Category: Main

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Tech Support is the bane of my existence

ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet have done fabulously well, almost beyond my wildest dreams (OK, maybe not, I dream that I can sell 100 copies a day and then I could just sit back and relax). One of the downsides with this success is that support requests are on the rise. Some of the questions are simple and are just inquiries as the documentation could use a lot of help. Some of the requests are crashes; a majority of these crashes are due to poorly written scanner drivers and there is nothing I can do about them. A small number of requests have to do with bugs in the software. While I don’t (usually) mind some of the requests that are nicely worded and relatively short (the longer the message, the less inclined I am to read it; bulleted questions have a higher chance of getting a good response), some just drive me crazy. I answer every question myself, even if it is a canned response. I don’t like questions unanswered, so I feel the constant need to check my email and answer right away.

This, of course, causes me a great deal of stress as I’m not a very patient person. I do my best to answer questions in a professional manner, but sometimes I feel like answering questions with flippant responses.

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Proposed Tax Rebates send the wrong message

President Bush’s proposed tax rebates send the wrong message in my opinion to the American people. The rebates stop if you earn a certain amount of income which might be fine, but the purpose of the rebates is to get people to spend money. Americans already have a negative savings rate and this tax rebate (if it is to work as designed) sends the message that people who get it should spend the money instead of save it. Those who earn less money already have a hard time saving money; something should be done to encourage people to save and use credit wisely.

This poor plan didn’t seem to go over with Wall Street as it is doing too little to late. I think it is a complete waste of $185 billion dollars that our government doesn’t have anyway. While I don’t have a fix for this recession, getting those that can’t afford to spend more money to spend money by giving them a rebate is not helping anyone. This is completely politically motivated and unfortunately, those that fall for it and think that it is going to help, just don’t know any better.

While I’m not a fan of Mike Huckabee, his tax plan is interesting in that it taxes what you spend thereby (in a little way) encouraging people to save. We need more saving and less spending.

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Are Chargers fans fair weather fans?

There have been articles recently saying that fans of the San Diego Chargers would only come out in good weather, but that was proven wrong in a recent game when it was raining. However, this post isn’t about that type of weather. This is about fans that wear the Chargers colors/gear only when they are doing well. In the past week, we’ve seen people wearing Chargers jerseys, have bolts on their cars, fly Chargers flags, etc. This is not normal for San Diego. There are some rabid fans that always have their Chargers stuff around, most fans don’t. It is only when they’re doing well that people come out in full force with their support for the team. Wouldn’t true fans fly the Chargers colors in good times and in bad?

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You know you’re in trouble when…

you step onto an elevator and there is an employee that says “count to 3 and hope this goes up”. Well, that’s what happened today when we were out at the San Diego Wild Animal Park today. We go on their new elevator (today was the first day that it was open), when it wouldn’t go up. The employee hit the button a few times and after the door opened and closed, it eventually went up. Also, the employee had a radio in case it got stuck! As we were leaving the park, I heard over one of the employee radios that the elevators (one was already out of operation when we were there) were not working. Not a good opening day for the elevators!

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MacHeist, another round of cheap software

MacHeist is back with another bundle of software. In case you’re not familiar with MacHeist, it is a really well developed series of games that when you solve gives you free software and at the end of all the “missions” you get a discount on the full bundle. The free apps are an interesting marketing tool. Most of the developers that put their apps in give one version of the software that isn’t upgradeable. Most of the software, I had no use for, but a few apps caught my eye, including 1Password which has changed how I browse the web! I wasn’t planning on buying the current bundle, but I needed a graphics app and while I think the UI of Pixelmator is awful, and the bundle price was less than a normal license, so I bit. I don’t have a whole lot of use for most of the apps, but they donate 25% to charity and I might find some utility to the apps.

I used to have mixed feelings about the deal as it is a great deal for consumers, excellent revenue generator for the people behind it, donates to charity, but the developers only get a small portion of the profits. Last year there was some debate over this. After talking with one developer this past week, he indicated that when they do these types of deals, the sales on their own site doesn’t decrease! I’ve seen similar trends when I’ve done the MacZOT! promotions. Those people that know about these deals is very small and if the deals spread the word, then how bad can they be?

Kudos to MacHeist for another job well done and for putting together an excellent way for developers to get their software known.

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ReceiptWallet UI Overhaul

ReceiptWalletScreenSnapz002.png
I’ve started to do some work on the ReceiptWallet UI based on some ideas I got this week as well as customer feedback. I found that I personally had a number of “recent” smart collections, so I decided to make them a standard part of the interface. Also, I used some features of Leopard to get the “Source List” view (it looks OK on Tiger, but isn’t as slick). For some reason, this was harder than it should have been; I had to verify that drag and drop still worked and lots of other things didn’t break such as contextual menus, adding/removing collections, etc. However, I think it is all working now.

I am still working on some things, but will be putting out a beta next week.

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Document based vs One Main Window

After looking at NEAT Receipts yesterday and a few other programs, I’m beginning to think that my decision to make ReceiptWallet a one main window application may not have been the best one. A huge advantage to multiple windows is that people can have data files for each year or one for work and one for home. Unfortunately, changing from the main window to a document based model is not easy. Unfortunately NSPersistentDocument doesn’t support packages, but a few developers have figured out how to get around this. What does this mean? This would mean that all the data is stored in one package and it would appear as one file, but would actually be separated inside. This is exactly what I’d want with the database file separate from the actual PDFs.

Hmmmm…

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Ill informed sales guy

One of my stops today was to see the IRIScan Express2. It seemed like an OK scanner, but with crappy software. The guy demonstrating used their Readiris 11 software to scan. I happen to have a copy of Readiris that was free with my Fujitsu ScanSnap. Here’s a screenshot of the version I have (the one he demoed looked the same).

I asked him if it was TWAIN compliant and if I could use it in other programs (for instance, ReceiptWallet). He swore it was. I asked if I could try using Image Capture to scan; he said I could. It didn’t show up. Image Capture should show all TWAIN compliant scanners. Next I looked in /Library/Image Capture/TWAIN Data Sources. It was empty; all the TWAIN drivers should be there. I decided to stop arguing with the guy as he obviously didn’t have a clue, unless they somehow used some magic TWAIN driver that only shows up in their app.Now here is the dilemma. I’m going to have people ask about the scanner and my answer right now is “I haven’t tested it.”. They have a show special that makes the scanner $99 (normally $149) which is pretty good. Should I get it? I probably will and then if it doesn’t work, I’ll warn people to avoid it. They have a more expensive version (IRIScan Executive 2) that has the same hardware, but includes Cardiris 4 for scanning business cards. It doesn’t seem all that impressive, but I’ll reserve final judgement until I try it out.This leads into another one of my rant; why do hardware vendors have such crappy looking software?

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