Category Archives: Reviews

Product reviews, reviews on software, apps, websites and anything that’s worth a few words.

ELGATO/EyeTV Follow Up

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EyeTV 250

After nearly two weeks of posts, comments, complaints and other unpleasant correspondence with the folks at elgato about my EyeTV 250 problem, I ended up having to troubleshoot and repair the issue myself.  After repeat emails from Andrea Lindgren of elgato’s tech support offering no help, but asking for my date of purchase, I finally started posting issues on the eyetv lounge in hopes that someone would respond, or at least read about the trouble I was having. This seemed to start getting results. However, one of the results was a response from another woman in elgato sales dept, Kathleen, who basically told me I was screwed. Actually what she said was

Your case has been passed to me by Andrea of technical support.
There is a one year warranty on all Elgato items. We are unable to offer out of warranty replacements. There is no repair program for these devices, they are serviced by exchange.
I am sorry for this inconvenience.
Kathleen
Elgato Systems

And basically, that tells me that I’m just screwed. It tells me that I spent over $200 on some electronics that is useless if anything breaks because they won’t lift a finger to help a customer. Once you’ve given them your money, you are no longer of interest to them and you’re on your own.

Unwilling to accept this solution, I took out my little mult-meter and began to test the hardware to find out why the receiver was not getting any power. I tracked the problem down to the AC power supply, a simple little device that plugs into the wall and supplies power to the receiver and probably costs around $10. I just happened to have a couple spares that came with old cell phones that I no longer use, so I swapped the ends out between the broken one and an old phone power supply, plugged it in and everything worked just fine.

After finding and fixing the problem, I got back on the eyetv lounge and posted my findings and complaints. One of their more helpful individuals, Nick Freeman, from elgato’s Customer Support department, actually helped me get things worked out and had a new replacement AC power adapter sent out to me.

So in the end, I’m not sure if elgato would have done anything at all had I not found and fixed the problem myself, and told them exactly what was wrong and what I needed to resolve my issues. I will say to their credit though, that they have at least one individual, Nick Freeman, who is willing to do what it takes to make a customer feel like he’s not completely alone with broken equipment. Since this last incident happened, I’ve been researching other products for watching TV on a computer and there are at least a couple to choose from. It remains to be seen if their support is any better than elgato’s, but they sure as hell can’t be much worse.

EyeTV: All I can do is bitch.

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So just before Christmas 2007 I purchased EyeTV for my Mac. I figure I spend most of my time in front of this thing anyway, may as well watch TV while I work.EyeTV 250

I was a more than a little reluctant to spend $200 on a little plastic box with some software to watch TV on my computer, but after looking at what I could do with it I decided to go for it. As it turns out, I absolutely love having TV running on my machine as I’m working. The EyeTV software is fairly easy to use, has some nice features for recording and converting video, and after the pain in the ass of setting up an account and getting the program guide stuff working it sits here and runs on my fourth monitor all day keeping me company while I’m working (I have no friends).

Then a week ago the unit just quit working. No power to the box, no more TV for me. I went to the company’s website to submit a ticket for service last Saturday, 6 days ago. This is the only way to get software/hardware issues resolved with their products; go to their website and submit a ticket. Then wait. And wait. And wait some more.

They finally sent a response on Wednesday in which they said maybe it could be serviced but there’s only a year warranty, so they needed the date I purchased everything. I replied immediately with that information, and I never heard from them again. Right now I’m really not sure how this will go. Is it worth $200 plus a software upgrade worth $40 every 18 months to watch TV while I work? Maybe when times were good, but when the economy is floating in the shitter and I haven’t had a project in a couple months it’s really hard to part with another $200 for something that I know is going to crap out on me again in the near future.

Normally I wouldn’t think twice about it, nor would I take the time to write about my frustrations, but when a company leaves a customer dangling like these people do, all I can do is bitch. I’m really hoping they come through and take care of the problem, but when a company that sells computer technology doesn’t have any way for it’s customers to directly contact them, I really don’t have much hope for resolution. It’s obvious that they don’t want us calling them. They certainly don’t want to be bothered with some pesky issues that a customer may be having; it’s just not profitable. I love how easy they make it to purchase their shit, but good luck when you have issues with it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with their support and service. A couple months back there were some serious issues with their providers and programming service. I went through the same crap trying to get them to respond and just tell me what was going on. They didn’t even need to fix anything; they just had to tell me if the problem was on their end or mine so I could skip all the troubleshooting and hours of screwing around with the system on my end. That took more than a week.

No, I don’t have much faith in ELGATO as far as taking care of this issue. I hope I’m wrong. I hope I have to eat my words. If they come through for me in the next 24 hours and fix my unit or send out a replacement, I will take it all back. Well, not the part about the severe laps in response time it takes them to get around to dealing with stuff; that’s all on them. They SUCK at doing anything for their customers in a timely fashion. As far as dealing with ELGATO and purchasing their products, I wouldn’t recommend it. Not unless you have the patience to deal with the service of indifference. It’s just not worth the $200 bucks.

I guess I’ll post an update when this gets resolved, one way or another. That’ll give everyone some idea of how long it takes for these guys to get off their asses.

Art Director’s Toolkit for the Mac (an update)

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After my last post on this subject/application, I had pretty much given up on getting this resolved due to the lack of response to all the emails I sent the software company (Code Line) for support. Then one day a couple weeks ago I was working on a job that was all high-res and production, no design, and the dies for the job were sent to me scaled down to some random number like 7% of the actual size with absolutely no reference to the scale. It’s always like that though; no time or effort goes into sending us the information we need to do the job right, so if anything goes sideways, they always can blame it on us! That’s my conspiracy theory for the day….

Anyway, this is a perfect example of the kind of thing that ADT is great at. You just click around under the Numbers or Scales section, type in your original size and your target size, and it gives you exactly the percentage of the scale. It’s not a big deal if you only have one element, but in this case there were several elements being printed as one and each was a different size, so it takes a bit of calculation and math (or quite a lot if you SUCK at math like me) to get the right percentages for all the elements to end up proportionately accurate in the end.

At the time, I hadn’t resolved this ADT license problem so I had to do it all the hard way. This prompted me to get on their website again and call the number listed in the contact section instead of trying to get a response via email. Finally about 4 days later I got a call from the owner of the company who was happy to help and resolved the issues within minutes. He said he never received any emails from me and it’s possible that they may be getting caught by the spam filter, which of course is a problem if you’re a legitimate user with support issues in need of assisstance. We talked a bit about what I do, how I use ADT and what I like about it while he was fixing my registration and activation code issue, and in a few minutes it was resolved and working again. I immediatlely got back on their site and paid the $20 for the upgrade to the latest version (ADT 5) and have been using it ever since.

So what’s my opinion of Art Director’s Toolkit at the end of all this you ask? Well, overall I have to say I love the application; it’s a very useful little tool that has an assload of time saving features if you’re an Art Director, Designer or Web Designer. I was more than a little frustrated at the lack of response to my email queries, but that’s one of those things that comes back to communication and how dependant everyone has become of email as means of contacting people. Email is great if you don’t want to bother people with a phone call, but it’s not always dependable or reliable, and I should have realized that right away. After all the years I worked for an agency long distance from my home office, I was one of the people that came to depend on email to get in touch with my team or other folks at the office. I learned very quickly however, that if you have something really important to tell someone and you do so via email, you had better follow it up with a phone call to cover your ass or it’s gonna come back and bite you in the ass. This situation only proved it again; if I would have just called to begin with, I probably would have had this resolved in the first week.

Art Directors Toolkit application: My thoughts…

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Art Directors Toolkit, for those who aren’t aware of it, is a little application that is part of the bundled software that ships with every Mac. At least I think it ships with every Mac computer; it’s been on every Mac I’ve ever purchased or worked on.

ArtDirectors Toolkit 4 - screen grab

ArtDirectors Toolkit 4 - screen grab

This is a snapshot of what it looks like.

Of all the agencies I’ve worked for and all the Art Directors that I know and work with, I’ve never known one of them to actually use this application. Most of the features this app has can be found within the primary applications we all use, like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, so why would anyone open up yet another application on top of the usual suspects that are eating up everyone’s RAM all day long? Additionally, the typical Art Director doesn’t spend much time exploring the folders on their machines just to see what’s in there, or curiously opening up programs to see what they are and what they do. So ADT is just another free, bundled application installed on Macs everywhere just taking up space.

I’m curious. I explore every folder on my machine. I open and run every application because I have to know what it is! Maybe it does something really cool and useful. Why would they install a bunch of totally useless apps on every Mac shipped?

Art Directors Toolkit is one of those apps that I found while exploring one day several years ago. I opened it, played with it, and found that it had some interesting features, but they weren’t enough to make it one of the apps that I use every day and can’t live without so it was closed and never seen again… until the next major upgrade. I’ve repeated this process through several generations of Mac computers and operating systems, until about a month ago. I was going through my Applications folder cleaning it out, backing up all of my older versions of applications to disk and tossing the useless stuff. Then I came across ADT4 again. I opened it, played with it for a few minutes and like every other time was about to quit, but found something that made me think. The Ruler. I’ve played with it before, but this time I just happened to be working on my website and needed to know how much space I had in a column between two Divs, and I thought about the Ruler. Perfect! The Ruler feature is pretty cool for several reasons: it’s “L” shaped, so it measures X and Y coordinates, but also calculates the angle between the two. You can set it units to any measurement; inches, centimeters, pixels, etc., and you can change it’s orientation so that the corner of X and Y is Upper Left or Right, or in the Lower Left or Right corner. You simply drag the ends of the ruler out to get the measurement, which works great when working on a website as it allows you to accurately measure any area on a page. It floats above all other applications so the Ruler is always visible, but you can change it’s appearance as well making it as noticable or as unobtrusive as you wish, and you can even change the opacity so that you can see what you’re working on right through it. Pretty cool!

ADT has a few other features that come in handy on occassion also. It will figure out proportions, scaling percentages and unit conversions. You can store color swatches, mix and blend colors and work with all the color modes to get accurate numbers, which is another great feature for website work. If you need to sample a color from one application and use it in another, ADT makes it easy to do so across apps. ADT also has it’s own little Application Launcher and Folder Drawer where you can store your favorite programs or directories and access them with a click all from within ADT. That is a feature of the newest version 5, however.

It was working on a website that got me reaquainted with Art Directors Toolkit and for that it proved to be very useful. Their version checker told me that there was a newer version available so I downloaded and installed it. Even better! This new version is V5 and has the launcher feature as well as some color swatch features that version 4, which ships with all Macs, doesn’t have. I was very happy with the latest release and I found myself using it every day. Things were great.

Then I booted up my machine one day last week and went to Launch ADT 5 while working on another website only to get a message telling me the demo expired and I needed to purchase a license. Bummed out, disappointed and broke, I was forced to go back to working with ADT4, the one that came with my MacPro. I wasn’t as happy, I was missing some features that I had gotten used to, not to mention all the color swatch groups that I had saved which I now had no access to, and every time I launched ADT4 it opens with it’s default settings, unlike V5 which saves your prefs and settings. I checked on the price of the update and it’s $40 that I don’t have, so resigned myself to working with the old version.

Contact Tech Support Page

Contact Tech Support Page

A couple days went by and I had finally come to terms with it, when upon launching the old free version 4 I got the message telling me my frickin’ demo had expired and I need to purchase a license!! Moving way beyond disappointment into the violent rage I experience every time I get ripped off and scammed, I contacted them to find out what to do about getting the old version working again or if there was an upgrade price to get the new one. A few days went by and no response. I read through their license agreement to make sure I wasn’t missing something again, and found that to get the old version working, I have two choices: I need to either reinstall my original operating system, which is Tiger – several OS versions back – and of course I’m running the latest Leopard so that’s not an option at all – OR – the preferred solution is to contact them and register my software, then they would supposedly send a license to me for the old version. So I contacted them again and tried to request a license. Their site reroutes you to the page where you purchase the new upgrade and asks for the damn license of your existing version, which I don’t have and can’t get because now I’m in an endless loop!!!!!!

So in the end I’ve concluded that if money wasn’t an issue, I would have purchased the upgrade. However, that was before my experience with their website and lack of customer support. Now I’m so pissed off that I seriously doubt I’ll ever use their software again. They will have to respond eventually and be really nice to me before I’ll even consider it, but based on my experience with contacting them and their Customer Support and Technical Support, I don’t think it’s anything I’ll have to deal with for a long, long time.

If anyone is curious or wish to help me extract Customer Support from these folks, the name of the company is Code Line Communications, and this is a link to their site: Art Directors Toolkit 5.

Go ahead, see for yourself. Send them an email and see how long it takes to get a response! Here’s their email address: Customer Support. I’m willing to bet we’ll have Bin Laden as our President before these folks take an interest in their customers.
Good Luck!