Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by Jeff H. on Nov. 16, 2011 · permalink

It took me months to learn my way around my last multi-segment download manager/accelerator because the core and advanced features--preferences settings, filters, download selector dialog--were all undocumented, and most of them were not intuitively obvious. Now I want to ditch it because they've added software updating through OpenCandy (can be considered spyware because it reports what is installed on your system, and can not be disabled). I'd heard of Down Them all, and decided to have a look. Sadly, the documentation is not much better. Of course, it doesn't help that English is a barrier, being that it is not the developers' first language.

I think I can figure out a few things because of their similarity to features in the previous software, but there are other features that will remain opaque without documentation (such as the filter's pattern matching language, which includes operators not found in any flavor of regular expressions I've ever seen), and some features shown in screenshots on their website that I do not even know how to access, much less use. I'm just too tired to go stumbling around yet another bit of software, trying to figure out how to use the core features by guess and by golly. It is hard work coding new whiz-bang features into a software app; I know because I've done it. I can't see the point in spending the time and effort without also writing complete documentation, so that all those great features are accessible to the end users.

Note: I haven't actually tried the software yet, but AMO requires a rating in order to post a review...