uploaded file, create an email and do it all automatically with zero skill level required for the end user. Simply put the product delivers as promised. [alert admin]

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Friday, April 09 2004 @ 11:38 AM PDT

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