EPSON, grumble, grumble, grumble

This weekend I finally had a chance to sit down with the EPSON CX9400 I picked up on Thursday. After hours upon hours of attempting to debug ReceiptWallet and figure out the problem, I finally came up with a workaround. It appears that the EPSON TWAIN data source doesn’t close a few of its resources when the data source is closed. Then when the data source is opened again lots of stuff has taken place since the last scan potentially causing the data source to lose track of its resources (or maybe Carbon doesn’t like trying to open the same resource more than once by the same plugin). In any case, I worked around this by not closing the data source for any EPSON scanner. I really, really dislike this solution, but I went through a lot of my code and tried removing chunks to see if they caused the issue and then eventually discovered that if I started a scan, closed the scan, then showed the thumbnail view (I normally show the list view), it would crash. So all the code I tested to see if it caused the crash really led me no where.

So, this proves to me (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the EPSON scanner driver is a piece of junk and causes lots of problems for ReceiptWallet users.

While I’m beating on EPSON, I decided to grab a screenshot of their latest user interface. This is 2008, not 2000 when I bought my last EPSON scanner. Can we at least get the buttons to be nice OS X buttons and use fonts that don’t look like crap? This UI is completely unacceptable; it’s kind of interesting that the Apple store doesn’t sell any EPSON scanners or all-in-one devices (at least the online Apple store).

I recommend that Mac users stop buying EPSON devices (unfortunately I had to buy one to test) until EPSON decides to spend some money and fix the drivers. They are in such sorry shape, it isn’t even funny.