Activity for April 16

Review - Weather Watcher Live
7.0.77 (Apr 16, 2011)

This will be my last review on BetaNews.

I retract all the positive things I said previously about WWL. I have dropped this application permanently--and I mean literally for life I will never try it again. I fought the good fight trying to post positive reviews, but I give up. I respected Mike Singer for his efforts, but his efforts have fallen short for my taste.

I wasted far too much time and energy trying to get it to work, and I give up. Speaking of time and energy, I have not enough of either to go into all my reasons, but I can mention a few:

I got tired of having to check, EVERY SINGLE TIME, if the weather info was timely. Too many times I didn't check and thus trusted info that was actually hours old. It's too inconvenient to check a date and time and compare that to the current date/time to ensure it's timely.

I got tired of opening a weather alert and being taken to a web page for a different ZIP code and/or a different city. Hey, Mr. Singer, when there's a tornado warning in my area, IT MATTERS to me that I look at alert info for the right area! Not only do I have to verify date/time, I have to verify and correct the area. So... WHY use WWL?

I got tired of trying to figure out--and report to Mike Singer--why the temperatures I was seeing for some stations were 7F or 8F different from others, and just as different from my own outside thermometer.

I got tired of error messages saying my preferred weather station was inaccessible. A few times when this happened, I determined which URL WWL was trying to access, and I found I could manually access it. What gives?

I got tired of having no way to configure the backup weather station. When the aforementioned errors would occur, WWL would invariably revert to using a lousy local station which always reported weather info I found worse than useless (e.g. temps far off from my own observations, and those of NWS).

All of these things happened again and again and again and again. It was an endless loop of aggravation. Report to Mike Singer? Done. And done again. And again.

If you can't trust the weather info, it's useless.

So, I give up. For good.

Waste of over $50.

Do NOT try figuring out (or assuming) who I am and contacting me.
Review - Mozilla Firefox for Windows
4.0 (Mar 25, 2011)

I made the mistake of updating from Fx 3.6 to Fx 4.0. I hate it.

Speed improvements? Where? I don't notice page loading having improved. I do notice that whenever I open a menu in my bookmarks, the saved favicons get loaded one-by-one, which never happened with 3.6. The icons slowly bleed into view. It's annoying. I don't see a faster startup speed. I do see plugin-container.exe devouring CPU, same as always.

The theme I used with 3.6 no longer works. I'm not a fan of the Fx 4.0 default theme, especially since it doesn't work well with my preferred Tab Mix Plus tab color setup.

I use lots of extensions. Literally 80% of them stopped working with Fx 4.0. This is so fun to deal with every time I install a major update. No, seriously, I love it.

I also "love" how I no longer have a status bar. I didn't have anything of value there, really! Those 6 extensions I had that used the status bar--BAH!--who needed them? Away with Fire.fm, NetVideoHunter, and the rest. The new "Add-on Bar"? Not the same.

Lost extensions. No improvements. Crap interface. Time to look for an alternative.
Review - foobar2000
1.1.3 (Feb 22, 2011)

As usual, roj talks sense and gets it right.

I don't know how a person can fail to understand the difference between neato interface gimmicks and usability. I don't care if I can achieve a sorta, kinda, meh, almost-there state by poring over 2,000 different "components" then another week configuring them.

But hey, whatever gets you through the night. If your ego is so fragile that you need to act as if you're some kind of elite hardcore user, and therefore shun interface and usability improvements, then have at it.

But thank goodness there are smarter people out there.
Review - MyLanViewer
4.5.7 (Feb 22, 2011)

The author of MyLanViewer spends 10 minutes per month coding, and 468 hours logging into the 100 different logins he has to skew the rating.
Review - WinRAR (32-bit)
4.00 Beta 6 (Feb 9, 2011)

6 betas? So what? I guess Roshal isn't as much a programming phenom as some of the reviewers here. Or, he doesn't want to release crapware like some of the [cough] freeware archiver authors do.