Anyone tried the new Mile Tracker Program?
 

Seems like it's part of something called "Deskport" now
Anyone installed it yet?

I did. Mile Tracker works fine under "Deskport". Some bugs (BA etc.) are gone.
Don't think that I'll use the other features of Deskport a lot ...

AWFUL!! Do Not Download Deskport!!
 

I just downloaded Deskport after reading the above post----Firstly let me say I have HAPPILY used (and been a contributor) of Mile Tracker for a few years...it has worked perfectly for me - I Loved it - I am disappointed that Mike joined Deskport---After my download - I went to access Miletracker - my details were transferred - but when I tried to navigate to an Airline Program - I immediately got POP UPS - I couldn't get rid of them - and my computer FROZE --- I had to shut down and restart---I tried this 3X - finally attempted to UNINSTALL this nasty program - and couldn't even get rid of it - could not uninstall properly - so now my computer has bits and pcs. left of a program I DON"T WANT! - (If I needed Mapquest or any of the "other" stuff on Desktop - I could just go there ---I don't need all that to load every time I start up my computer)...and then again - the old (wonderful) Mile Tracker started in it's own nice window - full screen - this "Deskport" starts about 1/4 of the screen - you cannot move it or enlarge it---it is a PAIN!!!
Mike??? are you reading this??? - Why did you "fix" something that wasn't "broken".....I would have been happy to send more money and/or paid for your Mile Tracker program on it's own..... :( :( Renee Moss

ReneeMoss:

I agree the "old" Miletracker looked much nicer.
I don't know why deskport uses only part of the screen :confused:
This website could easily win a price for "the ugliest website"!

BTW, I don't get any pop-ups (yet) I use the Google Toolbar with pop-up blocker.

I now have major remorse that I never donated anything to Mike. I hate the new Deskport. It is cluttered. What I really dislike is how it is a program that is always on, impossible to exit, and permanently occupies a large amount of space on my tool bar. I e-mailed Mike begging him to release a paid, standalone version :(

Something to make this thread even more useful
 

My stomach turned at these words, even before reading this thread.

My recent past -- and my hard drive -- are littered with "even more useful free products" that turned out to be nothing more than worthless, obnoxious, unwanted, cluttered piles of dreck. So goodbye, MileTracker. I won't even take the chance of downloading this new virus.

TV, radio, internet, snail mail -- any way you try to reach me, I don't want your advertising. I want only the content I want and nothing else. When I order steak at a restaurant, I don't want the waiter showing up saying, "and here's some other stuff you didn't order to make your dinner even more useful!" I'll pay to keep your "messages" away. And I do. Hello HBO, XM, TiVo. Goodbye Deskport and all your ill-k.

It's sad if this is the case. I've always considered MileTracker to be a good program the last 7 or 8 months I've used it. Hopefully Mike will consider offering an independant version. I'd be willing to pay for it.

same thing. I downloaded and tried it but did not like deskport at all. The only good thing is the FT links are fixed now there. I would be willing to pay or donate for a stand alone version...

i do no like the new deskport at all...

does anyone think it is possible to convince mike to release 2.0 as a stand-alone application? maybe if we all agreed to donate a certain sum?

I too am a very satisfied user of MileTracker. I not only made a voluntary contribution to Mike but have deliberately gone to MileTracker and patiently waited for the Amazon.com icon to pop up, so that Mike could get credit for my Amazon purchases. And my heart also sank when I saw the announcement about the conversion to Deskport. But frankly, while I'd be willing to pay a small one-time fee for a stand-alone product of MileTracker quality, I'm not sure that I'd be willing to pay for annual upgrades. Perhaps MileTracker is just like a lot of things in the Frequent Flyer world: It was a good thing while it lasted.

MileTracker, we hardly knew ye. Well actually, we knew ye for a few years, and ye were pretty darn good.

Thanks to all for the warnings!

I actually love it
 

I have yet to experience a single problem since I downloaded Deskport a few weeks ago. I really use it at least six times a day (especially the TV Guide, Movie Fone, and USA Today). I really don't see a need to resize the menu because you can close it out nicely to the system tray. Whenever I want to use it, I just click and it opens. I think it's a really useful tool, and it saves me a lot of time looking up stuff. :)

*Note to jonu:
Whenever I want to exit it, I right click the icon and the "Exit" option closes it out. It can easily be reopened by going to Deskport via the start menu. See if that works for you too.

I'd also be more than willing to pay a small one-time fee to have it be a seperate program. :(

What a Mess!
 

Ditto...I spent three hours last night trying to make this work. Ended up using Norton to clean up. :(

Folks, I know that you want to make a buck (and deserve to), but you just bit the hands that feed you.

Are you a shill for them? Looks like same message posted at frequentflier.

Major-league problems occurred after I installed DeskPort yesterday. My computer, running Windows 2000 and normally ultra-stable, froze and would not even respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del. I unplugged the computer and then it would not restart, with an indication that the boot block files were damaged. Now I only am able to boot up from the Win2K installer disk.

The DeskPort button at lower right is 4x the width of any other icon there, so requires 4x the screen real estate.

I hope DeskPort is un-installable. It's a very sad development.

Obviously a shill. This gets worse and worse. Has anyone checked to see if this program is uploading data it shouldn't be?

QL

Agree with the 'awful' sentiment. Screen is too small, ui is cluttered, and the Deskport app as a whole is very unconfigurable.

I can understand Mike's decision to "cash in', but I'll mourn the loss of a nice program.

Me too :(

MileTracker would be the perfect program for Randy to co-brand with FlyerTalk.

It's cluttered. It isn't sizeable. I hate applications that load at startup (going to disable that for sure) because it slows my startup.

MileTracker was my favorite.

I don't blame Mike for trying to package this differently, and a free product is a free product so I'm not criticizing him at all. Just less useful to me.

The September, 2003 cover story of Inside Flyer was on the best mileage managers. Time to consult that piece for an alternative.
Is it time to look into Yodlee, or time to pay Randy?

That is a shame.
 

Miletracker is a great program, but only on its own. I understand that hte need to maintain a site and upgrades are a big deal and that an association with DeskPort may be a help for Mike. However, as a user of the product I will have to walk away. I guard what goes on my computer very carefully and I have big questions regarding DeskPort. I often find these programs to evolve into monsters in the future - for desktop space, memory, and broadband. They often soon evolved into ugly marketing tools that do not work for me. In addition, these programs often offer links that are no use for me, so why have them on my desktop?

I would gladly pay an anual fee to keep Miletracker going. I will not download DeskPort.

I've installed Deskport and have had no problems with it, except that I don't particularly like, want or need its other features. I've experienced no freezes, crashes or popups. But still, I much preferred the standalone MileTracker and would be happy to pay for it.

This version of MileTracker works just like the old one but looks ugly because of the smaller and nonresizable window.

Let me take the Straussian view, perhaps this was all intentional -- buncle MileTracker into Deskport and make everyone so unhappy that they'll finally be willing to pay for the standalone application. :D

Well I don't really have a problem with Deskport as I pulled it off startup and have a popup blocker. No crashes or things like that.

However, I prefer it alone, not in a clumsy format as such.

Mike e-mailed me back with this message:
Thank you for your feedback. I've been away from my computer a bunch due to the holiday weekend, but I promise that I'll get back to you shortly.
Thanks,
Mike

Hopefully, we hasn't entered into any legal agreement with Deskport that would preclude MileTracker as standalone and is willing to reconsider...

I had a problem with the "Upgrade-or-Trash" principle of old MileTracker
 

When in the last update the ugly unsizeable screen on top appeared with promotional garbage, I deinstalled the Tracker, rein stalled the old version and constantly refused to upfdate, but eventually it would not work. So now I have a downloaded DeskPort which I haven't tried installing yet -- and won't, after the criticism it received here, and the MileTracker which only functions in that ugly version with the top screen, which I will uninstall.

However, I find the OBLIGATION to upgrade or have the programme stop functioning quite irritable. Buy-or-trash with test programmes is a fairer principle.

Even Microsoft does not force you to upgrade. It does many upgrades authomatically, but you CAN disable that and still have a functioning -- if outdated -- programme.

Anyway... I guess it'll be points.com for some time then. Do they keep the info ON-LINE, though?

The advantage with Mile Tracker was that it (purported to have) saved the data on the users computer.

My take is that the airline, hotel, etc. websites that MileTracker checks keep changing bits of text here and there, so Mike was forced into making updates just to keep MT working. I don't think he made updates just for the fun of it, he did it because he had to. Along the way he also introduced enhancements to the program, of course, but IMHO the reason for the updates was to keep the darn program working. I'm sure that became pretty boring after awhile.

MT was free for the several years it was available. Some of us donated but not enough to keep it going. Mike has done his best to find another program to hang MT onto...unfortunately, that program stinks, but what else could he do?

I really appreciate all the effort that Mike put into MileTracker (and the late Moonlight Labs fare finder) over the years. He did more than most for the FT community.

Actually we did approach him to make that program a FlyerTalk branded product but somehow lost contact. As for the new application, I'm not sure why Mike is in that mix since i thought that the application developer already had created another application called MilePro which claimed tens of thousands of users. I would have thought it easier to simply 'glue' that application in without adopting Mike's.

There might be something said for the consistency of MileageManager and MaxMiles. They both continue to be the longest running services to manage your miles than anyone. We really don't hear much about Yodlee these days as it seems totally focused on the financial marketplace. I know that Yodlee ended up on Yahoo! as a tech provider of a mileage manager but they told me it was only because of an existing contract for other services, not because it was best of class.

As for a stand alone - we have the former developer of MilesDirect in the office in the next few weeks, I'll ask him what are his thoughts on re-creating a stand alone with the FlyerTalk brand.

Thanks 4 Ur insights, Randy.

Ditto, your efforts are greatly appreciated Randy. Old Mileage
Tracker was just great, clean and simple. Often it was my
bible that would be printed just before a trip, covering all
accounts for a family of four, just incase. Worked great!

I dislike DeskPro as well, though it does not affect my system. AdMuncher seems to keep it in-line.

I did donate to MileTracker when I first installed it and would be quite happy to donate to it again to secure a Version 2.x and again when Version 3.x comes out.

Like many here, the only thing I need in DeskPro is MileTracker. Fortunately, I still have 1.x installed so I can continue to use it until it just plain breaks, at which point I'll hold my nose and fire up DeskPro, check my balances, and then Exit it. I did delete it from my Startup folder since I like as little "trayware" as possible running on my system.

I always enjoyed using MileTracker and also contributed a few times to it. If Mike asked for some moola, I would have gladly paid to keep MT stand alone. Deskport is terrible for my needs. First, it is terribly slow. Second, MT in Deskport doesn't work behind my corporate firewall.

What I never understood is why Mike doesn't consider open sourcing his code. If he is looking to make money from it, sell the stand alone app. If he is looking to provide free products to get advertising revenue, he still can with open sourced apps. I am disappointed that Mike's old apps that were quite useful now sit on some harddrive locked away.

Any way, I just un-installed deskport and have no intention of installing it ever again. Time to check out the other programs...

deskport.biz is the pits
 

I downloaded it. What was being displayed wouldn't even completely fit on my monitor's screen. So much JUNK. Computer froze. That could have been because my own pop-up blocker was working overtime. I wanted to uninstall using my own tool, but the program seems to have a fail-safe survival instinct (like the HAL 2000 computer in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey.") I was forced to let the clutter remain, using the deskport's own faulty, incomplete "uninstall" feature. At least the thing APPEARS to be gone for all intents and purposes, though I KNOW it isn't totally erased. I'm still using the old Miles Tracker again, after that experience with the "new and improved" version! -Max.

to download i had to disable the firewall ( which is one thing i do not like to do ), then tried to install it.
after restart it checked for updates and started installing again.
same story 3 times, so i finally deleted the whole crab and have kissed
miletracker bye, bye. :td:

good while it lasted. :(

DeskPort froze my system big time. Took me the better part of an hour to get the PC working again as it froze at boot up. The DeskPort uninstall seemed to work though.

I also disliked the UI.

I got the same email from Mike as the other poster about him being busy with the holiday weekend.

I also installed... and uninstalled DeskPort. I sent an email to DeskPort, and received this reply:

---------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sorry you don't find the additional functionality of DeskPort
worthwhile. If you came from MileTracker, the standalone MT version
will continue to work for the foreseeable future. If we can find the
resources to keep it updated, we will do so.

Thanks for trying DeskPort.

Harris Turner

DeskPort Technologies, LLC
10803 Portside Court, Indianapolis, IN 46236 USA
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>

I too used MileTracker. I too contributed at least twice. I too do not like Deskport. In fact Deskpot everytime I try to use Deskport it shows all my accounts as unknown. So besides the fact that it makes multiple connections out to the Internet at program launch, besides the fact that it puts itself in the startup, besides the fact that you can't resize the display, besides the fact that it puts a behemoth in the task bar, it flat out doesn't work on my system.

I sent an email to the author, but I'll send a plee here: Don't abandon Miletracker!

Yahoo Awrads Tracker not the answer
 

States it only allows 5 accounts. Yeah right. Also doesn't appear to have the handy "launch" feature of MileTracker.

"Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?"

While I did not have the problems that others have had attempting to install theprogram I dislike the "new" program.

I deleted it and it will never be seen on my harddrive again. I hope the old program continues to function.

Suggestion: Microsoft Money
 

I'd like to suggest that folks check out Microsoft Money as a substitute. While it's probably not the best out there, it does a great job of basic mile tracking (dates, comments, flight miles vs. other miles, expiration, and so on). It works well for me, anyway.

You likely wouldn't want to buy it just for the FF account tracking, but if you're thinking about one of these programs anyway, it might be a factor for your decision. I have the Deluxe version -- don't know if the Standard version has FF accounts or not.