Saturday night I bought another bundle of Mac software; I'm a sucker for those. Had good luck with the MacHeist bundles, and I use many of the programs at least once a week. This one? Well.

* One of the programs was a "notes manager." I just don't have a lot of problem with managed notes. I don't need something to tag my lists and sort them by priority and export them to .pdf so I can archive them in fully searchable form so I can prove, should the need arise, that I intended to get a loaf of bread when I went shopping on January 2, 2008. Besides, I use Evernote, which syncs across all platforms, can be called up on mobile devices, and it's free. So the notes program hit the trash straight away. What of the others?

* STOMP. Yet another video compressor. Can't have enough of those. Well, I can, and do, because nothing does everything. VisualHub, for example, is fast, but the dock icon bounces when it's done AND WON'T STOP BOUNCING. It's like having someone tug on your shirtsleeve until you want to give him a backhand. The program was discontinued; someone picked it up and retweaked it to VideoMonkey, which I stopped using because A) I don't like monkeys, and B) the default settings were always low, or "crappy and jagged," requiring a retweak every time you opened it up. Good bye.

Stomp looked simple enough for Child (TM) to use to crunch her animations down for YouTube. For her it works most of the time; for me, well, I tried converting some clips into Flash, and it did nothing but make blank empty documents. I tried to compress a 600 MB 55 minute Mp4, and the estimated completion time, after five minutes of chewing over the file, was ten hours. Sigh.

Back to Handbrake and QuickTime for everything, each of which has its own kludgy peculiarities.

* One of the programs - Freeway, a web design tool - was something I've been curious about for a while. Installed it, tried to find the place to enter the license code. After badgering the company's website for an answer, I found the explanation: there wasn't any place to enter the code on the Trial version, which is what I'd been sold. But if registered the product and downloaded it again, it should work.

Oh, for heaven's sake. Why not demand I burn it on a CD, load it into a clay-pigeon launcher, shout PULL , shoot it out of the sky and insert the fragments into my CD drawer? That would be only slightly more complex. Well, if I must. But the only things I could download was the Trial, which had no place for the code, or the full version, which required payment, or an update, which updated a version I did not have.

The update worked; I'll get back to you on the program itself. Some day.

* Daisy Scan. This one's nifty: scans your drives and generates a visual layout of the contents. Click on a block, it tells you what's on it. Makes it easy to find big honking files you don't want or need, like half-gigabyte Garageband files that teach you how to play the pan flute. I used it to eradicate language files from Adobe programs, because there's a fighting chance I won't need to code in Russian any time soon.

I had some notes on the other programs, but I misplaced them. And you know what? I don't care.