Clicker review eInstruction Response on Mac OSX

eInstruction is a company making clickers for audience response in lectures and seminars. This page is a review of the hardware clicker CPS Pulse and the accompanying software Response v6.71 (12/2012). The software appears to be mostly in Java and thus runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I'm testing on a Mac, so the comments may not extend to the other run-time environments.

Mac software: Response v6.71

• The windows don't behave properly, for example, they cannot be minimized. And worse, a 2nd window can block another, e.g. preference pane makes the response bar inaccessible.
• The installation is very cluttered. The application should limit itself to one directory but instead dumps often various files with subdirectories into no fewer than 4 different locations: home, applications, documents, and library folder. Couldn't be much messier!
• The name space for files is often too short. Are we still in the 8+3 era?
• The Powerpoint plugin doesn't respect toolbar customization and instead always resets to default (toolbar position reverts, icon only resets to icon+text).