Popular personal Mac database gets a solid update with new links to Apple Mail, enhanced compatibility with with Excel, Numbers, and AppleWorks files; and adds more spreadsheet style functions

One of the ongoing quests of personal computing has been finding a convenient place to park bits of data that you can't immediately act on don't want to give up on, and then easily find and retrieve them. One avenue of function and access is the Mac OS X menubar, and the subjects of this review are both examples of that genre - one fairly richly-featured shareware and the other just-the-basics freeware

As much as we'd like to think our computers never need any kind of care or maintenance, that simply is not true. Drive Genius can help with that support, and Prosoft has done a good job of making it fairly painless to use. While some operations may take a long long time to process, others are quick. What's the value? A computer that wont let you down just as a project is due, a paper is almost done, or just when you go to show a PC friend "Hey, check out how great my Mac is..." Despite the fact that Drive Genius can provide a variety of support for your Mac, the full value of Drive Genius is disappointing due to limitations in the software's functionality and poor documentation.

A powerful suite of disk maintenance, repair, management, and optimization tools, including defragmentation and partition resizing without initialization, updated for Leopard with a pretty and impressive new animated user interface

Font management programs have been around almost as long as the Mac has been around. In the early days, fonts were part of the system, and it was difficult to do anything with them. Then Apple introduced the Font/DA Mover, letting you finally having access to the fonts in your system and the ability to easily add new fonts. Nowadays, Apple provides Font Book, which makes it easy to add fonts into your system. But neither of these are font management programs. Over the years, there have been a number of font management programs, and FontAgent Pro has continued to be a solid, dependable program to control your fonts. Despite the fact that not all of my wishes from my review of FontAgent Pro version 3 were implemented in this release, this new version does continue Insider Software's tradition of great software.

Smasher is a strange, little, valuable program that helps repair and/or replace (by removal) font caches, folders, and troublesome fonts. The simple fact of computers is that there are a number of functions in your computer that demand your fonts are in tip-top shape, your font caches are in tip-top shape, and access to all of your fonts are tip top. So what do you do if things are not so tip top? You smash things up.

Spotinside comes closer than anything else I've tried to making Spotlight be what it should be, with a convenient interface, selectable search result previews, searches within results, tag support, an uncanny ability to zero in on what you're looking for, and it's free!

So simple and slick, it's a Clipboard manager you will actually use. All it does is sit on your menu bar and saves stuff you copy to the clipboard, which you can select retrieve with a mouse click.

The weird thing about the era of modern computing is that it's giving rise to a speakeasy mentality where everybody knows what the laws are, and it's remarkably easy to break the laws, but everybody is very careful to pretend that they're obeying the laws in public. Take, for example, Roxio's Popcorn 3, which is a program for copying DVDs and converting them so they can be used on iPods, PSPs, and AppleTV. It does not, however, copy DVDs that are encrypted.

FileMaker Pro 9, the best database program for Mac users, comes with some fantastic new programming features and some nice new features for those who use FileMaker databases created by someone else. If you do not have FM Pro, this review may make you want to run out and purchase it. If you have FM Pro and write databases with it, you probably will want to run out and purchase it. If you have FM Pro and use it to work with databases created by others, well, you may or may not be motivated to purchase the new version. And, if you upgrade to Leopard, you may have to upgrade, which is a whole different issue.

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