My comments in this blog seem to offend some. For better or for worse, I speak what is on my mind. It sometimes gets me in trouble, but most of the time helps me get stuff off my mind. I will admit that I’m a Mac snob and want applications to have a Mac user interface; I don’t want some cross platform UI (if the app works well and the engine or behinds the scenes stuff is cross platform, that’s fine).I received email about a recent post where I basically said that the app’s UI was crap. I couldn’t get past the UI to actually use the app, so it could be a fine app, but the UI was just awful. For me, pretty much anything done in REALBasic that isn’t tuned to the Mac is not a Mac app. Should the author be offended? Sure, he has the right to be offended if he wants. I stand by what I said about the UI; I like using a Mac and if I wanted to use Windows, I’d accept half baked user interfaces and put up with what is shoved in my face. Mac apps are just more elegant and have more polish.
My first podcast interview
Today I had the opportunity to be interviewed on the T4 Show. I’ve never done an audio interview before (I was interviewed back in high school for the recycling project I started for the local paper), so I was a little nervous. I tried to focus and think before speaking. After a few false starts with Skype (I’ve never used Skype before), we switched to iChat and things worked well.
You can listen to the whole interview by downloading the podcast. If you like the podcast, you can subscribe via iTunes.
I’ve listened to the show once (I actually have a number of episodes on my iPod, but only got around to listening to it the other day). I had a lot more time to listen to podcasts last year when I was training for my second marathon; now that I just goto the gym a few times a week, I don’t have as much time (I can’t just listen to them when I’m working as it hurts my concentration).
I’m not sure how I did on the interview, but I enjoyed doing it. I hope it is the first of many interviews.
Thanks, Michael!
Writing documentation
I have the daunting task of writing the documentation for ReceiptWallet. While I have some as well as some knowledge base articles, the docs need an overhaul. I wrote the previous version of the docs for Apple Help by hand. This time, I was going to look for a tool to do it. I found 3 options. HelpLogic, Simple Help Editor, and Mac Help Writer. The UI on the first two makes me want to barf. They say that they’re cross platform programs. For most programs, “cross platform” means “we have a crappy Mac UI in order to get it to work on Windows”. This isn’t true for all applications, but for many.
I tried to overlook the UI of these apps and the cost wasn’t an issue, but I couldn’t figure out how to use either program and HelpLogic kept saying that it couldn’t save my preferences and to check permissions. Not a good start. So I gave Mac Help Writer a try. It looked like it would work even if it did require me to use the format the author of the app wanted. I could live with that. However, there were 2 major flaws with the program. First is I couldn’t create ordered lists and second I couldn’t insert graphics. I went ahead and bought it and figured that I’d edit the files by hand after creating them.
Right before I went to bed and after I cranked out a bunch of help, I figured it out! I would use tokens and then search and replace later. So I’d encode < as %% and > as %%%; I’d search for the latter first and everything would work out.
To make things even easier, I created a shell script (with the help of Jerry Brady of Blue Circle Technologies) that automates the process after I use Mac Help Writer to generate the help.
#!/bin/bash
path_to_script=$(cd ${0%/*} && echo $PWD/${0##*/})
path_to_script_parent=`dirname "$path_to_script"`
cd $path_to_script_parent
cp -f Images/* ReceiptWallet\ Help/images/
cp -f Styles/* ReceiptWallet\ Help/styles/
cd ReceiptWallet\ Help/
WEBROOT="pages"
FILES=`find $WEBROOT -type f | grep html$`
for F in $FILES
do
echo " processing: $F"
/usr/bin/perl -i -p -e "s/%%%/>/g" $F
/usr/bin/perl -i -p -e "s/%%/This makes my markup look kind of funny, but it seems to work and I’m now more than half way through my help!
Backup, backup, and backup again
There are two types of computer users, those that have lost data and those that will. Yes, I know this is a profound statement, but computers are prone to fail (they are made by humans, who do, of course, make mistakes). I’m very religious about my backups as I have lost data in the past, not much data, but some. For years, I did weekly archives to CDs and then DVDs. These were good as I could go back in time and get old data, but it turns out I never did that. Last year I shredded years of old CDs and DVDs. My current strategy is to protect against hardware failure and software corrupting data. The first part is easy, just backup to an external drive every day. I do this and rotate between 3 drives; one is always offsite in my safe deposit box. I goto my safe deposit every Friday (the tellers know me I’m there so often). This is a great strategy and has served me well. I did have a hard drive failure several years back, but recovered quite easily (not quickly because my most recent backup that was a few hours old was sitting in the safe deposit box that I couldn’t get to for 2 days as I dropped it off on a Saturday). Every day I use SuperDuper! to backup and I’m very pleased with this. I’ve added Time Machine to my mix and that has also saved me. I believe you can never have too many backups. Oh and I forgot, my virtual private server gets an archive created daily and then once a day, it is synced down to my machine and then weekly copied to a drive going to my safe deposit box. So, I’m pretty well covered.
Why did I write all this? I got a panicked email from a user that used Carbon Copy Cloner to backup his drive, erased his computer and then installed Leopard. However, he apparently didn’t verify that this backup (his only one) worked. When he fired up DocumentWallet, all his documents that he had created over the last 8 months were gone and he wanted to know how to get them back. I’m not sure what the final result was, but I told the user where DocumentWallet stores his data and to search his hard drive; hopefully he’ll find his documents. At any given time, I have 4 backups of my data (1 Time Machine and 3 cloned drives with SuperDuper!). Could disaster strike me? Sure, if I delete a file and discover months later that I need it, I won’t have it. This has happened a few times, but it wasn’t critical. With all my source code under Subversion version control, I have another layer of protection that lets me roll back to older versions of my source.
So the moral of my story is make sure you have a backup strategy and always do backups. Either use an automated system or make sure you are extremely consistent about it. (Mine is semi-automated; I have a cron job that launches SuperDuper! everyday at 5 pm and then I shove in one of my drive.)
Discounts for Apple Employees
Periodically I get inquiries from Apple employees about discounts. Sometimes I respond, “what kind of discount can you give me?”, but usually I give them the line that ReceiptWallet is priced low enough that it is affordable and if it saves time, isn’t it worth the cost?
I can understand educational users asking for discounts, but why should Apple employees get discounts? Do I get a discount on Apple products (yes, as a developer, I pay $500 to get 1 discounted machine a year, but that’s it and arguably, the discount I get for what I want is about $500, so it is a wash).
Crappy Support Policy
Yesterday, I went to see about contacting support for VMWare Fusion to see why my el cheapo negative and slide scanner wouldn’t work as no one responded to my forum post (on their forums). After poking around the site, I discovered that they only offer 30 days of complimentary email support. After that I have to pay per incident. Wow, that sure doesn’t make me want to use their product. I can understand complimentary phone support for a period of time, but limiting email support, that seems ridiculous. Yes, I realize that some people abuse it, but what about the average Joe who only contacts support with an issue, more over, a bug in the software?
If someone has gotten the VuPoint Slide/Negative Scanner running under VMWare, please let me know
Broken iCal – Application Needed to fix it
After my calendar didn’t sync today using BusySync, I started poking around. The BusySync log gave a Google error saying that I had exceeded my quota. I’m not sure what it was pushing or pulling, but I took the opportunity to clean up my calendars. I had events back to 2002 in it that I didn’t need. In iCal, I selected the option to delete events older than 60 days. I quit iCal and restarted it a few times. That didn’t help. Next a tip said to search for ‘a’ or ‘e’ and then delete items in the results. Well, that was tedious as iCal kept crashing and freezing when I did that, but I managed to delete a lot of events. Then I went back through my calendars and looked to see that old events were still there (most had an ‘a’ or ‘e’ in it). I deleted those. Before all this I exported my calendar and then re-imported it. That didn’t help. My calendar was so screwed up after years of using iSync, trying to sync to Google and lots of testing, that some events were duplicated 50+ times.
Someone needs to write an app that goes through and cleans up the calendar with options like, delete items older than x days and delete duplicates (you can key off the title and date and time for a duplicate). Of course, this is a one time or infrequently used app, so the demo mode would have to be quite limited or no one would buy. I would write it, but I already wasted my time fixing it by hand. I should file a bug with Apple that the delete events item doesn’t work.
Disappointed in new MacBook Pro Offering
I see that Apple released new MacBook Pro machines today. The upgrade seems quite minor. I was hoping for more. While I will get a new machine (after I pay the tax man and see what is left), I really wanted something faster than 2.5 GHz (the 2.6 GHz upgrade for $250 is a waste in my mind) with a larger 7200 RPM drive (the largest 7200 RPM drive I can get is 200 GB). In any case, it will be a nice upgrade from my almost 2 year old MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz Core Duo with 100 GB hard drive). Apple is still out of whack with its RAM pricing; I can go down to The Chip Merchant and buy 4 GB of RAM for $110; Apple wants $400.
Hypocritical government
This shouldn’t be news to most, but our government is quite hypocritical. Today I was reading about a bunch of men that were arrested in Saudi Arabia for flirting with women. They were arrested by the religious police. Here is a country that has no religious freedom and is a dictatorship, ummm, I mean kingdom. Yet, the US considers Saudi Arabia an ally and hasn’t made moves to invade it. The US has tried to intervene in other countries that are dictatorships and have governments that the US doesn’t like, but because Saudi Arabia has oil and is strategically placed, the US keeps it as a bed buddy. Is Saudi Arabia any different than communist governments or say Cuba?
Mess of wall chargers
Yesterday I went to use my Sony Reader and it said “Low Battery”. This was very strange as it had been plugged into the charger for 2 days, so it should be charged. I looked at the Reader and it said it used a 5.2 V charger. I looked at the charger and it said 5 V. Hmmm. That was strange, so I dug through my chargers and found the 5.2 V charger. The 5 V charger was from my PSP; I plugged the 5.2 V charger in and this morning, the Reader was all set to go. Now, the two chargers had identical plugs on them, so it was quite easy to make the mistake. If Sony had a clue, it would have made the same charger for both products as it would have saved on manufacturing costs and would have reduced confusion for people like me that own both products.