$2000 dog bone

No, we don’t feed our dog diamond studded bones or anything like that. We’ve been letting him chew on a plastic Nylabone. He loves them and goes through them periodically. Well, on Sunday we were playing with him when I noticed a tooth fragment on the ground. My wife looked in his mouth and saw the tooth with the pulp exposed. After reading that this could be serious, I took him into the vet yesterday. The vet said that it was a fractured tooth and the tooth was a major one. The only option is root canal since Marley (the dog) is only 3.5 years old (older dogs he’d recommend just giving antibiotics and depending on the tooth, extracting it) and he really needs the tooth.

There are basically 2 veterinary dentists in Southern California; one here in San Diego (there are less than 100 board certified veterinary dentists in the world). The vet called later in the day after talking to the dentist and gave me the bad news; it was going to be close to $2000 for the root canal plus $250 for X-rays prior to the procedure. Ouch. So, the dog is scheduled for his root canal next Friday. While we have pet health insurance, I think we’ll be lucky if it covers half. (Yes, we have insurance for our dog; while it may seem frivolous to some, the costs as seen here, for some procedures are extremely high.)

I hate that this is going to cost a chunk of change (and will likely delay the purchase of some stuff), when do you say stop paying for your pet? Isn’t your pet family? I know that Marley is a big part of our lives and I can’t imagine life without him. I know that his time will come, but until that happens, we’re going to do all that we can do for him.

ReceiptWallet 2.0 Released!

I am pleased to announce that ReceiptWallet 2.0 has been released along with a completely redesigned website! Thanks goto Julie Bender for the new website design, my beta testers for finding all the bugs that I couldn’t have found on my own, Eric Ullman for my press release, and of course, my wife, for putting up with me while I got this release out the door!

I’m very excited not just about the software release, but about the website as it now looks professional and all 5 components of my site are themed the same (the main site, the knowledge base, the store, the news area, a WordPress install, and the contact area). A lot of work went into getting this site to work smoothly and I think it looks great! I’m biased, but I’ve seen few “indie” developer sites that have the same look on all pieces of their sites; some get close, but leave out a piece here or there. I figured that while I was getting my site redone, I might as well go all out and make it all be consistent (as much as possible). My site looked like crap before and I should have made the leap earlier to get a professional to do it, but that’s now 20/20 hindsight.

Oh, and this ReceiptWallet upgrade is FREE to all ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet users!

Important lesson in using NSLocalizedString

In ReceiptWallet 2.0, I use an ellipses in a number of places for menu items, window titles, etc. I switched all my source files to UTF-8 and started using ellipses in the NSLocalizedString macros to make localization easier whenever I get to that point. Well, despite using UTF-8 for the file encoding, something went horribly wrong that I didn’t notice until today. The ellipses caused a bunch of my menu items to take on names of other things, like Scan Receipt became Combining Documents…. Huh, I thought. So after a bunch of research, I found the solution. 1) Replace … with \\U2026 and 2) In my script phase where I run genstrings to generate the Localizable.strings file, add a -u flag. While that seems like an easy fix, I almost went bonkers today as I’m nearing the ReceiptWallet 2.0 release and this would have been bad.

Package Based Documents

There have been a number of postings about having a Cocoa document based application where the documents are packages. None of the posts seemed to nail exactly what I wanted, so I managed to piece together a bunch of posts and came up with some sample code to demonstrate it. I used this as a basis for ReceiptWallet 2.0, but have made a bunch of changes since then. Feel free to use this code in any way you see fit, but I make no promises of how well it will work for anyone besides me.

Grab the source

On the verge of releasing ReceiptWallet

As I’ve promised on my website, ReceiptWallet 2.0 is going to be released by mid March. I’ve been busy putting together all the pieces and am quite pleased how things are shaping up. I had a web designer completely redo my website and managed to “skin” all the pieces of my site (store, support and main site) so that the same theme is carried throughout.

I’m quite excited about this release as I think that the software is very sound and appeals more to a wider audience with ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet combined. In addition, the new website will give the software a more professional look. While I’m not going to reveal exactly when I’m going to push everything out the door before I do, time is running out to hit mid March, so it will be soon 🙂

iPhone SDK: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Apple announced the iPhone SDK the other day and there is a lot of discussion about it among those that I know. Overall, I’m quite happy with Apple’s offering; while I don’t have a huge interest in writing handheld applications anymore (I wrote Newton and Palm software for way too long), it might be fun to dabble in some stuff. In addition, I have some clients interested in apps.

The Good

  • Xcode is the development environment.
  • There is a simulator.
  • Apple is charging money to get a certificate and release applications; this might keep out some of the weekend developers that don’t have good development practices.
  • The SDK looks very complete.
  • Background applications can’t be written. Yeah, hopefully this will make the platform more robust.

The Bad

  • Apple won’t take my money to become a developer, yet. I applied, but who knows if I’ll be accepted.
  • The $99 fee is too low. Yes, I said it. The barrier to entry is so minor, that every Tom, Dick, and Harry will sign up. I don’t want my iPhone to crash and have people write crap. I’ve been through that with the Palm; there is so much crap that people just throw out there. I want quality and people that are serious about development. I have nothing against hobby developers (except they drag the value of software down by releasing stuff for next to nothing), but the entire iPhone platform will get a bad reputation if people download software and have their iPhone crash. Maybe Apple will yank the apps that crash.
  • No Interface Builder support, yet (I’m impatient).
  • Enterprise developers are charged more than commercial developers; I’m not sure what this is about, but maybe it has to do with a different distribution mechanism. I have a client that wants to sign up and doesn’t have a problem with the fee, but it seems to me that Apple should just have one fee.
  • Why were some companies chosen to get early access and others weren’t? I’ve been developing handheld applications for over a decade and no one contacted me. I guess they were just looking for the wow factor; one of the companies that was selected has written garbage in the past on other platforms, but the company name means something…I guess quality doesn’t.

The Ugly

  • Apple underestimated the demand. It took hours for me to grab the SDK; to top it off, someone brilliant put a link to the SDK on Apple’s homepage to drive even more traffic to it.

I’ve only poked around in the SDK as I’m trying to get ReceiptWallet 2.0 out the door, but will take a closer look in the upcoming weeks.

PDFKit is borked

I love that Apple has lots of frameworks for me to use in my apps and gives me things for free such as PDF viewing and manipulation. This is with PDFKit. The problem with PDFKit is that it isn’t very tolerant of PDFs created from various other applications. I reported a bug with this back in the 10.4 era and it got fixed; I simply added a keyword to a PDF using Preview and it crashed (this is the same thing I do in ReceiptWallet). Now, I was pointed to another PDF that has the same behavior. The steps to reproduce this are quite simple:

  1. Download the IRS W-9 form
  2. Open it in Preview (on 10.5.2)
  3. Choose Tools->Inspector
  4. Click on the keywords tab
  5. Click the + button
  6. Add a keyword
  7. Do a Save As and give it a name
  8. Watch Preview crash
Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000000dce481a4
Crashed Thread:  0

Thread 0 Crashed:
0   libSystem.B.dylib             	0x952773af szone_free + 2101
1   com.apple.CoreFoundation      	0x9155c826 _CFRelease + 342
2   ...ple.ApplicationServices.ATS	0x906240d4 FindNameAsCFString + 1432
3   ...ple.ApplicationServices.ATS	0x90623acc ATSFontGetPostScriptName + 76
4   libCGATS.A.dylib              	0x9364e8e5 get_name_with_name_code_nl + 250
5   libCGATS.A.dylib              	0x9364ea67 ats_name_handler_get_postscript_name + 23
6   libCGATS.A.dylib              	0x9364fd48 get_postscript_name + 49
7   com.apple.CoreGraphics        	0x924f0cd3 CGFontNameTableCreate + 322
8   com.apple.CoreGraphics        	0x924f0b73 CGFontGetPostScriptName + 29
9   libPDFRIP.A.dylib             	0x18bd81a9 PDFFontType1EmitDefinition + 57
10  libPDFRIP.A.dylib             	0x18bd6674 write_definition + 55
11  libPDFRIP.A.dylib             	0x18bd4c38 PDFFontEmitDefinitions + 22
12  libPDFRIP.A.dylib             	0x18bd6197 emitFontDefinition + 17
13  com.apple.CoreFoundation      	0x9155f1fc CFSetApplyFunction + 140
14  libPDFRIP.A.dylib             	0x18bd61db PDFFontSetEmitDefinitions + 60
15  libPDFRIP.A.dylib             	0x18bd2f8b PDFDocumentFinalize + 385
16  libPDFRIP.A.dylib             	0x18bd1c0e pdf_Finalize + 28
17  com.apple.CoreGraphics        	0x925567bf CGContextDelegateFinalize + 55
18  com.apple.CoreFoundation      	0x9155c786 _CFRelease + 182
19  com.apple.CoreGraphics        	0x925567ac CGContextDelegateFinalize + 36
20  com.apple.PDFKit              	0x902a418a -[PDFDocument(PDFDocumentInternal) writeToConsumer:withOptions:] + 1491

Filed as Radar (Apple’s Bug Reporter) bug # 5784122. I don’t even enough a way around this. I could try to re-write the PDF, but if the PDF has filled in information, it will become toast. Do I have to write my own PDF code to handle this? Apple has so many technologies that some of the most useful (at least to me) get neglected; there is so much focus on the glitzy stuff that the basics get ignored.

Am I out of touch with my users?

I received 2 pieces of email today about the new ReceiptWallet 2.0 beta basically saying that they wanted their receipts and documents in one window since ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet were now one. When they were separate applications, receipts and documents had to be in separate windows as they were separate programs. With the combined program, that is basically still the case. Furthermore, with multiple libraries users can now separate out information more, like for multiple years, multiple companies, multiple projects, etc. If everything was in one window, this wouldn’t be possible. Am I missing the point of these users? It has me very confused and almost questioning the major decisions I’ve made about the products (making them handle multiple libraries and combining them). However, most of the feedback I’ve received has been quite positive; one user even bought a second copy that he didn’t need just because he liked the new version so much.I take what my users say to heart and spend a lot of time thinking about what to implement and how to implement. I don’t just discard feedback; I always think about it and wonder how many other users are thinking the same thing. Unfortunately most users don’t contact me, so I have no idea what they think of what I’ve done.

The OS war continues

Yesterday I was talking to 2 people that had completely different views on operating systems. The first person had just switched to a Mac and bought his wife one as well. He was extremely pleased and said that Vista actually caused him to switch as it was slow and then he had to upgrade his hardware to run it. He also thought that he’d need to run VMWare to run his old Windows apps, but found he only uses it for some media files (probably those with DRM) that don’t play on the Mac. On the flip side, the other guy was completely anti-Mac because he said it confused him and he didn’t like how iTunes arranged his music. Fair enough to not like iTunes as iTunes is designed for most users that don’t care where iTunes actually puts the music; he is the exception.

I always say that you should use the tool that gets the job done; if you want to use Windows, that’s your choice, but don’t ask me for help. People have also said, buy a computer that the person you know who knows most about computers uses so that you can ask them questions. With that kind of thinking, please buy Windows so you don’t ask me questions :-).

I think that most people that sit down with a Mac for awhile and get used to it, will find that it works well and may be less confusing than Windows. With all the software that ships with Macs, it makes it a no-brainer for many people.

The OS war will never end; however, these days with Intel based machines, it is much easier to convince people to move to the Mac.

Caught cheating

No, I didn’t cheat in school, I cheated in failing to fix a ReceiptWallet feature. When I was working on ReceiptWallet to move it to document based, I didn’t fix the AppleScript support. When ReceiptWallet was a single window application, the scripting support was global; with document based, the scripting had to be specific to a library. As anyone that has written AppleScript support, it is a royal pain in the you know what. I was hoping that no one would notice this, but even before the end of the ReceiptWallet beta, I had someone send me email about it. Damn, I guess I had to fix it.

So, I spent the last 2 days fixing the AppleScript support so that people can bulk load receipts and documents in ReceiptWallet. I’m quite pleased with it, but it was much harder to implement than I’d expect.