tin-men

Bandwagon

Last week a tweet popped up on Twitterific about getting free hosting for a year with Dreamhost if you buy an application called Bandwagon. Free hosting for a year when you buy a $24 app? Bargain!

This application automatically backs up your iTunes library to Amazon’s S3 service or to your own FTP server. Since I was looking at changing hosts for my sites anyway, this seemed like a pretty good deal, so I signed up.

That’s when my troubles began.

To start off with, this application is beta. That means that there will be bugs and errors. But I thought that since they felt confident enough to charge for it, that it must be pretty much finished and nearly ready to come out of beta. But I was very, very wrong.

To start off with, it seems very much unfinished. The close button on the notification window is on the right. How many mac applications have you seen with a close button on the right? That’s correct, none.

It also crashes. A lot. Like every hour. It manages to regularly take up more than 150% of my processor time and most of the time only uses one core for some reason. This is on a MacBook Pro with a 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo in it, so it’s not a slouch by any stretch of the imagination. Bear in mind that this application is designed to upload a lot of data (60Gb in my case) over the internet and since most people’s upload speed isn’t that fast, the application will need to be left running unattended during it’s initial upload for quite some time. The first few nights I left it running, I woke up to find my MBP sounding like a 747 with my computer totally unresponsive until I did a Force Quit.

These are common problems according to their support forums, so I have to ask the question: How on earth do they think they can charge for this?

You do NOT charge for beta software. Especially when it doesn’t work properly.

Let’s compare this to the other application I’ve been beta testing, Skitch. I’ve not had it crash once, and it’s performed exactly as it should do every single time. And how much did I pay for it? Not a single penny (although I’m definitely buying it when it comes out of beta, providing Plasq don’t charge stupid money for it).

There is a new version of Bandwagon due out this week, and it is supposed to fix the main problem I’m having (I.E. it not working), so I’m looking forward to actually using what I paid for! I hope the developers sort it out, because this product has huge potential, I just can’t help feeling ripped off. A car company doesn’t expect you to test out the air bags in your car for them, I don’t see why I should have to put up with an application that I paid for not working.

As a side note, when I was writing this post Nik IM’ed me an image that sums up what he thinks about Bandwagon. Enjoy! [link]