Okay, here are my experiences with the FoneLink app so far:
Basically, the whole application just seems ridiculously rushed, and it kind of feels like no real thought went into anything in it. The whole thing is just buggy and confusing all around. Standard UI practices are eschewed in favour of ridiculous and stupid trickery (e.g. superfluous and annoying effects and such) and at times the UI is just so confusing that it feels impossible to even begin to think of how to use it. The layout of the UI is usually fine, but the graphics and the UI copy (i.e. textual labels) are not. The overall feeling I got was that I couldn't trust the application to do anything reliably, and that it was a bit hostile towards the user. I just wouldn't recommend this to *anyone* in its current form (version 2.1.2). Below are a few specific issues I wrote down:
- When launched, the app adds its own item to the menu bar. This item will stay there even after the app itself has terminated, and there seems to be no way to remove it. Oh, and it also seems to add it to the current user's startup items list. BAD, BAD APP!
- The custom window background graphics in the "Time Tunnel" section are ridiculously nonstandard and confusing, and not to mention .. uh, well, awful. Just awful. I just can't get past it to even try one single feature in this section of the app because of the horrendously confusing (and ugly) look of the UI.
- Clicking the "Home Center" toolbar button in the "Time Tunnel" doesn't take you to the "Home Center" view, but instead the "Connection Center" gets shown, the custom "Time Tunnel" window graphics are not cleared, and some toolbar buttons in the "Time Tunnel" are not removed from the UI.
- Lots of SMS messages were marked as "not read" even though I have, in fact, read all of them on my phone. Did not find any way to "mark all as read" or "mark selected as read".
- Updating the SMS messages from the phone got stuck after updating to 2.1.2. It just says "opening connection...". Pressing the "x" button for the "Updating (SMS)" operation in the "Action Master" section simply hides it (the button, that is). Restarting the application and trying again worked, though.
- Ordering the SMS messages in the list by date doesn't work -- the ordering is messed up (i.e. a bit random) no matter what I do. The same problem appears in the list of Events & Tasks.
- I keep getting Growl-like notifications with the title "FoneLink SMS inbox" between regular intervals (a couple of minutes) about one specific (and random, I might add) SMS message that's in my inbox (yes, it's the same one every time, and it's not even the latest one).
Okay, here are my
Okay, here are my experiences with the FoneLink app so far:
Basically, the whole application just seems ridiculously rushed, and it kind of feels like no real thought went into anything in it. The whole thing is just buggy and confusing all around. Standard UI practices are eschewed in favour of ridiculous and stupid trickery (e.g. superfluous and annoying effects and such) and at times the UI is just so confusing that it feels impossible to even begin to think of how to use it. The layout of the UI is usually fine, but the graphics and the UI copy (i.e. textual labels) are not. The overall feeling I got was that I couldn't trust the application to do anything reliably, and that it was a bit hostile towards the user. I just wouldn't recommend this to *anyone* in its current form (version 2.1.2). Below are a few specific issues I wrote down:
- When launched, the app adds its own item to the menu bar. This item will stay there even after the app itself has terminated, and there seems to be no way to remove it. Oh, and it also seems to add it to the current user's startup items list. BAD, BAD APP!
- The custom window background graphics in the "Time Tunnel" section are ridiculously nonstandard and confusing, and not to mention .. uh, well, awful. Just awful. I just can't get past it to even try one single feature in this section of the app because of the horrendously confusing (and ugly) look of the UI.
- Clicking the "Home Center" toolbar button in the "Time Tunnel" doesn't take you to the "Home Center" view, but instead the "Connection Center" gets shown, the custom "Time Tunnel" window graphics are not cleared, and some toolbar buttons in the "Time Tunnel" are not removed from the UI.
- Lots of SMS messages were marked as "not read" even though I have, in fact, read all of them on my phone. Did not find any way to "mark all as read" or "mark selected as read".
- Updating the SMS messages from the phone got stuck after updating to 2.1.2. It just says "opening connection...". Pressing the "x" button for the "Updating (SMS)" operation in the "Action Master" section simply hides it (the button, that is). Restarting the application and trying again worked, though.
- Ordering the SMS messages in the list by date doesn't work -- the ordering is messed up (i.e. a bit random) no matter what I do. The same problem appears in the list of Events & Tasks.
- I keep getting Growl-like notifications with the title "FoneLink SMS inbox" between regular intervals (a couple of minutes) about one specific (and random, I might add) SMS message that's in my inbox (yes, it's the same one every time, and it's not even the latest one).