Review: Rebound!

Rebound! with v. 2 software
Sophisticated Circuits Inc.
http://www.sophisticated.com/
$99
(software upgrade from v. 1, $19.95)
Available at the Applelinks Store

Review by Gary Coyne

Do you use a remote Macintosh server (internet and/or intranet) and on a Saturday night try to upload new material to find your server down? You have two choices, either screw your evening as you drive over to where the server is and reboot the machine, or screw people wanting to view material on your website while you wait until Monday morning to reboot your machine. Either way, someone gets screwed.

Rebound! is a de-screwing device.

[Rebound is for older, ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) Macs. If you have a newer USB Mac, you may want to check out Kick-Off! ($179.95) which offers the same capabilities.]

The Rebound! software requires System 7 or later, and runs in native mode on both 68040- and PowerPC -based Macs. It has various on-line help and supports, Apple Events and AppleScript.

The hardware is simple: a bright yellow ball about the size of a medium jawbreaker attached to a short ADB cable, which goes into the ADB outlet on the back of the Mac server, and the keyboard plugs into the yellow ball. Install the Rebound! software, reboot, and unless you want to customize the settings, you're done.

You can already set your Mac to restart if there is a power failure, and placing aliases of any programs required to run into the "Startup Items" folder can easily get you going from a rolling blackout. But, when a program freezes or the computer hangs, someone (or some "thing") needs to restart the program and/or the computer.

Rebound! monitors the computers activity. The software is constantly creating and resetting an internal system clock. If that internal system clock isn't reset, the Rebound! hardware initiates a keyboard or hard restart depending on what's necessary to restart the system.

Unfortunately, either a crash of some kind OR a very heavy application processing time period can be perceived as the same thing to Rebound!, so it is wise to not set its response time too short. Notice (in the "System Crashes" dialog box) you can also set the time allowed for the system to restart so that if the computer should freeze during a restart it will get restarted again.

Rebound! also monitors any application freeze and can either (see the "Application Crashes" dialog box) restart a program or elect to restart a computer.

Because some programs have memory leaks that can cause a computer to become unstable after a period of time, you can also set Rebound! to self-restart on a regular basis. Thus, you can set Rebound! to restart the computer on a weekly basis at a low-use time, like Monday mornings at 1 am.

Rebound! ships with iLog which maintains a running log of all activities of Rebound! and the starting and restarting of the computer, and applications.

All this is well and good, but if you want to "test" this product to make sure it's going to work as promised, you have the challenge of waiting for the computer to freeze. After all, "a watched computer never freezes."

Fortunately, Sophisticated Circuits provides the program "Crash Test" with Rebound! that creates the four different types of crashes: The System Freeze (an infinite loop and nothing works); the System Error (a non-defined trap); the Application Hang (also an infinite loop, but the mouse will still work); and the Application Timer Expire (a semi-crashed program). In my testing, Rebound responded correctly in all circumstances.

About the only thing that Rebound! is missing is that it should ship with "Okey Dokey Pro" by Dan Walkowski. It's a freeware Control Panel that automatically "clicks" the default button in any modal dialog box after a predetermined time limit. This can be necessary if a program you need in your startup process requires an OK button to be clicked to finish the startup process. While this can be done with an AppleScript, Okey Dokey Pro will do it without the programing. (Okey Dokey Pro is available on most shareware web sites.)

In short you don't need Rebound! for the home computer, even if you leave your computer on continuously. Most people leave their computer on so as to not create the "electron hit" of a normal startup. If your computer should freeze when you are sleeping, so what? Unless you are running the SETI program, no one is depending on your computer during the middle of the night. However, if you are running a computer as a server (internet or intranet) and other people are depending on that computer being on every single moment of every day, you need Rebound! (or Kick-Off!). Think about this the next time you are waken in the middle of the night to drive across town and hit the "restart" button before driving back across town to go back to bed.

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October 16, 2008