So here we are.
Ok, cost is 30 bucks INCL. VAT, not 30 bucks plus VAT, my mistake. It's by comp, so it's 60 bucks for 2 comps, but if your 10-year-old Adobe thing is only on one of them, you'll pay 30 bucks for that comp and zero bucks for the other one, which would be a good deal if the MS thing wasn't there for free. Bartels goes so far as to mention the being first on the market for his product (by about 3 months or so) as one of the "advantages" of his offering over the competing MS offering; it's like the whining of the 6-year-old nerd, "ok, teacher, Sam did it right, as I did, but my finger was in the air first" (by a tenth of a sec or so). Of course, it's a pity for Bartels that MS came with a free prog as his paid one, just about 3 months after him, but then, most traditional KVM offerings have lost much of their value, i.e. they're only needed anymore but in rather restricted set-ups, and I didn't see any sign that Bartels had problems to settle with his conscience re his biting into the hardware manufacturers' market with his product, so why expect third parties to mourn his loss of business by the prompt arrivel of the free MS alternative?
Years ago, in his text expansion forum, I had been advised that I was expected to buy his product first, THEN ask questions within the forum - which is outrageous in itself, but it's Bartels style. So I sent a kindly worded request by mail, with my problem, and with mentioning that I was seriously considering buying the product in its high-priced version if the problem was resolved - only to get the answer then that I first had to buy, then ask questions.
So, here, years later, some months ago, with my problem with their screen tool, I sent a kindly worded mail again, not bothering with their respective forum presumably reserved for paying users AFTER buying, and this time, I didn't get any answer to begin with (so his style didn't improve but worsened), and here we are, Bartels pretending no unanswered question within the forum - highly manipulative as ever, I hadn't even mentioned the forum.
As for promotions, there have been aborted discussions on bits in the past, between Bartels and third parties, and with heavy censorship by that site, which is understandable since the owners are there to make sales, which in fact is a heavy 50 p.c. of the promotional prices realized there, so if Bartels tells he didn't receive a request when sombody complains his request wasn't answered, Bartels' response stays there, without clarification - I'm happy it's not the same thing here and in other discussion fori, and I'm happy that for every Bartels product, there are alternatives - when contacting Bartels Media some months ago, I hadn't discovered MWB yet, but only Synergy, so I seriously considered this Bartels product which after having knowledge of MWB, is not necessary anymore.
As for text expansion, nobody needs any Bartels stuff either since there's always AHK, where you can switch from one vocabulary to another (which was also possible with Bartels' product, but cumbersome there), or even add up special vocabularies with basic ones (didn't try with Bartels stuff, might be possible, but probably isn't): programming in several languages at the same time; plain English, legal French, medical Dutch, whatever you like - I'm very happy with AHK which does everything I ever wanted, and no need for the superimposed "macro language" on Bartels' text expander since that would be another proprietary scripting language, and a very expensive one at that. For "just text expansion", there are cheap and good alternatives that have been mentioned many times in this forum (just pay attention that they allow for individual ending chars - there are also worthless alternatives that trigger the expansion anyplace); for power users, i.e. for anybody participating in this forum, AHK is NOT more complicated to script than it is to script in Bartels' macro language, and to use AHK for alternative or combined text expansion vocabularies, anybody can do this from start on, no need for either his or any of the alternative offerings.
So these tools developers make their living from potential macro users' fear of not being able to "program" in a script language as AHK, whilst in fact, any functionality except for the most basic routines need much more complicated "scripting" within these proprietary languages / construction kits to click together, than to do the same stuff within AHK, AI or a commercial offering as WinTask, so these hybrid offerings ("dont program, just click together", or here, "have a text expander which even does macros") are kind of at least partly deceptive, and most of your effort in going from such a macro tool to AHK for instance, lies in the incredible amount of work necessary to transfer, one by one, manually, thousands of single "commands" within your macros there to the respective AHK commands, since they mostly don't allow for any exporting - once you try to do real work in such a tool, you'll never get out of it, or then, it'll take you a week or more of hard labour.
The irony in Bartels' stance lies in the fact that he lost me years ago for his about 160 bucks product, by treating me as a schoolboy, and that he lost me anew, as a potential 90 bucks customer (= 3 screens are always considered "power user" for any one of the three comps, so you pay thrice, even without any Adobe product anywhere in your network), by doing the same - since I wouldn't have searched further, and by this would not have discovered the free MS alternative before buying his stuff. So, to sum it up, it's not Bartels' product that put potential users off, it's his conversation style if I dare say.
