Reflection 4 Mac 4.2

Rating:
Summary: Laughable in the face of the PC version
Review: Reflection for Macintosh is a terminal emulation program for the Mac platform. It allows any Mac user to access a Unix or OpenVMS system, emulating terminals ranging from VT52 to VT400 to WYSE to UNISYS, and a handful of others.

Mac Reflection is a commercial emulator, but falls short of what I expect from a commercial application. I've seen freeware emulators which are more feature rich than Mac Reflection. Granted, Mac Reflection supports high-wide characters and 132 column mode, which I have yet to find in a freeware application, and it does support ANSWERBACK settings, as well as a set of other custimizable features.

The one thing that is very weak in Mac Reflection is the window font. It does allow you to change the font size, but the font itself is ugly. Freeware emulators have a nicer looking font, and bumped up against PacerTerm, another commercial emulator for th Mac, it doesn't even compare. In addition to that, Mac Reflection suffers from stray characters when the graphics character set is invoked on the server.

The biggest let down of Mac Reflection is that its cousin, Reflection for ReGIS Graphics, which runs on the Windows platform, has all of the features and customizations that is wanted on the Mac platform. Users can close a session without properly logging off the server, and in the PC version, there is a feature to prevent that. In the Mac version, there is not. The macro (scripting) features of the PC client are far richer, as well as the window, menu, and toolbar customizations. To get a good idea of what Mac Reflection lacks, check out the review on Reflection for ReGIS Graphics. Most, if not all, of the highlighted features for PC Reflection do not exist for Mac Reflection.

As a bare minimum emulator, Mac Reflection gives you the basic functionality required to emulate other systems. In terms of custimization, user interface, and design, Mac Reflection falls short of being a good commercial emulator.

Pros

-Supports highwide and 132 column features
-Supports ANSWERBACK

Cons

-Week connection controls
-Ugly font display
-Buggy handling of graphics character set
-Lack of commercial quality interface and custimization
-Not built to the same spec as the Windows version of Reflection (which is a great emulator)

I cannot recommend this product. For basic emulation, you are better off using a freeware emulator. For a feature rich emulator, try the commercial emulator PacerTerm.