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Money Forecaster makes predictions about your financial future based on your current fiscal condition. Although we like the idea of this program and think it could be quite useful, we found it confusing and frustrating to use.

First impressions count, and Money Forecaster's interface is nice enough to look at and seems fairly intuitive. According to the Quick Start guide, the program is quite simple to use: just configure your accounts, add your income and expenses, and set your money goals. However, it turned out to be more complicated than it sounds. Money Forecaster allows you to set up … Read more

MB Reflexology gives users basic information about reflexology and shiatsu self-massage. Like many programs from Mystic Board, this one is heavy on advertising and delivers only mediocre content.

The program's interface is cluttered with advertising for Mystic Board and so-called home business opportunities. We always find it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff on these programs; there's a lot of text, and you're never sure at first whether you're reading an ad or a legitimate part of the program. To start, users choose whether they want to do shiatsu self-massage or reflexology. For shiatsu, … Read more

If you're a regular user of the revision comparison feature in Google Docs, you'll likely enjoy new service Compare My Docs. It comes from the same folks who created TextFlow, the Adobe AIR-based app that spot differences across multiple copies of a Word document or rich text file.

Compare My Docs does many of the same things as TextFlow, including being able to compare up to six versions of the same document to see what's been changed. The big difference though, is that it runs right in your browser and requires no sign-up whatsoever.

Just like TextFlow, … Read more

OmniOutliner is a popular, long-lived tool for building and organizing informational outlines--whether you're taking notes for a class, building out a complex project spec, or anywhere in between. OmniOutliner can help you create rich, multi-column, collapsible outlines in almost any style or format, with support for embedded notes, images, links, and more. Novices will have an easy time getting started with this flexible app's well-designed interface, but there's also plenty of room for power users to learn and exploit OmniOutliner's more heavy-duty features, including batch searching and support for AppleScript.

Given the abundance of competitive "… Read more

Reunion is a popular, long-lived, Mac-only genealogy program that can help you organize, view, and show off your family tree. Of the many genealogy options out there, Reunion tends toward the higher end, but it comes with many extras--and boasts a long, stable track record--to justify its price.

This app comes with much of the functionality you might expect, making it easy to quickly add family members (with predictive text), fill out notes and various data fields, cite source documentation, quickly perform searches, import data from other programs (essentially, from any app that uses GEDCOM files), and even run customized … Read more

Like Cover Flow for contacts, PhoneFace lets you create a custom favorites list comprised entirely of photos (and/or avatars).

In other words, it's a visual alternative to the iPhone's own Favorites list. And a terrific one at that.

To get started, you tap the Plus icon, then choose an existing contact from your address book. If there's not already an associated photo, you'll have the option to snap one with the iPhone's camera, choose one from your photo library, pick an avatar from PhoneFace's collection, or even pull down his/her Twitter profile … Read more

TextFlow, the Adobe AIR application that lets users collaboratively edit documents, is now available in the browser. Users can group together multiple versions of the same document and selectively pick which edits they want to keep--just like they would on the desktop version, but now without software.

Along with the move to the browser, the service now hosts your documents so you can access and begin editing them from any computer. The company has also lifted the file size limit, meaning you can finally upload and edit documents more than 10 pages in length--not being able to do so was … Read more

As those of you with older PCs may have noticed the hard way, some of the new features in Apple's Safari 4 beta for Windows require a graphics card with at least 64MB of on-board RAM that supports at least DirectX 9. This makes it the first browser I've heard of with an explicit graphics card requirement, but is this really a big deal?

DirectX 9 has been around since 2004, and you can pick up a card for your desktop that supports it for around 20 bucks. This isn't quite analogous to Windows requiring a massive … Read more