AAUG Reviews

by Ron Schoedel, AAUG Member

Jax is broken into two sections: one deals with your music on your Mac, and the other with data for your iPod. It brings together a bunch of semi-related features into one application interface, and generally does a good job. Many of these features are available as individual shareware programs, but to my knowledge Jax is the only program that brings all of these together like this.

Let’s look at the iPod features first. Jax promises to give you stocks, weather, gas prices, documents, and email on your iPod. Sounds cool! And it generally is. Just keep in mind that your iPod is only going to get this information when you dock it to your Mac and sync the data. It is only updated as often as you sync it with Jax and iTunes. So, if you plug in your iPod infrequently, keep in mind the data on your iPod will be aging. If you need to have up to the minute access to some of this data, then an iPhone is what you probably need, with its constant internet availability. But Jax goes a long way toward giving you some data functionality on your iPod, albeit static data.

Documents: I test this feature by added 8 supported documents to sync. Jax claims to support Word, PDF and other standard formats for text documents. I gave it eight Word (rtf) files, all very similar to one another (built on the same template). Only five of them were added to the specified playlist. Twice. I brought this oddity to the attention of the JoeSoft engingeers for research. I am told it may have something to do with how intense of a function the text-to-speech is. (more…)