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This review was written by a pudding-like mass of readers. Tonight we found out why they are called "readers" and not "writers."
We have found Help Viewer to be gruntingly slow and more difficult to get along with than Shelob the Great. Its interface, admittedly, was slightly more attractive, but only by a small margin. When using it we often hear random and inexplicable cries of pain (or perhaps joy?) that seem to be coming from somewhere in the heart of South America. I've also noted a faint cheese-like odor emitted when using the application, although that might just be my feet.
It has been claimed that it loads slightly faster than MacOSRumors updates, although it is believed this is widely exaggerated. Help Viewer is obviously slower. In fact, on average three new episodes of AtAT will be posted while waiting for Help Viewer to load. John Moltz has even been known to assemble a coherent thought during the interminable launching time.
Help Viewer features many new cutting-edge technologies, including the all-new SidebarAnnoyance, whereby the sidebar insists on opening in an excruciatingly slow fashion three seconds after you've started reading your help file. Other featured techologies are UnreadableFontSize, borrowed from the Camino web browser, and the aforementioned UltraSlowLoad technology.
Help Viewer claims to be "Retrieving" during the abominable Load of Boredom. We do not believe this story, as we have noticed it reading our "multimedia" files and uploading them to 'ftp.monkeyconspiracy.org' and ftp.PerversionTrackerGivesMe-TheMenstrualCrampsSoBad.com, which makes us believe that netregistrar has been payed off, as we were informed that it would be only sold in the event the world had been taken over by anteaters.
Perhaps chief among our objections is that this ambitiously-named application does not seem to provide any actual way to view help, Apple apparently believes it is helping us by sending our multimedia files elsewhere, and by emitting random noises and smells, but not once did we view anything, and instead are left wishing that we had instead viewed the birth of an African Newt, or possibly a jazzersize session featuring Richard Simmons.
Apparently we are supposed to forget this fact after viewing the boring animation, asking questions that must have come from the deep pits of various "humor" sweatshops operated by John Moltz. Note that we were not impressed; in fact, we were so insulted by this distraction that we asked Apple to provide large amounts of figs to make up for the nutrients we were forced to excrete from our body. They responded by telling us that Apple ignited the personal computing revolution in some decade or other.
Having passed by the distractions of the suggestive icon and the animation, we quickly churned our bloody way through the menus, attempting to find something to satisfy our need for redemption from the sand flies attacking our sweaty gonads. We found, instead, an attempt to blow PVT out of this world by providing never ending loops, as can be seen when going to Help Center Help. We were so confused by this phenomenon, that we were forced to set fire to a wonderfully stress-relieving Furby.
The "Ask a Question" field did not function nearly as well as most users expected. It failed to properly answer many simple questions such as "Is there a God?" and "What's the meaning of life?" and "Why do firemen wear red suspenders?", usually responding with some form of inane technobabble, although it did quite well with "Do I need a new Mac?" The only conclusion that we can possibly come to is that Help Viewer's answers are about as accurate as Spymac rumors about Mac PDAs.
Help Viewer seems to load at inopportune moments, interrupting many of our "happy times" with WebGrazer and making us wonder if Help Viewer is actually Apple's hidden motive for destroying everything that is good and decent in this world of tears. We have yet to find evidence of simian involvement, but no doubt it will surface anon.
Searching within a particular app sends back dozens of unrelated responses from a multitude of applications, even some you did not know existed. Which is disturbing when encountering the hidden blog of Dan Knight. It's painful to review the disgusting display of nonsense it returns. In fact, it's more painful than being tortured mercilessly by a giant featherduster-wielding mutant space crab.
Apple, for making an application that required us to stop using WebGrazer and burn our favorite Furby all without even stepping foot into a Shoney's Restaurant, we give you a 9.9, which may be altered later, due to the fact that we are still coming off the drugs and Barbie doll hypnosis.
This is your chance! Prove your worth as a reviewer, with the First Ever Tag Team Review! This Friday (tomorrow), join with the throngs of wannabe-reviewers for a collaborative review session.
All you need is a copy of Hydra, and the ability to banter wittily about various humorous things. Tomorrow at 8:00 PM CDT, fire up Hydra and use its Join via Internet feature to connect to ladd.dyndns.org.
The subject of ridicule will be Apple's Help Viewer.
If you aren't familiar with Hydra, it's a realtime collaborative text editor. Which means you can have several people editing a text document, AT THE SAME TIME. It's a revolution in your head!
Note that we haven't actually tried Hydra with more than 3 people, so it might just bomb and be a horrible disaster.
We are pleased to announce that Miro Jurisic has won the Badger Challenge, by being the first contestant to send in a solution. Miro apparently has nothing better to do than surf PvT all day, since he sent us the answer less than 1 hour after the challenge was posted.
Here is Miro's solution:
"pvt -> l337.com -> top link to cafepress -> "shipping" -> "go shopping" tab -> "software" category -> search for "goodgirl" -> go to goodgirlco in search results -> "!!! It's ary baby! Art!!!" -> Search -> type "descriptive scientific paper regarding bagers" in the yahoo search and submit
For me , hit #10 is such a paper, YMMV."
Other contestants may have come up with shorter solutions, but they did not come up with any cunning translocations of hedgehogs, and therefore they LOSE, and do not get the amazing LUCKY PRIZE.
In other news, PT Bruiser has been updated by the author to version 3.1415. This new release includes several of our suggestions, including window transparency changes, metal appearance, and the occasional grunt. Regrettably, the grunting is not continuous, but I suppose we all have our limitations.
Given that PT Bruiser has come out on the losing end of the Badger Challenge, but has also implemented some exciting new bits of worthlessosity, we will leave their score at our original 9.2.
Falling into the category of "shameful attempt to be reviewed," PT Bruiser claims to be "the premier PerversionTracker-accelerated web browser for OS X." Offering such technological marvels as "CSSMangle3000™" and "RandomRearrangement XL®," PT Bruiser is clearly the technology leader amongst all the PerversionTracker-accelerated browsers we examined.
But does this browser really have the shameful inattention to detail that makes software really bite the testicles? In this case, I think we can answer with a resounding "maybe." We were initially disappointed to note the lack of a metalized appearance, which would have gone some distance in solidifying this application's position as pure crap. It does however achieve some compensatory effect through its use of a delightful bruised apple icon, and the NeXT-retro home icon, which is shared by the Finder.
While the HTML rendering is just about as hideous as you would imagine, essentially stacking all the div tags on top of each other, the page remains surprisingly readable. This application is clearly not as sophisticated as Internet Explorer 6, which fully implements the emerging W3C standard, Side Bar Disappear (SBD). Instead, PT Bruiser opts for SBD's lesser predecessor, Side Bar At Bottom (SBAB). A very disappointing misstep by Mr. Coffey.
Despite this black eye, PTB still succeeds brilliantly by accelerating the URL-typing process. If you mistakenly type in "PertersionWacker.com", you can rest assured that you will be safely redirected to PvT. In fact, if you type any URL other than ours, you will also be taken back to PerversionTracker. This leaves the desperate web surfer with only the links present on our web pages as an escape. At this time, we'd like to extend a LUCKY PRIZE to anyone who figures out how to work their way from our web site to any descriptive scientific paper regarding badgers, while staying entirely within the PT Bruiser environment. The author claims that there is an unlocking process, allowing one to visit arbitrary URLs, but we have not located it as of yet.
The read me claims that PTB is incapable of submitting forms, as a security measure. Unfortunately, this has been revealed as nothing more than a blatant lie, as any trivial test of PvT's search function will reveal. This should make the badger challenge significantly easier for any would-be contestants.
As potential future improvements, we would like to suggest continuously varying transparency of the main window, as well as a SimPiglet-inspired calvacade of grunting sound effects whenever the mouse is moved. These features, along with the previously mentioned textured appearance, would go far in making PTB far more useless.
Mike Coffey, you sly devil, we can't resist handing you an 9.2, for introducing yet another worthless browser into the world. However, your score will be retroactively lowered to an even 8 should anyone succeed in winning the badger challenge, thus proving a possible use for an otherwise god-awful crumb-heap.
Yet another example of why color-blind metallurgists should never design applications, WAFInspec delights with its misused "textured" interface, questionable concept, and Neanderthalic implementation. WAFInspec purports to "browse, preview and extract contents of Web Archive Format type files, like the cache files of Microsoft Internet Explorer." Oh joy! I can finally browse my IE cache, just as I've always dreamed! Will I be a REAL boy now, Gepetto?
Even if you are masochistic enough to hunker down with Internet Explorer in your dank lair for long enough to build up a cache of Horny Housewife porn, you will be sorely disappointed when you try to browse the fruits of your painful grunting labors. If your experience is anything like ours, as soon as you try to open a cache file you'll be thwarted by that floating specter of doom: the Hypnotic Monkey Beachball. Although WAFInspec claimed to be "Loading..." it made no attempt to communicate any signs of progress or failure in the 40 minutes (including frequent bathroom breaks) it took us to write this review. Perhaps there is a subliminal progress indicator hidden within the bitter heart of the Beachball, though we dared not look too closely for fear of becoming the unwitting agents of the Global Monkey Conspiracy.
From its appearance, we can surmise that WAFInspec is intended to provide a table listing all of the items in your cache, from which you can select an item to export. But seriously, doesn't that sound excruciatingly dull? We can only imagine three things duller than that, and two of them involve numismatics. The other one may, or may not, involve Republican mating rituals too sickening to mention here. Wouldn't want to spook the ponies, eh Alec?
Although we cannot adequately critique the functionality of this torpid nonstarter of an "application," the interface contains several trifling flaws which we will expound upon fulsomely. First and foremost, obviously, is the metal interface. As you all know (What you say? You DON'T know?!), Apple recommends that applications that "provide an interface for a digital peripheral" or "strive to re-create a familiar physical device" should use the metal interface. Clearly, this applies to WAFInspec since it strives to recreate the look of the popular CacheViewer 2000 Rotisserie from Kenmore. Unfortunately, it fails to reach a temperature high enough to give my giblets the brown crackling texture I require for maximum sensual pleasure.
As if the metal interface isn't enough to give any right-thinking person a galloping attack of hysterical hiccups, WAFInspec also triggers our gag reflex (and we've eaten Giant African Snails, please remember) with its needlessly Lilliputian scroll bars and stimulatingly demonstrative preferences dialog. These putrid drops of UI smegma baffle our mighty hindbrains even more than the name, which lacks a 'T' for no apparent reason, other than the incoherent excuse of a "typo."
Executive Computing, you make Jello Jigglers seem akin to spinal fluid! We aren't at all sure what this means, but it's definitely bad news for you. And your pet ferret too. Using advanced spinal biopsy technologies, we have determined that an 8.9 rating would fit you better than those pants you're wearing. Khakis with internal galluses? You disgust us with your pitiful attempt at waterproof trousering. As if you could possibly hope to fit in with a gang of littoral sophisticates such as ourselves. Faugh! That is what we say to you. You smell like the internal membranes of a badly pickled herring! Good day, sirrah.
Update: This morning, WAFInspec 1.0 was released, with a nod to us. Amazingly, it appears our review actually influenced this version. The window is no longer metal, and the scroll bars are the normal size. Ahh, so much better now. If only I wanted to view my IE cache.
Building on the thrilling strategy elements of such games as Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, CloneShooter is not your father's shooting game. In fact, it is worse. Much worse. Worse than a carny-promoted waterfowl hunt. Rife with dubious UI choices, and crosshatch background patterns, I only wish that I had reached for the force-quit key combo sooner. The music was a pervasive blend of poorly-played electric guitar loops that can only be forgotten through repeated applications of hot mustard plasters.
Featuring scores of stiffly jerking humanoid figures, who we take to be the clones, the gameplay is no better than the trappings. Evidently the player is expected to shoot the clones while avoiding injury to the hostages. As near as I can determine, the best strategy in this "game" is to stay ducked behind the ledge as much as possible, and only rarely pop up to fire off a burst of ammo. Sickeningly, you must do this rapidly enough to kill the clones faster than they appear. And appear they will, in vast quantities, presumably from some off-screen high velocity terrorist clone laboratory. At this stage, we consider it likely that the terrorists are using yogurts, puddings, flans, custards, crème brulées, and other similarly glutinous substances to form an emulsion for this "flashcloning" process.
For whatever reason, hostages did not appear until the 4th level, and were differentiated from the terrorist clones by being women, and having blindfolds and tied hands. You sick sexist bastards! Strangely, the hostages also multiply at the same rate as the clones, and fly about the screen in the same frenetic fashion, making their death practically inevitable. In this way, the game is almost realistic, as real handguns are many times more likely to cause death or injury to the gun owner or owner's family than to some supposed miscreant. Not surprisingly, this fact does not magically become false when the National Rifle Association attempts another of their miserably moronic arguments.
The documentation makes a limpid attempt to explain this pathetic mess by explicating the story-line, which is as follows: "Supposedly a terrorist cloned himself a few years ago. We had thought that he only had 3 or so clones. We were wrong." Well, now that they've explained themselves, this game is completely fucking brilliant. By making the clones appear similar to Craig Venter, slack-jawed suckah of the genome world, Industrial Magnolia has created a stunning postmodern commentary on the human genetic quandary, and we hope they will accept our offer of a 10.8.
Summer in Australia is bloody hot. Bloody, bloody, bloody hot! Well over 104 degrees in the shade. Animals hide under rocks and trees, and pant and dribble a lot. Humans turn their houses into frigid airconditioned oases ... and pant and dribble a lot. What better time to go outside, light a naked flame, stand in the sun (right under the ozone hole) and cook? That's cook meat, you butt-humping bandicoot!
Lots of cultures have a barbecue of some kind, but nothing matches the Australian experience. Don't argue, Texas, or you'll find yourself staggering around with a sharp-clawed, very determined echidna trying to dig it's way out of your World's Biggest Bumhole!
Today's review is of meat. There are basically two kinds of Aussie barbie meat. First, there is the only credible category, as eaten by real Aussie blokes and sheilas in their simmering, treeless backyards, and comprising two sub-meats:
a) sausages: ground-up lips and arseholes of sundry four-legged animals, mixed with fat and sawdust, and pushed into edible condoms; and b) chops and steaks: chunks of meat from the ribs or bums of sundry four-legged animals (usually after they're dead), to be tossed, still bleeding, onto the overheated barbecue plate. A subset of this variety is the so-called "barbecue steak" -- a ragged off-cut hacked from around the anal sphincter, pounded thin using a spiky mallet, and (usually after cooking) served to the children, who, being young, don't deserve nutrition or enjoyment from their meal.
The other type of meat is "dined upon" by chardonnay-sipping ponces in shaded pergolas (or "summer houses") in the "courtyards" of stately homes in the more affluent metropolitan suburbs. This category of meat might include marinated chicken kebabs; fillets of pork wrapped in banana leaves; or prawns and other seafood (we never "toss a shrimp on the barbie" -- tossing a shrimp means either a dwarf-throwing competition in a pub, or another act of perversion on a small man, which I prefer not to discuss in an open forum). Who the hell do these people think they are? And then they accompany it with a macadamia and mango salad, for Christ's sake! But these, and other such barbecuarious abominations, are reserved for bankers, financial advisers, company directors, and other such un-Australian scum. Put such blasphemous fare right out of your mind!
In next week's review, I'll be considering how to destroy the meat by rendering it into small, curled-up chunks of unidentifiable carbonaceous matter ... er, cook a delicious meal. I'll also look at the crucial points of the barbecue ritual: who has the tongs and why; why sheilas should stick to the cask wine and forget about cooking; what to do if the barbecue catches fire (and why peeing on it is not a great idea); and much, much more.
So for true-blue Aussie meat: 0 out of 11 (top marks!), plus a bonus 0 (double marks!) for helping to clean up all those roadside carcases. Love that roadkill! For poncey, inner-suburban yuppie-style meat: 11 (boo hiss!), just because you're all rich bastards and I hate you!