My immediate feeling - they aren't off to a very promising start.

1. They have decided to have their setup program change the IE (and others?) Home page to be their own portal at jordysoft.net (easy to change back - but highly unethical making such a change without authorisation or informing the user that it would occur).

2. Anyone trying to go to the company/product website (jordysoft.com) - perhaps to learn more or purchase - is also redirected to their shareware download portal. It is like they have pulled down all the blinds and curtains, deadbolted the doors, and ran into a bedroom to hide under the blankets. Note - you can get older versions of their company & product webpage - from the cache on google. etc.

3. I tried even to open online help to work out how the feature: "Advanced URL Catalog creates thumbnail images of your favorite websites." is accessed (still wondering) - yes it will create thumbnails for all of your websites (easier to select from a picture than a name?). Don't bother - online help shuffles you off to their download site... (Their site was working over the past few days - I feel this "change" might just be for GOTD's benefit). http://blog.jordysoft.com/ and http://forum.jordysoft.com/ are still unaffected (and uninfected with any product information)

I just want to look at Advanced URL Catalog - and all Jordysoft wants me to do is to download and look at something else. If they didn't want people to see their software and company in the best possible light - why offer the software then pull out all stops to keep information away from users who want to try the software?

And I thought this might've had some potential - it DID look good, but the company doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence.

A More complete list of features from their webpage - before they "turned it off".

Advanced URL Catalog as a Bookmark Manager allows you to do:

* Advanced URL Catalog will help you store, organize, annotate, delete and check your favorite Internet pages.
* You can do all kinds of operations to the database.
* It's compatible with all browsers. You can import / export urls to / from Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla, FireFox, NetCaptor, Avant Browser, MyIE2, iRider, CSV Files, HTML files and all kinds of text files.
* The bookmark data files is encrypted and compressed so you can protect your information.
* Advanced URL Catalog can handle huge urls over 1.000.000.
* Advanced URL Catalog creates thumbnail images of your favorite websites.
* Have convenient modification and updating functions for the Urls and catalogs. Support the drag-and-drop to organize the bookmarks.
* You can protect your bookmarks with a password.
* Advanced drag-and-drop function allows the moving the bookmarks from a category to another and moving a category to another, also opens the databases with drag-and-drop operations.
* Search the needed bookmarks and deleting, modifying, copying the listed bookmarks directly from the search result.
* Allow the bookmarks to be arranged easier and quicker on categories.
* You can grab urls from all active sessions of Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla, FireFox, NetCaptor, Avant Browser, MyIE2, iRider browsers.
* You can select with what browser you want to open the bookmarks.
* Drop Basket for faster browsing and URL addition.
* You can check the urls for validation and automatically update Title and Description of urls from meta tag.
* You can automatically delete all the urls that are no more valid and remove all duplicate urls.
* You can store user names / passwords (login information) and comments for every url.
* User defined rating system and comments..
* System-wide hotkeys for easy use, even when working with another application
* Is simple to use and will make your browsing really efficient and much more enjoyable.

You may download a FREE Demo Version of Advanced URL Catalog 2.12 by pressing the link below.

blah blah blah...

BuBBy  –  15 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+335)

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I would expect a professional bookmark manager to install cleanly and unobtrusively, and then ask to import bookmarks from IE, Firefox and other installed browsers. Advanced URL Catalog did none of these things. Instead, during installation, Kaspersky reported its attempts to grab the following:

- shutdown rights for my operating system
- debug rights for my operating systems
- access to my internal browser configuration
- access to my browser command line (Firefox profile manager)

And finally, WinPatrol reported that it had tried to change my home page to jordysoft.com.

To top it all off, it turned out to be an amateurish, poorly designed piece of tat offering no advanced features whatsoever. To describe it as 'professional' and a 'complete bookmarks solution' is just nonsense.

This software is ill-mannered and generally very nasty. I recommend that people who are not protected by advanced anti-virus software should steer clear of installing it to try it out.

Julia  –  15 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+104)

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it also changed the default browser (from opera) into iexplorer :-( I really do not like programs that mess up my config!

wiem  –  15 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+85)

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Hm, developer doesn't seem to be a developer at all. Link to the product page gets a redirection to the jordysoft.net portal. Not convincing at all. I'm not goiung to try this, so no thumbs up/down for the program, but definitely three thumbs down for the offer(er) jordysoft.

just_passing_by  –  15 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+78)

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I love this site and all the free licenses, BIG thanks to GotD team for one of my biggest web addictions! :-)

(Er... while I'm spouting off - more plain text serial numbers would be very, very nice! And redo Linkman Pro & DogWaffle, pretty please???? But not next week, I'm away! :)

And thanks, of course, to this community for the raw, UNBIASED reviews and all great alternatives - open, freeware and commercial.

BUT as Bubby said, while today's offering sounds like a very interesting product, J's brand-new(?) portal turns out to be pretty self-serving, at the very least. Their bookmark manager listing includes only one product - guess which one? Who gives it 4/5 stars, themselves??

It's possible this lack is because they're just starting this portal and it's not very well populated etc. - very obvious since the forum is empty, as is the blog. However, it's impossible to tell how many programs are actually listed, since there's no item count displayed in any given category! Also, [blech!] - the "fully reviewed" products are each given one sentence pro/con/summaries. Woot. Better reviews in the Comments here!

----------------------
Oh, wait.... NOT GOOD. Not only do they have very excessive, annoying and irrelevant (even worse!) pop-up balloon advertisement linkage (just how is "Microsoft officially announced" at ALL relevant to any hair care products?!), Jordysoft also plagiarizes news articles, don't even edit the content, and don't attribute them.... Copyright infringement, while not equal to stealing, is close enough in meaning for this highly improper usage.

1. What caught my eye: Ah ha! "MS releasing an Anti-virus, finally?!"

http://www.jordysoft.net/frmDescriptionDetailsNews.aspx?TopMenuId=11&LeftMenuId=233&SubMenuId=0&ContentId=15" (URL all one line)
However, in the second last paragraph, the news article "Jordysoft" published, really, actually reads "One last thing Ars [emphasis mine] discussed with Burch was the...." which gave me a double-take. "Ars? Is this from Ars Technica?!"

A quick Google search reveals: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/06/microsoft-announces-free-antivirus-beta-this-tuesday.ars

Bam! Is the rest of "their" news also in copyright violation? Let's try the Windows 7 pricing article, it's over 2 weeks old, plenty of time for any corrections...

2. "With the cat officially launched from the bag today by Microsoft, we now know the pricing of Windows 7 as it applies to consumers looking to purchase the operating separately."

"... we now know..."? Hmm....

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-7-price-upgrade-retail,8144.html

Sure enough, 0 for 2... looking bad...

3. "NASA Partners With California Space Authority" - let's try that. An official government news item, surely they will.... but no. Completely unattributed, out-going links stripped, as well as all sources! Unlike other reputable news sources, publishers and reporters.

On the web, rress release at:
http://media-newswire.com/release_1093737.html

UPI feed to Lexus-Nexus:
http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100019545&docId=l:997646391&isRss=true

and the actual NASA site:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2009/09-71AR.html

Bah. This is direct contravention of the extremely liberal NASA copyright/permissions (basically, only attribution is required), found here:
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html
Paragraph 3: "NASA should be acknowledged as the source of the material except in cases of advertising."

Restrictions, item 2,
"It is unlawful to falsely claim copyright or other rights in NASA material." Under the copyright laws, publishing ANYTHING is an implicit claim to copyright unless otherwise stated.

and the same restriction spelled out, for example, on http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/policies.html

But no, even NASA gets ripped off. And to add insult to injury, not only stealing words, J is now explicitly claiming their own copyright as well as removing sources, copyright notices and permissions of others: bottom of every page: "Copyright © 2009 Jordysoft.net. All rights reserved"

Very, very sleazy.

That's 0 for 3...You're OUT! Busted, Jordy. And boycotted. Makes me wonder where you pilfered your code from, too.

Sorry this got so long, but dang it, GotD, they should be slapped down, hard and possibly banned. And reported!

(To be explicit for Jordysoft: This posting copyright 2009, D.G.Ebel and free to use, source attribution required!)

Grant  –  15 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+77)

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