Product
Review:
You Software's You Control
Menu Utility
by Mitchell Levine
So far,
2004 has brought a disappointing harvest of truly powerful
Mac OSX utilities across my desk. Fortunately, You Software
has broken this trend with their highly useful apps You Control
and You Synchronize. For anyone using a systems network—say, three or more stations connected through
a LAN—Mac OSX can be significantly more resistant to
easy modification and alteration. Lacking a simple, organized
central function devoted to tweaking a system registry like
Window's Control Panel, institutional Apple users might find
it a little more complex to make substantial changes to their
user environment. However, a learning community has considerable
needs for flexibility—every class and school is different—and
implementing customization in an organized manner should be
a priority.
You Control is a specialized solution in this regard,
a collection of 15 menu utilities designed to allow a creative
IT manager the opportunity to make numerous specific upgrades.
In a You Control custom menu, an enabled user can: add an atomic
clock, display collected user e-mail messages, view a customizable
calendar and schedule of events, access the OSX finder through
an intuitive menu system, and much more.
Most education
users have probably encountered the difficulties in menu
navigation that OS users have become accustomed to: Unlike
Windows users, the typical school IT user simply does not
get many alternatives for these types of operations. Not
only will You Control give the system administrator to effect
all of the above changes, it even allows customization of
elements like fonts, colors, and numeral systems. Although
I as a typical non-institutional user haven't found making
many of these changes necessary, a K-12 school IT administrator
might be very interested in being able to systemize many options
that Mac OS doesn't make simple—for example, the alternative
of adding to a standard Finder menu an instant record of running
processes similar to Windows XP's Task Manager, as a trouble-shooting
and productivity feature. Additionally, the Pasteboard module
is an excellent addition to the standard copy utilities installed
standard with a Mac users operation system.
These features
should certainly outweigh the lack of functionality of other
of the features within in an education setting, like the
iTunes and Address Book manager modules—certainly,
the Clock applet alone should be sufficiently advantageous.
At $69.95 for a download (minus any potential education volume
discounts), the suite is a little pricy, but is still definite
worth a look-see. For more information and a free trial download,
visit the company's site at www.yousoftware.com.#