spfrosaidthis

Synchronizes with Palm OS.

This is an excellent application. It is very easy to use, stays out of the way and even has 2-way synchronization with the Palm version!

Easy to use, beautiful, stable. Applications like these make the Mac experience so pleasant. They just work and fit in the overall look-and-feel. Well worth the additional cost.

But I also miss saved searches in version 2.5.2. :-(

2.5 caused some problems, but was a workable solution. But the new 3.0 is rubbish.

This is the first time I have been moved to comment negatively on a piece of Mac software: I paid for the upgrade, but it's been nothing but restart, restart, restart because of instability.

Five reasons not to upgrade:

1. DVD Player and EyeTV 3.0 fight for some reason (when EyeTV is recording during DVD Player playback), leading to kernel panics. Duh, restart machine.
2. USB driver code appears to lead to kernel panics all by itself. Duh, restart machine.
3. web access is so flakey as to be useless. Duh, restart EyeTV.
4. export is painfully slow (many days to export some stuff, it might even be that the export function is broken) Duh, restart encoding.
5. many, many spinning beachballs (unbelievable). Duh, restart EyeTV.

Sleak, slow and unworkably poor. EyeEyeEyeTV: stick with 2.5...

Fission does one task and does it well.

Excellent user interface designed for occassional users like myself. AAC support alone is worth every cent of this application. Fission is one of those apps that really "get" Mac OS X. Rich use of interactive graphics (but no clutter), smart choice of defaults, easy to learn, obvious references to Apple's apps.

GC is often compared to a Swiss army knife. I think that makes sense. It does nothing really well. The user interface is so confusing that you need to buy and download a pdf-tutorial to find your way. Some very simple tasks have awkward workflows. (Ever tried to save a losslessly cropped JPG?)

But then, like the famous Swiss army knife, it can do A LOT of things. Manipulate EXIF and IPTC data, losslessly change the resolution of a file, add borders to a picture, rename files, create icon previews for the finder, correct white balance, add text, sharpen, ...

The most useful feature is batch conversion of files. Batch commands are easy to define. Then select a few file in the image browser, click a button, and you'll have your images resized, sharpened, framed and saved with a given filesize. (Great for Flickr.)

In the Windows World you might compare it to ACDSee or PaintShop Pro. However GraphicConverter's feature set is quite unique. GC is neither an image editor nor an image database. It's an image "converter" with many additional bells and whistles, for very little money.

GC is also great as an addition to Photoshop. (If you can afford Photoshop, the few bucks for GC don't matter.) You'll find that many of these occasional tasks are faster in GC.

When Preview can't do it and P-Shop is the proverbial howitzer to kill a fly, GC will get the job done. This is a must in your photo/image editing toolbox.

I like using this. It's a must have in my book.

This application is one of the reasons, why I love Mac OS X. Outliners are not everybody's piece of cake. They don't really exist for Windows or Linux. Maybe because few software designers understand what an outliner is all about. Omni is one of the few exceptions. They get it. Completely. So they created what I consider to be the perfect outliner. It's exactly right. The features and the user interface are perfectly balanced.

I use it to collect and categorize bits of data. From shopping lists to feature comparisons to book chapters. I love it as a creative tool to collect and categorize ideas. I have outlines with less than a dozen and more than thousand entries. Some are plain lists, some are former mind maps, some are future text documents. OmniOutliner makes lots of sense to me. :-)

I'm still running Toast 7. When I bought it, it was the only application that supported my external burner. The price is steep, the feature set is limited. But I use Toast almost daily. It's a universal tool: burn disks from images, create images, create DVDs from EyeTV recordings, create ISO disks for universal acces on all platforms, ... Toast 7 just works. Nothing fancy, but useful.

Version 9 is out, new features and comparison with versions 8 and 7 are here

Unfortunately I get the dreaded hardware error on lead-outs on all my DL media using either my MBP internal or my LG external DVD-R drive...Disco doesn't burns them just fine

the best!!!!
like NERO

Stable, reliable and simple. Other FTP clients are cheaper, have more features or have a slicker design. But somehow I always end up using Transmit.

I think of it as a professional tool. Expensive and boring. :-) Transmit doesn't get in your way. It gets the job done. It has the perfect feature set. It just works. What more can you want from an FTP and WebDAV client?

My favorite FTP, and I've tried lots. Plus: the owner of the company responds to email -- lightning-fast and very polite.

Elegant UI, excellent functionality, occasional performance hitches; despite being a paying user for years, I've switched to YummyFTP for SFTP and vanilla FTP, because I prefer its Finder-like hierarchical view. (I do web dev for a living; I don't use Amazon S3, and avoid WebDav like the plague!) But if you're only gonna pay for one FTP app, Transmit is the one to buy!

KompoZer is becoming an increasingly "official" replacement for NVU. You'll find a link on NVU's product homepage (nvu.com). NVU's developer forum (forum.nvudev.org) announces KompoZer on the topmost sticky message "status of nvu".

KompoZer brings back the fun to NVU. A free open-source HTML editor with CSS-support. It doesn't replace Dreamweaver, but it's a very useful tool for smaller web projects.

I was seriously disappointed by NVU. The feature set made sense. A simple WYSIWIG HTML-Editor with CSS support. All you need for a small, but technically sophisticated web project. Exzellent idea! But first Linspire totally overhyped the project as a Dreamweaver "rival". Then they released a version 1.0 that was so unstable that it became pointless to use. Then they never fixed it. Horrible.

KompoZer actually works. Try it! :-)

Very fast and solid word processor. Has many unique typographic features.

But for styles the learning curve is really, really steep. Somewhere around version 2.1 Mellel's concepts for managing styles grew over my head. I love structured documents and I appreciate typographic details. I have typeset whole books in Word and LaTeX. I love styles and auto-numbering of any kind. But in Mellel I just don't get it anymore. Why are "title flows" not part of "style sets"? What's the benefit of "style variations"? Flexibility is great, but Mellel (as of version 2.2.7) its too much.

For shorter structured documents I went back to a more Word-like application OpenOffice (actuallly NeoOffice). For lists I use OmniOutliner. And for really complex documents with extensive numberings and high typographic standards I rather invest the learning time in TeX (with TeXShop as frontend). For visually rich documents I prefer sitll otther apps. That leaves Mellel ... where?

In my opinion, Mellel needs some major cleaning up of the user interface. I bought Mellel because it was fast and simple for basic tasks. I still love Mellel for all the power under its hood. But I think the way Mellel organizes styles and manipulates styles should be more centralized.

My wishlist: strictly separate manual formatting from application of styles from manipulation of styles. For a simple letter I want only manual formatting or choose form exisitng(!) styles defined in my letter template. In complex documents styles shouldn't be tweaked on the fly either, they need some serious planning. So I'd love to see a centralized user interface for all style management features (the "styles sets" dialog is 85% there) and remove(!) style editing from the palettes. That should do the trick. Easier manual formatting and easier style management.

In the current incarnation I wouldn't recommend Mellel to anyone, unless you need left-to-right script and support for middle-eastern languages.

I used Word in Windows but for the mac microsoft did not deliver so I started a search for a word processor that could handle my demand.

When I found Mellel my search was finally over and I am loving it.