Category Archives: Stupid Software
iDevice Manager (was iPhone Explorer) Installs MySearch/Incredibar Crapware
I’m a little P-O’ed. The worst thing about shareware used to be the risk of getting nagware. It would nag you to death until you coughed up whatever their fee was.
Nowadays, though, the biggest danger is the slipping in of crapware, in particular toolbars that do little more than slow your computer down, track your browsing and serve you up ads. It’s an annoying practice, even if the little addition is a legitimate program. However, to install real unwanted crapware and not even prompt you if you want to install it or not is inexcusable.
It is puzzling in particular when donationware does this. Now, I have donated to some very useful program sources in the past, even when I thought the promoting of giving donations was a little pushy (although it does make me more likely to really drag my feet first, because I get suspicious when it’s too pushy). I mean, if you really need the money that bad, why not make it shareware and have people pay for what the program really does?
Well, unfortunately, it seems that even potentially useful utilities like iDevice Manager from Marx Softwareentwicklung, www.software4u.de, fall victim to stupid practices that just piss people off. I thought it was a fluke the time before last, but it happened again during an update. My default search was changed to the Incredibar BS and installed the MySearch malware without asking me. If you uninstall it from the Programs control panel, it will only uninstall the IE toolbar. Your home page and default searches for all of your browsers, though, are still set to the Incredibar nonsense. You have to clean it out of all of your browsers and reset their home pages (although, System Restore might do that for you as well if it is recent).
Seriously, stuff like this should be prosecutable in a court of law. I’m putting the word out to anyone who will listen to avoid iDevice Manager like the plague.
Oh, and as to a donation? You’ve got to be doing drugs! Now that I’ve written my review, I’m removing it ASAP.
It’s Broke, but the Arrogant and Stupid Don’t Understand That (or Denial Is Not a River in Egypt)
the technique, method, or system of operating or controlling a process by highly automatic means, as by electronic devices, reducing human intervention to a minimum.
~ automation. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved February 21, 2012, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/automation
[Bolding mine]
Automation can occur a couple of different ways, but it almost always boils down to the use of computers, either as a controlling device for robotics or as means of running a program and crunching data.
However, automation is a means to an end, not an end of itself. After all, if there is no benefit, then there is little point in pursuing what hiring more human beings can do. It may be a means to reduce cost by replacing simple human action by a more efficient automated process. Perhaps it is a way to streamline getting a customer to the right expert to talk to, if not even to resolve the simpler issues. Whatever the reason, efficiency is surely part of the strategy, because if it is not, then the automation has failed. If the process requires constant intervention to keep it working, then it by definition is not efficient.
Let me repeat that: If it requires constant human intervention by someone other than an enduser, then it by definition is not efficient and is a failure. You would be better off with inefficient but adaptable human beings doing the process.
Enough Crap, Adobe!
I do not run McAfee. I do not want them on my computer. If you want to run it, fine. I’m not going to tell you not to run it. However, this is my computer, and I have the right to run what I want and not run what I don’t want.
If you feel the same way, you’re probably tired of companies wanting to put crap on your machine every time you download anything. It used to just be the free programs that did this, but even commercial software does this these days. It has gotten ridiculous.
I went to someone’s house once and I could barely see their home page when I opened IE. They had at least five toolbars on their browser! No wonder they thought web surfing was slow!
Yesterday, Adobe Reader wanted to update. I cannot remember a week going by since the beginning of the year when something Adobe didn’t want to update. Annoyed, I clicked on the update button and was taken to a web page. Of course, they want to force their download manager on you, which does nothing useful and eats up resources.
OK, I figured, I’ll just uninstall it afterwards. Well, to my horror, it started downloading McAfee Security Scan Plus. What?! I clicked on Cancel, but it was too late. I had to uninstall not just the stupid download manager but the crapware as well. Bogus!
No more automatic Adobe updates! You know, there are alternatives, and I’m going to start investigating them.
Meanwhile, I suggest everyone uninstall the Adobe Download Manager (checkout the Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel) and do their updates via Ninite. It is free for personal use, it suppresses all the bazillion dialog boxes and does a pretty good job of stripping crapware as well.
If you are an IT professional who does installs all the time, I highly recommend getting the Pro version. It saves you time from having to search for the latest version and then go through all the gyrations of clicking through meaningless boxes.
On a side note, they’ve updated their website today, and it is easier on the eyes. Good job, guys!
One app that might interest you on Ninite is Sumatra PDF. I haven’t used it, but people who do seem to like it. It is billed as a light-weight app, with a focus on being simple to use rather than being bloated with lots of features you won’t use.
Maybe if people start utilizing the alternatives, some of these app makers will start getting the idea.
The Best Delete Tool For Windows
Once again, I find myself disappointed. All I wanted to do was delete a directory that shouldn’t have been there. FreeFileSync somehow messed things up and kept creating FFS* directories. The problem is that they were in the My Documents directory! So, when I would go to sync My Documents … well, you get the picture.
So, just delete the directory, right? Well, it kept telling me it couldn’t. I tried rebooting. I tried safe mode. I tried to take ownership. None of that mattered.
OK, surely there is a reliable utility to do this with, right? Well, from past experience, I wasn’t expecting that much honestly, but there should be something out there for this. In the past, I have used Cygwin’s rm utility to do this. For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, it often succeeds where others have failed. On my laptop, though, I’ve long ago replaced Cygwin with the real thing (Ubuntu, in this case), so on my laptop it is fairly easy to boot into Linux and remove it. However, this particular machine has never had either.
So, I tried Delete32, UnLockIT and something else called Unlock. Guess what? None of them worked! Not a one!
OK, so I downloaded the entire default Cygwin package, installed it, booted into safe mode (just in case), and had the directory deleted in about 1/3rd of the time I had spent looking for a small Windows utility that would do the same thing.
Cygwin: Winner by a mile!
Good Way to Get Rid of Google Calendar Dupes?
Short answer: I don’t know. At least not automatically.
This is pretty annoying. I can remove dupes in Outlook, but they will fail to be removed from Google Calendar after a sync. You’d really think Google would have a built-in function for this, but they do not.
So, I tried out a couple of programs on the web. First, I tried GG Duplicates Cleaner. It basically ran for about ten minutes and then died. Afterwards, it would run for 30 seconds or so and complain it couldn’t connect (even though it went through all the motions).
Then, I tried GCal Toolkit. It is trialware. To me, trialware is a good way to shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t do it right. Needless to say, they definitely do it wrong. It found maybe 3 dupes. I suspect it is because you have to get the paid version to go back to repeating appointments set in the past. There’s only one problem with that. I’m not going to purchase it until you prove to me that it works.
So, any non-stupid software out there to remove Google Calendar duplicates?
Another Reason to Hate Windows Vista: BSOD While Installing
Usually, a blue screen of death (BSOD) means a hardware issue. Recently, someone came to me with a laptop that had frequent BSODs. He tried reinstalling, just generally made a mess of things (probably not his fault, as you will soon learn) and finally came to me for help.
I put in the recovery DVD he had, and it looked like it was going to boot up, and bam! BSOD.
So, I took the machine downstairs to run diagnostics on it. I booted up Ultimate Boot CD and ran memory and CPU diagnostics. Nothing. I booted up Ubuntu from the CD. Interestingly, it worked fine, and I checked the SMART data for the hard drive, and it showed no problems.
Scratching my head, I put his recovery DVD back in, booted up and bam! BSOD. OK, maybe it’s his disk, right? I found my Vista DVD, put it in, booted it up, and bam! BSOD. OK, does it just not like DVDs? I looked at all the disks. So far, only the Vista DVDs had this issue. I began to wonder if I was losing my sanity, and so in desperation booted up off a Windows 7 DVD. Success!
However, now I was really confused. I Googled it, and I found: BSoDs. It relates to how Vista creates a logfile on a drive, but when it fills up it causes a BSOD. Stupidly enough, you cannot even start the machine to fix it until the file is gone.
I then tried the Vista disk again, and surprisingly it worked without any manual intervention. It appears that the Windows 7 DVD must have done something to fix it.
This is actually the second time I’ve run into this, but I didn’t know how it was fixed the first time. I also didn’t troubleshoot as much, so I may have stuck in the Windows 7 disk earlier in the process for some reason.
At any rate, can we get rid of Vista yet?
Stupid Video Editor Software
I just don’t get it. Why is some of this stuff even out there? I was hoping to report a working video editing program today, but frankly I’ve really just wasted my time downloading junk!
All I want to do is split the audio of two portions of a video. Then, remove the audio from the first portion and move the second audio onto the first. Finally, remove the second video.
These cannot do it (or if they can, it’s so well-hidden as to be meaningless):
- Any Video Editor
- VirtualDub
- AVS Video Editor
This one wouldn’t do anything worthwhile at all. Downloading was really a complete waste of time:
- Viscom Video Converter Pro
These are buggy:
- Aimer Video Studio Express
- CyberLink Power Director
The last two are especially disappointing because they held such high promise.
1. Aimer really got my hopes up because I could finally separate the video and audio tracks. However, they need to fix their app, period. When you want to split the file, sometimes it will and sometimes it won’t.
Worse, try removing a section of the video you are editing. It stupidly leaves the space in the file. OK, so just move it, right? Well, somehow the “removed” section now reappears when you slide it to the left? What junk!
So, with my hopes dashed (especially after dealing with various “editors” that don’t even have this feature), I uninstalled it.
2. CyberLink was an over 800MB (really!) download. Yes, you can actually separate video and audio! Yes, you can actually move it! Yes, you can actually remove the section(s) you don’t want!
Don’t get your hopes up too high, though. It too got to the point where it would not split files any longer. So, I reverted back to dealing with the originals and creating a new one, and that seemed to be a good work around.
When you “produce” the output, or “product”, file, do not choose .MOV! Somehow, you get 2 files in the output directory? Which is the real one? Don’t ask me! Even worse, it doesn’t matter which one you pick because Windows Live Movie Maker cannot read either one. I tried it in VLAN (the player that can play anything video), and although it could play the clip, it’s color is completely distorted. In fact, it seems the only player than can play it is QuickTime! What good is that?
OK, after taking a deep breath (not sure why I didn’t just delete it – maybe it was the thought of waiting all that time since it took about 30 minutes to install), I tried a .WMV. That actually worked much better. Movie Maker and VLAN were able to play it just fine.
If you don’t need to make .MOV files, though, perhaps it will work fine for you. However, there may be other bugs. In fact some others:
- When you go to activate it, it asks for your key. It tells you you need to get the key from the email you received. It tells you you need to download the activation pack. There’s no link on the box to click on, so how are you supposed to buy it?
- I don’t like confusing packages. Their whole “media suite” thing is confusing. I downloaded PowerDirector, so what’s all this other stuff? Do I need it? Do I want it? What’s up with all the pricing models, anyhow?
So, it is with some reservation, with lots of caveats, after asking lots of questions, after finding out exactly what someone wants to do, I might, might, recommend it for someone to use.
Really, is this the state of affairs? Still? I remember some time ago just wanting software that would create a video CD, and how much “fun” that was (and, still is apparently, as the last one I tried to create still could not “play in your region”). That was a couple of years ago, and not much has improved!
Most people will get along with Windows Live Movie Maker, I’m sure. And, it does do some very basic things – for free! So, I’m not going to pay someone for the same functionality. If you want me to part with my money, how about giving me software that do something and do it well?
Review of PrintMaster: Broderbund Sells Stupid Greeting Card Software
Something told me to not trust Broderbund. It isn’t the first time I’ve run into issues with them. They used to be a decent company – about a decade and a half ago.
Broderbund did used to sell CreataCard, though. It was really American Greetings, but it worked fairly well. It was not elegant, though. Some things on it were clunky. However, it did work, and that’s what counts. I had a lot of difficulty getting it to work on Vista once, so I figured it would be a bear on Windows 7. Turns out I was correct on that count.
The thing that kills me is that they stopped making it. While not top of the line software by any means, it was still just about the best thing out there unless you wanted to go all out and get PrintShop.
Well, I thought I’d give PrintMaster a try. It was the right price, and my wife likes to have templates to use for greeting cards. Big mistake.
Lesson #1: Never buy greeting card software until you try it out first. There’s a lot of junk out there. That includes PrintMaster.
The process for taking your money is pretty straight-forward. It downloads and installs just fine as well.
Using the application, you are faced with a rather odd window. I guess it is all the rage these days, as I saw a couple with all the silly large buttons on the left.
I managed to create a greeting card using their wizard. The first thing I noticed was that there wasn’t much variety. I’m still not sure what I was paying money for, as I could’ve come up with that many choices just surfing the web.
However, then I noticed that there was only one page. “Interesting,” I thought. I added pages, and I could preview it just fine in greeting card preview mode. So, then I decided to print. There was no way to tell it to print correctly on a half-fold (or quarter-fold, for that matter) sheet.
I figured I must’ve done something wrong. It turns out that buying the software was what I did wrong.
I started over, and that’s when it hit me: The page sizes are all whacked out. It turns out I had selected a 4” x 6” “greeting card”. Of course, that is stupid, as there is no such thing. There are 4” x 6” notecards, and there are 4” x 6” photos, but greeting cards are 8-1/2” x 11” and are either half-fold or quarter-fold. Literally half of the limited choices are not even greeting cards.
Oh, and the other sizes were 5” x 8”? What kind of size is that? And, somehow you are supposed to fold them into 4” x 6”? Are these people geniuses who can defy the laws of physics?
No, the software is stupid, and I want a refund.
Also, Broderbund makes PrintShop as well. Good luck with that also. The Amazon reviews on it are brutal.
Well, I guess there’s always the virtual XP function I can try on Windows 7 …
Back To 1992: Web Editor Tools Are Still Stupid
Yesterday, I was watching TV and there were several commercials pushing the movie Hot Tub Time Machine. It appears to be yet another movie based upon the corny concept of going back into time and seeing if you can exist there and not screw up your future.
Déjà vu. I’ve been here before. Maybe I don’t remember stepping into the hot tub. Sometime in the past, I had two programs that did the same thing, but they could not read each others’ files. These were not unusual programs, either. Many people used them. Yet, even though they had the same goals, I had to make sure I used the correct one if I wanted to share them with anyone else.
The difference is that in 1992, it was usually the battle between WordPerfect and Microsoft Word. There were dozens of other program titles as well (I sort of liked AmiPro myself), but those were the big ones. None of them could read each others’ files, either, even though they were all word processing applications. If you wanted to convert one format to the other, be prepared to pay and be prepared for it to look really different.
Then, there were the spreadsheet wars soon afterwards. Actually, that was more of a skirmish than anything else. Lotus sought to win their case in the courtrooms rather than on the Windows platform, which ultimately meant Excel’s success.
But, that’s all behind us, right? I mean, this is the era of open standards, right?
And, what is more open standard than HTML?
As I complained about in “Website Designer Software”, the CoffeCup Visual Site Designer application was a shock because it could not import files from an existing website. The tool assumes you want to create one from scratch. It saves the project in a proprietary format rather than HTML files.
Silly me! I thought that this just had to be an anomaly, right? I mean, this is 2010, right? HTML/XML is an open standard, right? Oh, John D, you are so naïve!
So, I downloaded SiteSpinner Website Design Suite. I installed it, and I tried to import my existing website – somewhere, anywhere. Guess what? I could not find such a function!
OK, someone help me out here! Please tell me that I’m overlooking something. There just plain is something missing in the help files, right? Otherwise, I might just drown in this hot tub!
I think I would recommend Microsoft Word as an HTML editor before a product that forces you to recreate an entire website for no reason.
