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.#