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2351

General Software Discussion / Re: EverNote beta 2.2.0.372 has some nice new features

« Last post by J-Mac on March 19, 2008, 09:46 PM »

Well, I just downloaded the beta, so I'll let you know shortly. But the beta forum has posts complaining about this new "feature".

Hopefully what I read is not true, or is just misunderstood. But that seems to be a complaint on the boards there.

Jim

2352

General Software Discussion / Re: EverNote beta 2.2.0.372 has some nice new features

« Last post by J-Mac on March 19, 2008, 07:47 PM »

I don't really like Evernote 3 that much so far. Your database is on their server - no more local databases. And your backups are also online. If you have no internet connection you're out of luck.

Also, it appears that there is no more auto-category tagging, severely reduced category intersection features. By trying to make Evernote an "access from anywhere" application they have placed a lot of limits on it. The beta forum doesn't seem to be a very happy place lately.

Jim

2353

General Software Discussion / Re: User friendly . . .

« Last post by J-Mac on March 18, 2008, 02:11 AM »

Good. I hope it works for you. I have had an account there for two years now - Power, not Professional account. I am not a photographer; I just wanted my photos online at a place that was more secure than Flickr. On Flickr someone had made a number of pics of my granddaughters "Favorites". When I went to look at their pages it was a collection of small children in various stages of undress - babies being bathed, little girls bending over, etc. Flickr didn't care very much. Smugmug is family-run, has true privacy features, and doesn't tolerate stuff like that. A very nice community there.  And it IS loaded with professional photographers selling prints as well as family point-and-shooters like me.   

Jim

2354

General Software Discussion / Re: Way to call upon multiple ObjectDock docks via keystroke?

« Last post by J-Mac on March 17, 2008, 10:02 PM »

Hi Brandon.

Hmm..  I used ObjectDock Plus for about three or four years but I never tried to operate the docks with keyboard hotkeys or anything similar. I always figured that if I would have to use my mouse to click on an icon on the dock anyway I might as well just have the dock slide open from its "drawer" hidden mode as my cursor approached it.

But I do see why you would want free-floating docks like that that you could hide away quickly for a full screen game. I once created four or five rectangles of various sizes and placed icons for different categories in each: one for all my A/V apps, one for the two dozen different photo editing & scrapbooking apps, etc. But as you probably know, when any full screen application - game or otherwise - is open over these the shadow of the docks bleeds wight through deeply - I imagine it is Java-related; either way, I had to lose all of those and stick with the hidden tabbed docks. Even those are tough because in the full screen programs if you get close enough to the edges the docks come sliding out anyway!

All that I can think of for your problem is some sort of Autohotkey script that toggles keyboard shortcuts or uses command line controls to operate the docks. Of course I am illiterate when it comes to creating AHK scripts, but if you ask in the coding/program request forum I'll bet someone could create one for you.  As for determining if either keyboard shortcuts or the command line to opeate the docks, I would head on over to the Stardock forums - ask Brad if OD+ can be used that way.

Jim

2355

General Software Discussion / Re: The quiet disappearance of the top two mp3 cataloging software.

« Last post by J-Mac on March 17, 2008, 01:44 PM »

But the title of your thread here is "The Quiet Disappearance of the top two mp3 cataloging software.".  Looks like you're saying there that you believe it is effectively a "dead application". Well, actually you said that MP3 Collector is "...soon to disappear off the web completely."  Are you changing your thinking? 

Really, though, I probably won't buy it unless I see some sort of commitment, as I mentioned in a post above. Or, of course, if they decide to officially declare it "dead" and lower the price.  If they want the same price as I paid them for Movie Collector and Music Collector (both of which I really like quite a bit!), then I want at least a similar degree of commitment, specifically in the form of active development and support in the forum!

That's not unreasonable, it it?

Jim

2356

General Software Discussion / Re: The quiet disappearance of the top two mp3 cataloging software.

« Last post by J-Mac on March 17, 2008, 12:32 PM »

Well, it's definitely enough to cause me to hesitate in making the purchase.  If they stated some kind of commitment to the application I would buy it right away; I was ready to a week and a half ago. But I think I would rather wait and see what they do with it now.

If I make the purchase at full price and they discontinue it shortly thereafter I'll be beating my head against the wall!

Jim

2357

General Software Discussion / Re: The quiet disappearance of the top two mp3 cataloging software.

« Last post by J-Mac on March 17, 2008, 03:43 AM »

…Like I said before, I don't blame the Collectorz staff for that.  In the beginning, they were very responsive, but at the time, the software was still new.  As they added more software, the MP3 Collector became their least popular one out of the suite, which is not their fault.  Someone on the forum asked them about their lack of attention to the MP3 Collector and they responded with what I wrote above, that they have to address the needs of their other software first because that's where the bills are being paid.…

-superboyac (March 17, 2008, 02:27 AM)

I do understand, but I do not agree with your statement about "fault". I'm not sure what in the heck you mean there!

Fault? It's not their fault that they ignore that forum? Then whose fault is it? Let's be honest: they sell that application for the same relatively high price that they sell the others in their stable. Regardless of the popularity, or lack thereof, that you claim, the users who purchased MP3 Collector did so in good faith and paid with dollars of the same value, right? Don't they deserve at least the same level of effort from the developer as those who have paid the same for, say, Movie Collector? Or Music Collector?  How can you say that they are without fault for, first, seemingly ceasing all further development, and second, not supporting the forum for that app?  Come on, that's just not right!

You seem to be blaming the user base for not being larger for MP3 Collector. If it is not supported by the users, then announce that they are stopping development and if they want to continue to make it available, then either make it a free download and don't support it at all. Or reduce the price to reflect the "non-support" status of that program!

But even with that being the case, the MP3 Collector program still works great for now.  It could be looked at from a different perspective, where it's polished enough where features don't really need to be added or it's not that urgent.  There are a couple of nifty feature requests out there, but for the most part, I have no complaints.

Really? It's just... perfect, so let it be. Is it also so perfect that questions from users are not worthy of replies? You are being facetious, aren't you?  (Actually, that sounds just like Nuance's theory of non-support!)

Jim

2358

General Software Discussion / Re: User friendly . . .

« Last post by J-Mac on March 17, 2008, 01:51 AM »

dessa,

Not sure if this is close to what you want, but take a look at Smugmug. Their Pro account allows ecommerce, you can setup categories and subcategories for your galleries and setup different passwords for each.

Jim

2359

General Software Discussion / Re: 45 best Freeware Design programs

« Last post by J-Mac on March 17, 2008, 12:15 AM »

Wow, that IS some list!

Very much appreciated!   

Jim

2360

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft Office 2007 users, your opinions are wanted

« Last post by J-Mac on March 16, 2008, 11:51 PM »

Sadly, Zaine, I no longer have a "workplace"!   

I can say, though, that not many companies have upgraded to Office 2007 yet. At least not as many as Microsoft would like.  Corporations are usually slow to upgrade their office suites.  Office 2007 upgrades are priced exceedingly high, despite the comments by many here about the academic discounts. That is, for personal consumers, home users, etc.  I know that corporations with multi-seat licenses get fairly substantial discounts, and I am virtually certain that Microsoft is discounting it even more deeply now because of the relatively slow sales. But for large corporations, it is the training costs that are prohibitive. While the software purchase itself is a capital expense, the staff training is not - it is an O&M expense item and does not get the beneficial tax treatment that new software purchases get.  And the training for Office 2007 is much more intensive than previous upgrades to Office. When I was in the business, we had an abundance of administrative personnel who were not overly "computer literate" except for the specific applications(s) that were required for their jobs.  So working through such a drastic UI change can be a true killer from a productivity standpoint! You'll see some secretaries in tears struggling for hours to get a report typed that would have taken them a few minutes previously.

I think that all will eventually settle in with the new version, but not for quite a while. Of course I may be way off here, but I don't think so.   

Jim

2361

General Software Discussion / Re: The quiet disappearance of the top two mp3 cataloging software.

« Last post by J-Mac on March 16, 2008, 11:37 PM »

superboyac,

Having recently purchased both Movie Collector and Music Collector from Collectorz.com, I was looking hard at MP3 Collector.  As recently as a week ago I was browsing through its forum and became worried just as you apparently are here.  It has not been updated and requests about its future and the time table for an updated release have gone pretty much unanswered. The Collectorz mods there rarely reply to posts there, though they are very active on all other forums.  A post queried about the next update in December and the response was, "We will revisit MP3 Collector next year  "  Not very much of a commitment!  So I decided to hold off on any purchase, at least for now.  I am very much pleased with Movie and Music Collector presently; why take a chance of souring my opinion of the developer by spending top dollar on a product that seems to be on the way out?  Better to stay happy with what I have!!

Jim

2362

General Software Discussion / Re: Almeza MultiSet

« Last post by J-Mac on March 16, 2008, 11:25 PM »

No problem - I just thought I'd show you those replies in case you hadn't seen it.

By all means, go for it. I wasn't trying to discourage you from purchasing Almeza; just letting you know where I went with my look into it. I liked the concept, but as with most newer applications that have not been around long enough to build a reputation - good or otherwise - I wanted some feedback from folks who have used the software; particularly the users here at DC, in whose opinion I have a lot of faith!  Not having received any feedback either way, it was just a little too high-priced for me to purchase speculatively.

Good luck!

Jim

2363

General Software Discussion / Re: Almeza MultiSet

« Last post by J-Mac on March 16, 2008, 01:54 AM »

I was asking the same question a couple of months ago here.  A few members have this app by virtue of a few 50% discounts offered here at DC during the recent Christmas holidays, but none had yet tried it, nor seemed very eager to do so.  I was getting ready to reinstall Windows on my desktop PC and considered something like this.

I ended up just doing it without Almeza or anything like it.  It looked like it would take a good, long time to set it up correctly, and there looks to be some situations where you have to perform some extra scripting work for certain programs.  I did not want to spend that much time setting Almeza up and then finding out later that it doesn't perform as well as advertised. Or, maybe worse yet, finding out that I neglected to perform a few of the additional scripting things and my reinstall is worse off because of that.  Had I been able to find any users who had successfully used Almeza I might have gotten it.

Normally, when I reinstall Windows I like to take my time installing the software afterwards. Mainly because there are some that I may or may not use again right away. To get a good setup with Almeza I would have to script out reinstalling everything and then upon the next reinstall, selectively check off which I want to reinstall - IF Almeza does that well.  As I said, I couldn't find out from anyone here.

Jim

2364

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft Office 2007 users, your opinions are wanted

« Last post by J-Mac on March 14, 2008, 12:30 PM »

Outlook has an extremely crippled IMAP feature. Take a look at, say, Thunderbird, where you can see ALL of your folders in any number of IMAP accounts, real time.  I believe Outlook allows you to subscribe to and view THREE folders at a time - and then you have to mark what you want to view and then download the bodies. That is not IMAP support, IMO.

Jim

2365

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft Office 2007 users, your opinions are wanted

« Last post by J-Mac on March 14, 2008, 12:24 PM »

BTW, I cut my teeth on WP5.1 also.  With the codes showing, it was probably the absolute best teacher of word processing!

Jim

Hey!! My 500th post!  I haven't written THAT much, have I?   

2366

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft Office 2007 users, your opinions are wanted

« Last post by J-Mac on March 14, 2008, 12:23 PM »

Oh boy!  You all are really getting me pumped up to dig into this.  I only use Outlook 2003 for calendar and contacts currently - all but one of my email accounts are IMAP and Outlook just doesn't do IMAP.

Word and Excel are my staples, so once I get into them more heavily I'll be able to comment with some experience.  Office 2003 is still on my desktop PC, which is where I do most of my Office work; typing is tough enough for me on a full-size keyboard - notebooks slow me to a speed that would make the Comcast turtle family jealous!

Jim

2367

General Software Discussion / Re: Easiest replacement for windows system restore?

« Last post by J-Mac on March 14, 2008, 02:24 AM »

The best and most reliable I've found is Acronis True Image.  For a similar application that is free, you could try DriveImage XML, but that is much slower and less versatile than Acronis. Besides, Acronis can be had pretty inexpensively.  Shop around and make sure to check both Newegg.com and Amazon.com.

Jim

2368

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft Office 2007 users, your opinions are wanted

« Last post by J-Mac on March 14, 2008, 02:06 AM »

Hi Zaine.

I just got a new notebook last week with Office 2007 Professional but I haven't used Office enough yet on that machine to get a good feel for it.

Two things I can say so far:

• First, I am not very fond of the ribbon interface just yet. BTW, I know that MS does not want us calling it that, but what the heck else can you reasonably call it?

• Second, I created a spreadsheet in Excel 2007 and tried to upload it to Google Docs so I could print it later from my desktop PC.  (While I was able to get the new notebook to connect wirelessly to the internet through my router, I have not yet solved the problem of getting this Vista Notebook to share with, or even SEE, the XP PC's on my network). However it could not be uploaded to Google Docs - error (from Google) says that it could be a few issues but the most likely seems to be that Excel 2007 has data validation turned on by default. And try as I might, I cannot get it turned off. That's a real bummer.

Jim

2369

General Software Discussion / Re: Code 19 in Device Manager

« Last post by J-Mac on March 14, 2008, 01:56 AM »

Did you uninstall the printer and all associated software, then reinstall?  Worth a try!

Jim

2370

UrlSnooper / Re: A little Help

« Last post by J-Mac on March 11, 2008, 11:51 PM »

Do you think the words "secure" and "protected" in the URL have anything to do with it?

Looks like it's a protected server. You can't access it without a password, I imagine.

Jim

2371

General Software Discussion / Re: Max Alert = Max Ripoff

« Last post by J-Mac on March 10, 2008, 11:28 AM »

I use jv16 Powertools for registry cleaning. If nothing else for two good reasons:

1) Since they started charging for this software they did not charge me anything to upgrade for each major version until this year.  Their latest version, jv16 Powertools 2008, will cost me $6.95.  While it is not a lifetime license, it works for me!

2) Rather than clean the registry regularly, I only clean out specific entries when required to do so. Haven't you come across applications that, when having difficulties upgrading to a newer version, tell you to delete all registry entries associated with the previous version? I have, and doing that with the Regedit facility isn't easy when some aren't labeled clearly.

So I use it sparingly, and the cost for this one is, IMO, very reasonable.

Jim

2372

General Software Discussion / Re: CCleaner 2.0 Beta Released - Clean the Crap off your Computer

« Last post by J-Mac on March 07, 2008, 06:16 PM »

Don’t get me wrong; I've used CCleaner for a few years with very few problems. However I have had to help people more than a few times who don’t really know much and presume that the default settings are safe. They are not safe in many instances. Someone who doesn’t know very well exactly what they want to clean can definitely get into trouble with it.

A basic, well written Help file would most likely help some users. Then again, some folks just never read them anyway!

Jim

2373

General Software Discussion / Re: CCleaner 2.0 Beta Released - Clean the Crap off your Computer

« Last post by J-Mac on March 07, 2008, 10:10 AM »

I use CCleaner only on a very limited basis. It has failed me in the past, though I usually have sufficient backups to recover. Two main issues I see in it:

First, there is no real Help file. There are some online "Tutorials" by other users, but I would hesitate to call them true tutorials, as they are extremely limited in their scope. The only real source of help is the forum, and that has a lot of less-than-experienced users there, some of whom try to help and may lead some other non-techies astray!

Second is the lack of any option for backing up data before cleaning/removing it.  IMO, "cleaning" applications should offer to back up data before removing it. (Maybe most do - I haven't tried all of them). I have been using jv16 Powertools for a few years and such backups are their default behavior.  However that is a paid application; CCleaner draws a lot of users by virtue of being free, including non-tech types who probably need such a backup option more than most!  While temp folders can usually be deleted without any trouble, deleting registry entries without backing up can be fatal!

Jim

2374

Find And Run Robot / Default Hotkey Not Working - Vista on Dell XPS Notebook

« Last post by J-Mac on March 07, 2008, 09:54 AM »

Brand new Dell XPS M-1330 notebook running Vista Ultimate. The default hotkey, Pause/Break, doesn't exist on this notebook! There is an Insert/Pause button and a Delete/Break button, but neither bring up FARR.  I tried to edit this hotkey but it is not editable.  The Alt/Space key combination works but I cannot seem to remember that combination -- I always use that after hitting the Insert/Pause key several times; I'm having trouble getting used to the Alt/Space combination. Too accustomed to the Pause/Break key - which I apparently no longer have on this computer!  I had to deselect the Ctrl/Space hotkey, as I use that quite often in another application.

Is there a way I can be permitted to edit the Pause/Break hotkey and replace it with the Insert/Pause?  (I don't want to make it the Delete/Break key, as I'm concerned that will kill the "Delete" function).

Thanks,

Jim

2375

Living Room / Re: free email without frequent login requirement - recommendations?

« Last post by J-Mac on March 07, 2008, 01:24 AM »

Gmail is definitely the best bet for them.

I have a Fastmail paid account, but their "free" account is really nothing more than a demo at this point; more of a sampler to see if you like it. Too limited to be of much use otherwise.

With Gmail you can even give them separate accounts. And if they need ongoing help and/or monitoring with their email, you can see if they will agree to let you have their password(s) and then set the Gmail account up as IMAP. That way they won't lose messages in error - they'll always be on the server, and you can access them anytime without downloading them from the server, therefore getting them before the couple can.

Jim