Rejected Software:
I've reviewed these and cast them aside... They didn't work out for me.Total packages: 143
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Update 1/5/08. There's no doubt Tickershock is cool, and for folks who really love the news-ticker method of information delivery (Pointcast, anyone?), it's worth a look. I like the fact that it's so customizable and provides numerous interesting built-in themes and options. But given the multitude of highly effective, free ways to get your news feeds nowadays, I certainly couldn't justify the standard Mesa-Dynamics software price of $20. Heck, I had been using ClawMenu's wonderful RSS reader until a few months ago, when I decided I just couldn't afford the time to stay on top of the web news. I'm hoping that'll change shortly, but when it does, I'm pretty sure I'll go back to ClawMenu. (And just so you know, ClawMenu is a very lightweight newsreader... not a dedicated application like NetNewswire or PulpFiction. Still, it's very handy, looks great, and fits my workflow.)
Version as tested: 1.3.
As it turns out, it wasn't (for me, at least). Part of the problem could be the obnoxious demo behavior, which results in potentially dozens of little reminder notices that you've exceeded the demo period popping up and draining your system's juices away. Since MaxiMice acts as a Cocoa plugin, it gets activated in all your running Cocoa apps when you start it up. And for some either sadistic or ignorant reason, the developer engineered the demo reminder to pop up in each of the host applications, rather than just in System Preferences, which houses the MaxiMice preference pane.

So, perhaps I didn't live with edge scrolling long enough to become dependent on it. During the time I did use it, I went from total annoyance to mild tolerance, so things were moving in the "right" direction I suppose. But I really don't need to spend another $10 on Mac software, now do I? Besides, MaxiMice doesn't handle the other half of Window Tricks: Resizing windows from any point. If only the developer had continued working on MaxiMice, it might today be the best tool in its class! I say this because MaxiMice has the easiest mechanism for window moving of any I tried. It utilizes the "float" technique of MondoMouse ⤴, but with the freedom to define a single key as the shortcut---by default, it's the Control key. This means you can hit Ctrl and move your mouse around (never having to click it), and the window over which the mouse is hovering will move where you will. Not only that, the window you want to move doesn't have to be frontmost... it can be hidden behind other windows, and you can move it with the Ctrl key without bringing it to the front.
Most distressing to me is that MaxiMice is the only tool that would take care of a little task I grew quite fond of. As a user of the amazing MacGizmo ⤴, I've been enjoying a future feature of Leopard for almost a year now---namely, the ability to quickly preview any image, video, PDF file, HTML file, or text file without actually opening it. Only problem with MacGizmo is that its interface slides down and covers the Finder. There are times when I pined for the ability to move MacGizmo out of the way without actually closing it. Then, lo and behold, one day I clicked the Ctrl key and found MacGizmo moving wherever I wanted it. Since I was in the midst of testing several "window moving" tools, it took me awhile to identify the hero of this scenario. As it turned out, none of the other "window tricks" applications that I've tested are able to move MacGizmo. This may be an idiosyncracy of my system, but that's the way it is.
Still, in the end, cooler heads prevailed, and I decided it was silly to pay $10 for software that adds a little enhancement to another that cost me $20.
Below are some other notes I took about MaxiMice.
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Version as tested: 1.0.1.
- Puts an icon in the menubar for controlling its features,
- Uses the cool "float" move/resize mechanism that distinguishes MondoMouse,
- Offers a wealth of additional window tricks compared with some of the commercial products,
- Has excellent key binding options,
- Has customizable visual feedback,
- And more besides!
However, it also crashes a lot and doesn't run at all in Leopard. The source code is there for the taking if anybody would like to get the thing running again, but in the meantime, I've had to pass on it. Here are a few notes I took during testing.
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Version as tested: 1.0.
Megazoomer
Expand (Some) Windows Full-Screen Instantly
Freeware
Tags
Rejected Apr 28, 2007
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Update 4/28/07. Even if you're a Windows switcher who misses the ability to zoom your windows to full screen, I don't think MegaZoomer is the tool for you. It's free, and works as advertised, but what you get isn't really what you want. Besides, the Mac OS X zoom button works as it does for a reason, and it's a good reason. Try it for awhile, and you may come to agree. I felt similarly when I moved from OS 9, but soon came to appreciate the value of not having a window zoom to full-screen size by default when clicking the zoom button. Mac OS X's zoom button, as implemented in apps like Finder and Safari, is brilliant user-interface design... though it will take some getting used to. My advice? Learn to love it---you won't be sorry. Besides, MegaZoomer won't help you with a lot of the apps you may most want to maximize---like the Finder---since it's a Cocoa plugin that works only with native Cocoa apps.
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Version as tested: 0.4.1.
Afloat
Cocoa Extension Aims To Extend Power Over Windows
Freeware
Tags
Rejected Apr 28, 2007
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Update 11/28/06. After having Afloat running for a couple of months, and several sessions of trying to use it, I've concluded that no matter how cool I think it is, Afloat just doesn't work for me. My summary of pros and cons noted during testing are below.
Update 4/28/07. I downloaded and tried out the newer beta 4 "experimental" version of Afloat today, but it just cemented my view that this software is on the wrong track to adding the kind of functionality it's after. There are other tools that do a better job, in each instance, and are likewise free. Beta 4 is a rewrite that no longer uses SIMBL, instead using a dynamic Cocoa injection system similar to the one that tools like F-Script Anywhere uses. I've updated the pros/cons list as well.
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Version as tested: 1.0 b4
Launchd Editor
A Pale Subset of Lingon's Powers Over Launchd
Freeware
Tags
Rejected Apr 06, 2007
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Update 4/6/07. Well, I'm back... and after trying Launchd Editor, I'll say right away that I'm not a happy camper. What's put me in a foul mood? It's software like Launchd Editor, which is less than half as useful as the free, open source Lingon, and yet has a developer who expects people to pay for it! There are many Mac users who are afflicted with the common human delusion that because one software app has a price tag, it must be better than one that does not. When it comes to software, this just isn't so. Always look for high quality freeware, or at least donationware, because in so many product categories, you'll find that's where the best is. Why? It's because guys who design high-quality freeware are doing it for the sheer joy of creating something useful, not to make a buck. Guys who put together a lame product like Launchd Editor and ask $5 for it are just looking to make a buck on something they've put very little effort into. It's a shame, and I do hope readers of this site will head in the right direction when the time comes to begin using Launchd effectively.

All Launchd Editor does is walk you through filling in the fields and optional tags and attributes of the Launchd XML file format. It does so with the minimum possible user interface style (that is, none). Heck, its author didn't even bother to make an icon for his shareware. You can open existing launchd .plist files and edit them, or make new ones, but that's it. In the process, Launchd Editor provides no help whatsoever... no Help file, no inline help, no external links to information on launchd.

Again, this might seem like a lot if you had never seen Lingon, but once you have, you're going to hope users of MacUpdate, VersionTracker, and Google don't go astray merely out of ignorance. This isn't a review of Lingon, but here's a short list of the things Lingon does elegantly that go way beyond Launchd Editor:
- Provides an "Assistant" to walk you through making your first Launchd agent. The assistant asks you the essential questions and doesn't confuse you with all the complicated options, which is great for first-timers.
- Gives you access to all of the Launch agents and daemons on your entire system, and you can open and view them to the extent you have the appropriate privileges. This means all I had to do was open Lingon and select "Users Daemons" (which required authentication) to discover that Google Desktop had installed two separate Launch Daemons to support itself.
- Gives you a friendly interface for starting, stopping, and loading/reloading any given agent or daemon.
- Provides an advanced view of the pure XML code itself, which you can edit by hand if you're so inclined.
- Provides useful inline explanations of each field a you go. In addition, this freeware provides a useful Help file that the for-fee software does not. Finally, Lingon's Help menu even includes handy links to the launchd and launchctl man pages.
- Lingon also includes a full-service set of menus that enable keyboard shortcuts for most items, and it even provides a Preferences window that lets you select options like the fonts you'd like to use and the external editor you prefer.
Now, you know that the developer of Launchd Editor is aware of Lingon... right? How do you suppose he justifies charging for software that he knows is inferior to another product users can get for free? He's counting on the web being a big place, and he knows a lot of people looking for a launchd editor will find his site before they discover Lingon. Does that make it right? Not on Mars, it doesn't.
Anyway, forget you ever heard of Launchd Editor... Go grab a copy of Lingon if you want to begin harnessing the awesome power of launchd on your Mac! It's the best launchd editor I'm aware of at any price.
Version as tested: 1.0.1.
Update 4/6/07. I've tried using Punakea several times in the last couple of months, and at this point the tool appears to have not only stability problems but also some architectural flaws that make it fairly useless for me. Architecturally, Punakea is saddled with its use of the Finder comments field for storing tags, which simply isn't as powerful or flexible as the support extended tagging Apple introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"). Extended tags have been available on other Unix systems for years, and they support pretty much unlimited data types and sizes. I learned about them from reading the documentation on SpotMeta, which leverages that powerful framework for its tagging scheme. Unfortunately, SpotMeta's development has now been abandoned, though its source code has been released for others to extend. There are really only one or two sticking points with SpotMeta, however, which I wish I knew enough Cocoa to fix. The other big flaw in Punakea is that it doesn't let you tag folders... only files.
Here are a few notes I made on Punakea during testing:
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Punakea is being managed by a clearly thoughtful, forward-thinking development team, and it's possible they will "see the light" one of these days, perhaps even use some of SpotMeta's amazing code. Already, they have released a beta version of a new tagging framework that appears to store the tags in a repository outside of the files themselves. This is good news potentially, because one of the limitations of extended tags, it appears, is that they don't survive when a given file is updated... for example, when a new application release is written over an older one. At least, I don't know how to keep them alive in that circumstance, and clearly, you don't want to have to create new tags every time you update a file!
Version as tested: 0.2.3.
Worldmark
Bookmarks Made Universal (Then Abandoned)
Freeware
Tags
Rejected Apr 02, 2007
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Update 4/2/07. Worldmark is the kind of project that is very disappointing to fans of Mac apps like me. It's been over a year since I downloaded Worldmark, and I've tried it a few times. One huge flaw in the concept is that the menubar icon is only there to let you drag items (URLs, files, folders, etc) to it.... it doesn't display a list of your "worldmarks", doesn't give you access to Worldmark's preferences (of which there are hardly any), and doesn't let you load different Worldmark documents. As such, it's totally counterintuitive. But that's not what's disappointing to me.
No, it's the fact that this first beta release was issued in September 2005, and there hasn't been a single update since then. And yet the developer has the temerity to expect users to pay $10 for continuous use. Sorry, but to me, payment for shareware is a bargain between user and developer: The user agrees to pay for the software, and the developer agrees to not put the software in mothballs, which is exactly what appears to have happened to Worldmark.
The good news, however, is that there's a free, open source application I had already adopted, which does everything Worldmark can do, plus a whole lot more: Check out Hallon some time. By developer Peter Borg, who has also given the Mac world the open source Cocoa apps Smultron and Lingon, Hallon actually lets you bookmark items within applications. For example, you can bookmark a particular song in iTunes, or a particular album in iPhoto, and so on. In addition, it's extensible, so users and other developers can build plugins for applications that aren't already included in the package. Finally, Hallon lets you associate due dates and set alarms for anything you bookmark.
And you know what? The Hallon menubar icon can be used not only to add new bookmarks, but it also displays existing bookmarks in various useful ways! Just like you'd expect.
In other words, Hallon is an awesome product that has solutions to problems you may not even known you could solve. My only complaint about Hallon is that it, too, hasn't been updated in a long time. However, I know that developer has been very busy on Smultron, and besides, he's not asking for any money for his effort. (Though I'm sure Borg would appreciate a contribution if you are so moved.)
Version as tested: 1.0 b1.
iRepair
Simple Freeware Utility Tries To Manage File/Folder Permissions
Freeware
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Rejected Apr 02, 2007
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Update 4/2/07. As it turns out, there's not much to see here. This is another piece of software that was created and then abandoned... but at least it's freeware! If iRepair could do what it claimed, it could possibly provide some value added over the Finder's native tool, because sometimes you'd like to apply permission settings to an entire folder and all of its files and subfolders, but Finder doesn't give you the option. iRepair does.
p:Unfortunately, though it has a nice interface for doing it, iRepair doesn't work as advertised. In half a dozen trials today, I got iRepair to work only once. I tried to discern a pattern to the one success, but found none. It's possible that iRepair works on file systems that have a more traditional setup... in other words, ones that don't utilize symbolic links where actual folders usually are. But that's no excuse... it's easy enough to get Mac apps to follow symbolic links, if you know it's a requirement. iRepair probably just didn't go through much user testing. However, my idea that symbolic links may be tripping it up is pure speculation... I haven't had the time to test the theory. If anyone does and would like to send in test data, I'll be happy to amend this. If the developer reads this review, I also invite you to let me know if you revise the software, and I'll test it again sometime.Version as tested: 1.0.5.
Update 3/22/07. So, I finally get around to giving Jedit X a serious try last night. I was immediately impressed by the software's overall design, and its Cocoa base meant nearly all the components were where I thought they'd be, and worked the way they should. It's always a mixed blessing when software provides a wealth of preference options, and Jedit provides much more than most. It would be interesting to compare the number of settings you can configure in Jedit X with those in, say, BBEdit or TextMate. For some reason, text editors tend to pile the configuration options on... probably to satisfy customer requests. Philosophically, I side with Apple's designers in thinking that the fewer options a user has to consider when opening a new piece of software, the better. On the other hand, I've often felt that Apple skimps too much in that direction. Fortunately, Jedit X's preferences are well designed and logically arranged.
Sadly, I didn't get much further than the 15-20 minutes I spent considering all of the preferences settings I could tweak. As soon as I downloaded a PHP file to see how well it handles typical editing and coding operations, I realized I'd have to say "bye bye" to Jedit X.

Everyone has a few "must have" requirements when it comes to software, and one of mine for a programmers editor is tabs. I have been using a tabbed editor for a long time now, beginning with BBEdit and for the last year or so, Smultron. I'll never go back to single windows for each document. I often open 10-15 files at a time when I'm programming, and the desktop just gets too cluttered! No matter how good Jedit X is in other ways, this is one feature I simply can't live without. I miss it when I'm in TextEdit, too, but I don't spend nearly as much time there as in Smultron. A really cool widget-building app that I've used in the past, Widgetarium, didn't have tabs either, and it drove me nuts trying to keep "tabs" of all the open files. Unfortunately, Apple's new Dashcode software for widget making is missing tabs as well.
If you're programming habits don't require a tabbed editor, you should definitely give Jedit X a look. it handles a wide variety of syntaxes and appears to be particularly strong in HTML. From what I saw, Jedit X would also make a very nice RTF-style editor like TextEdit... it has a lot of features geared to plain old writing, as opposed to programming. For documentation purposes, it has some nifty tools such as the "bookmarks" tab in its drawer... the accompanying screenshot is a Jedit X document containing the Jedit X Help file, showing the linked navigation in the form of bookmarks. Sounds like PDF, right? There's much more to Jedit X, but I didn't get any farther than this. Still, that was far enough to see that at only $29, it's a great value... If ... :-)
Version as tested: 1.39.
KIT
Shoeboxes, Notebooks, and Scrapbooks... Are Hard To Search
Freeware
Tags
Rejected Mar 17, 2007
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Update 3/18/07. KIT is inexpensive (only $25), is attractive and easy to learn, since it follows the application design pattern of all the best Cocoa apps from the last year and a half. However, it has some basic design flaws that will be frustrating to experienced users expecting consistent behavior, and it's too unstable for even relatively light use. For me, it's also missing a number of critical features in a PIM. For the full details on my review, refer to the article "An Ongoing Review of Personal Information Management Tools for Mac OS X: No Perfect Solution (Yet)", updated with a review of KIT on 3/17/07.
Version as tested: 1.3.2.
Tables
New Mac OS X Spreadsheet Gaining Ground
Freeware
Tags
Rejected Mar 06, 2007
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Update 3/6/07. Tables is making great strides toward full usability, but it isn't there yet, according to my tests with some large, real-life spreadsheets. Yet I fully expect to move Tables from the "Reject" to the "Recommended" column if the developer continues making progress as he has since debuting Tables in summer 2006. For a full review of Tables, as well as my thoughts on all the contenders in the Mac OS X spreadsheet market, see my March 2007 article, "Mac OS X Spreadsheet Roundup: A Few Excel, The Rest Should Be Shot."
Version as tested: 1.2.
WindowFinder
It'll Find Windows, But Will It Find Lost Windows?
Freeware
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Rejected Feb 22, 2007
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Update 2/22/07. As it turns out, that's really all that WindowFinder does... it presents the open windows of all your currently running desktop applications. It has no knowledge of windows belonging to background applications, which is what I really have trouble finding sometimes. If you're looking for something besides Expose to meet this need, there are a ton of 'em out there. One that I'm getting fonder of all the time, even though I don't use it much, is My Favorite Things. Like WindowFinder, it's a menubar launcher-type application, but it's infinitely more flexible than WindowFinder. In addition to displaying all the windows of your running apps, My Favorite Thing's main purpose is to let you easily find the apps you run most often. Like Tag Clouds, it can present the app list with each app at a different size to indicate its frequency of use. More about My Favorite Things when I get around to a review of it. If you'd like something that does this for free, check out Witch .
Version as tested: 1.4.
Taco HTML Edit
Freeware HTML Editor for Mac OS X
Freeware
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Rejected Feb 22, 2007
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Update 2/22/07. Well, in the many months since I wrote that intro paragraph, I have totally weaned myself off of BBEdit and mostly on to Smultron. I say "mostly," because Smultron doesn't have very much specific support for HTML editing and isn't great at handling a heavy document load. Unfortunately, Taco HTML Edit doesn't add anything significant (to me) of value over Smultron, and it lacks a few of Smultron's nicer features to boot. It's better than Smultron at HTML editing, but the way it supports code editing isn't robust enough for me. In any case, I'm impressed with Taco, but not enough to feed it to my Mac. See below for a screenshot and my short list of pros and cons.
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Version as tested: 1.7.2.
Update 2/22/07. Yes, you can use Quaik to send emails, but why would you want to? I still haven't figured that one out... Quaik is just a stripped down mail outbox, and you can set up some defaults, use Address Book for addresses and... well, that's about it. If the mail I sent a little while ago every arrives (it would have by now if I'd used Mail), I'll havve some idea how Quaik handles rich text formatting in an email. I told it to send the mail as HTML, and I'm curious to see how the bullet list gets translated... That's the most interesting part of Quaik to me now, but honestly I'd never use it for sending HTML mail, I don't think.
Version as tested: 1.0.3.
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