balkaster

Software Reviews by balkaster

The reviews and opinions below are posted by SnapFiles visitors. They do not necessarily reflect our opinion, and they are solely based upon the experience of individual users.

FolderViewer

Confusing, full of poor design choices

Ambitious, but too many design failures. Tooltips required to learn your way around, but instead of having fixed colours, they adopt colours from the current Windows scheme, freq. resulting in invisible text. The various panes are not well laid out, and use two completely different idioms to suggest controls to show, hide, or expand the various panes. One such is a bar w/ mouseover effects, but the arrows on the bar, meant to suggest the direction of the resultant action, are not consistently or correctly used. The drive bar is useless unless the *correct* pane is *already shown*. Some panes can be instantly maximized with a menu command (but not one of the two conflicting barstyles), while others can't be hidden at all. It all feels so random. It is heavily tied to Internet Explorer (w/ perm. toolbar links to services I never use), all other browser users are OOL. Impressive functionality, but awkward to use due to poor design, and not customizable. Price: Free

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ExplorerXP

Nicer than some, but limited

This is nicer and more feature-rich than some other freeware file managers, but it's lacking in more modern features and not terribly powerful. It's slow to move files and to change the sorting order of files, and the powerful Groups feature can't be sorted, defaulting to the order in which the Groups were created. It only supports Windows Explorer's Details file view (lacking List, Large and Small Icons, etc.). Upside: the tabs can also be tiled, and customizable keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on newer versions of Windows, hasn't been developed since 2005, and the user forums have been locked since 2007. Dead project. I would recommend over Pablo Explorer on features, but Explorer XP has no FTP feature and Pablo is still in development. If you don't mind a legacy app that will eventually have to be abandoned, this is a nice lightweight Explorer replacement. Price: Free

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ClipMagic

Very unreliable product

I have tried ClipMagic several times over the years on several different computers (all Windows PCs), and I have never understood why it gets such high ratings. I have always found it to be a very unreliable product, and I always end up uninstalling it within a couple of days. It does not reliably capture anything from the clipboard. It begins corrupting image clips almost immediately, either by inexplicably reducing the file size to nothing or by selecting one clip seemingly at random and making ALL other image clips duplicates of it. Text clips mysteriously disappear. Trash is not reliably disposed of. The screen capture utility does not seem to work at all. And it's always been like this. I'm astonished these guys are still in business. Don't waste your time with ClipMagic. Price: Free Trial ($14.99)

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ClocX

Keep looking

Okay, so the bitmap backgrounds are pretty, the anti-aliased hands move well and don't gulp resources, the config dialog is thoughtfully well laid out and doesn't suffer from the egregious spelling errors, invented terminology and misplaced buttons that are so common in freeware these days. But the "transparency" doesn't work in all versions of Windows, and unless you have XP you're probably getting a red grid instead of a transparent background on non-rectangular bitmaps or a bloody red splotch where a drop shadow is supposed to be. There are so many freeware clocks out there that do everything else well AND get the transparency right. Try Beatnik, Rainmeter, The Clock, QuickClock or any of the others out there; they're all free, all do the basics and some of them do much more. And they all got the transparency right. Price: Free

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PopTray

Indispensible

Been using this for years, and I don't know how I got along without it. Provides an extra layer of security against known and suspected spammers and potential viruses/trojans/worms by allowing you to see messages before you download them (it can't see attachments or parse scripts or markup language, so you can view message content without fear of launching malware). Well-designed, well-thought out, fast and reliable. It does tend to be a bit of a resource hog if you leave it always open to check many accounts (as in "more than three"), but that's a minor complaint. Stands in in a pinch when I don't want to load my full-fledged mail client. I tried three or four mail checkers before this, and this is the best. Everyone should give this a try. Price: Free

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SmartBar XP

Dangerous

Load Smartbar XP and see all the cool functionality it has! Watch your GDI resources shrink from 91 to zero in twenty seconds! Thrill as your system freezes forcing you to turn the machine off because ctrl+alt+delete doesn't even respond! Smartbar crashed eight times in the hour after I had it installed. It looks nice but the name says it all: it's designed for XP, and if you're using an earlier version of Windows you're out of luck. Thanks to the authors for thinking of the rest of us (none of the other Longhorn/Vista style sidebars will even load in non-XP Windows), but this doesn't work. If you really need this kind of functionality (it's cool looking, but none of it is necessary), wait for Vista and upgrade. Price: Free

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MediaMenu

Can't recommend

MediaMenu produces a nice LOOKING configurable menu that simply doesn't work as described. Documentation is poor, and implies that files linked to the menu will launch in the system default viewer for the file type, but apparently this is not true. An ancient and obsolete version of Windows Media Player is included, and apparently that is the only way that media files linked to the menu can be run, although there is nothing in the documentation to indicate this and sending files to this player requires different syntax. Upon burning the result to a CD with an autorun.inf file, the program failed to autorun and none of the links worked except the additional and exit links. A second attempt produced the same result. I now have two CDs with a bunch of useless padding thanks to MediaMenu. Price: Free

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evolvEd Text Editor

Interesting but needs futher development

I agree with the previous reviewer's comments. EvolvEd is nice looking and has great keyboard support for entering HTML tags. The feature to add your own menu items is also very nice. It's great looking as well. Unfortunately, it has a few major bugs that haven't been addressed in the last three updates. Selecting "New Document" from the File menu opens a new instance instead of replacing the current window. The new instance has no toolbar or line numbering even though these are on by default in the Preferences dialog. Opening the Preferences dialog to turn these back on in the new instance causes the original instance to fail to respond to further activity. Attempting to open any document in EvolvEd via the "Send To" context menu causes the editor to crash if already open and fail to launch (with error messages) if not already open. After such a crash, EvolveEd cannot be relaunched, it must be uninstalled and reinstalled. Price: Free

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Software Reviews by balkaster

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