Today I released DocumentWallet, a product similar in concept to my ReceiptWallet program. The two programs share much of the same code, but I felt that they needed to be separate applications. The market for this type of program is quite crowded and I own a few of the “competition”, but didn’t find any one of them to meet my needs. I hope that others feel the same way. I think I’ve done some clever sales tactics by offering it for 50% off for ReceiptWallet customers. I also decided not to penalize people that buy one and then want to buy the other. Some vendors give you a great deal for a bundle, but if you don’t buy it then, tough luck. I now choose to run my business in a way that my customers want to come back. Having an easy to use product should make it easier to sell than some of my past products. I hope it sells well.
Upper body pain – huh?
Today after my run (training has begun for my 2nd marathon), I started to feel pain in my upper body. This doesn’t happen after a run so I started thinking, what could cause this? Then I remembered I started playing my Nintendo Wii 2 days ago. While I haven’t played with it much, the swinging action is doing a number on me. I thought I was in decent shape, but it’s making me work in a way I didn’t expect. Thanks Nintendo!
A solution to an annoying ScanSnap issue
I’ve now had my Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-511E0XM for less than a day now and one thing that I found quite annoying is that if I wanted to scan between scanning to ReceiptWallet and to another application, say preview, I had to go into the ScanSnap Manager preferences (sorry, settings), and change the app. The app has a dock menu, so it wouldn’t have been rocket science to let me switch between apps from the menu. So, with a point in the right direction from a colleague, I present ScanHelper. ScanHelper is a small application that places a menu in the menubar that lets you select which application should be used for scanning. Simply tell the ScanSnap Manager to use ScanHelper and then ScanHelper routes the scans to the selected application. You can now easily select a destination right from the menubar. I’m releasing this as free software, but if you like it, please buy my ReceiptWallet application. You can download ScanHelper here.
Digging up the past can sometimes be a good thing
I was contacted today by someone looking for a real early version of Eudora for Newton (prior to 1996) to prove that someone’s patent claim of email on a handheld is invalid. That’s pretty amazing to me that someone would actually attempt to claim email on a handheld so late as Eudora for Newton wasn’t the first; there was eWorld and the Motorola Marco which pre-dated Eudora for Newton. As I was searching and digging up stuff, I came across a press release announcing that Eudora Pro for Newton won a CES Innovations award in 1997 (that’s 10 years ago!). I either forgot about the award or no one ever told me about it. I wasn’t at CES to receive the award (I’ve never been to CES, I was at Comdex for one day the prior year, I think), but I guess that’s what happens in a big company. I was the sole author of the product, so I guess I can claim the award as my own.
Let’s Play “Find the UI issues in the scanner software”
Today I received the Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-5110EOXM that I ordered (I couldn’t pass up the $100 Macworld discount and the $50 rebate). The scanner is great; it scans to PDFs and doesn’t make me look at their ugly user interface too much. However, I thought I’d point out the issues (first off I had to find the version of the software that was Intel native as the CD didn’t have it and it wasn’t readily available on their website:
- They use Command-S to bring up Settings; it should be Command-, and the menu should be labeled Preferences
- The buttons in the settings dialog are all laid out wrong. Mac applications put the OK button on the right, not the left like it is in their software
- They use low resolution graphics
in the settings dialog - They are inconsistent with the use of periods; they use them at the end of some radio buttons when they shouldn’t
- They should use sheets instead of modal dialogs for some things
- By having too many tabs, they have to put warnings in some tabs, like: “Note: JPEG is available only when “Color” is selected at [Color Mode].” If this were all on one tab, it could have automatically changed (which it actually does, but you won’t notice it until you flip tabs) and the user could see it.
- Location of saved files looks like it is an edit text field, but you can’t edit it. You have to click Browser … and choose the folder
- Browser … button has an extra space in the text
- They don’t need so many sub dialogs as they could have accomplished much of it in the main window
- Under “File name format …, they have “ex.) 2007_01_19_15_56_49.pdf” which is the example of the file name that will be generated. They could have spelled our example or done this another way; there is plenty of room
- When the scanner is off, the dock icon has a big red circle with a slash through it
For such a small application, it really has an awful looking interface. Luckily I won’t have to see it much.
Please, oh please, ask for a user interface review by Apple; they’d be more than happy to rip your application to shreds. (I’ve had a few UI reviews and got my stuff ripped apart, so I know how it feels.)
Fed up with non-English speaking customer service reps
Last week my wife called me while I was at Macworld telling my that the credit card company called to tell us that our credit card number had been compromised and that we had to close the account. I waited until Tuesday to close it as I was out of town and didn’t want to deal with it. I spoke to a customer service rep on Tuesday whose accent was very heavy and who didn’t seem to be a fluent English speaker. She asked if I wanted new cards sent overnight; I asked if it cost more and she said no, so I said of course. Today is Thursday. No cards. I called again and spoke with another rep who was a native English speaker. After a few minutes (and him getting annoyed reading my record when he discovered a mistake), he apologized and said that the cards were sent via regular US Mail. Lovely, nothing we can do about it now except wait a few more days. Uggh.
Product Version Numbers
The normal scheme of version numbering for products seems to work for most developers. Going from 1.x.x to 1.x.x+1 is a minor bug fix; going from 1.x.x to 1.x+1.x is maybe a few new features and bug fixes. In some cases, developers only charge for 1.x.x to 2.x.x updates which makes a lot of sense to me to differentiate the products. That’s how I like to do things. Today I downloaded a new version of a freeware product I was using (I was using version 1.1.2) and when I downloaded the 1.2 version, was extremely surprised to find that it was now shareware ($34). While the developers said that they would be charging in the future, a minor version number update caught me off guard. Furthermore, they didn’t provide release notes on what changed, but instead on first launch, I got an alert to buy it. I poked around for a few minutes and then reverted to the freeware version. I’m not opposed to developers making money, but they should have called it 2.0 and added some additional value to it (or charged money from the beginning). I’m a bit disappointed in this, but on the flip side, it reinforces my desire to write a new application based on ReceiptWallet.
First impressions of the Garmin Training Center for the Mac
Last January, Garmin announced that they’d have a Training Center version for the Mac. That was one of the reasons I bought my Forerunner 305. Last week, they delivered (a little late). I saw a few screenshots before Macworld on the Garmin blog and posted a comment that it looked very un-Mac like just from the 3 screenshots I saw; Garmin didn’t approve my comment. I guess the truth hurts.
I picked up a CD at Macworld (they’re not making it available until later this month for download due to localization issues or some such nonsense; they deliver their other software as fully localized or English only; I just checked the page for the iQue 3600 and there is an English-only and an EFIGS-English, French, Italian, German, Spanish version). I loaded up the software on Sunday and my first impression was not very good. Brushed metal has to go and the main screen just doesn’t look right; there is a lot of space around it. It would have been better to put the information (profile information) in preferences. The application has no drag and drop onto the icon to import files (I downloaded stuff from my MotionBased account) even though there is an import menu item. Heh folks, that is about 5 minutes of code to put it in; just add a Cocoa method:
- (BOOL)application:(NSApplication *)theApplication openFile:(NSString *)filename
And add tcx as a file extension to the info.plist file.
Next, I can’t edit any of my activities. The ones I import are all coming in as Skiing instead of running. I can’t sort the columns (clicking on a column highlights it), I can’t turn off columns. I can, however, reorganize the columns. If I choose the Close menu item, the app quits. If I click in the column title for Activities, the sort arrow changes, but does nothing.
Right now I can’t use all the maps I have for my iQue 3600, so I get a totally useless map view in the center of the screen that I can’t collapse.
So, I have no idea what took Garmin so long to do this. Their program didn’t take a rocket scientist to write. My first pass of ReceiptWallet took 2 weeks of almost full time work and then about another month of part time tweaking to release a solid 1.0 product. If Garmin has more than 1 person working on this full time, they should call me to fix it! The MotionBased folks said that they got the USB code for talking to the device from the Training Center developers last March (or so) to get MotionBased working on the Mac, so that leads me to believe that Garmin spent 9+ months on the user interface. Ouch.
For now, I’ll stick with MotionBased; I renewed my subscription last month and it is significantly more full featured that Training Center. Granted, MotionBased is not free, but I would have paid something for a good Mac Training Center.
My take on Macworld
Now that Macworld is over and everyone and his dog has blogged about the good, the bad, and the ugly, I’ve decided to post my reactions. I had a chance to watch the keynote yesterday (no time last week as I was working a booth) and the one thing that came to my mind was iSnooze. So Apple announced AppleTV and the iPhone. I have no interest in the AppleTV as we don’t watch many movies and any TV shows we watch, we just record on our TiVo. If I want to show pictures on my TV, I just turn on the TiVo desktop software and presto, I have it; I don’t want to stream music to my TV as I just use my Squeezebox. So, the AppleTV buys me nothing (at least nothing I can see right now).
The iPhone is interesting (at first I really didn’t like it). However, I don’t think it is for me for a number of reasons: no tactile feel, GSM only (for now), and no flip cover to protect the screen. When I was at QUALCOMM working on the pDQ phone (the first Palm OS based smartphone), we said it had to be a phone first, a PDA second and that’s why it had a keypad that flipped over the screen so you could dial. The Treo, to me, seems like a PDA first, a phone second as I’ve never been impressed with the phone quality. My Motorola RAZR is a very nice phone; voice quality is the best I’ve heard in a phone. That leads me to the iPhone. It looks to me like an iPod first, a phone second (or maybe third after the Internet stuff). Of course, it will probably sell well and I may change my mind later, but it just doesn’t appeal to me.
Why was the keynote iSnooze? It was a Macworld keynote and there wasn’t any discernible mention of the Macintosh. I didn’t expect Leopard to be ready, but I hoped to see another feature or two revealed. No new Macs were introduced and I really would have been quite happen with an iLife ’07. One small feature in that probably would have impressed me more than the iPhone.
As for the rest of the show, it takes a lot to impress me. Nothing stood out. I visited the Garmin booth and picked up a copy of the Training Center for the Mac (my impressions of that in another post) and liked the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, so much so that their $150 off (rebate and coupon) got me to order one. It should work quite well with ReceiptWallet.
Maybe next year if I set my expectations real low, the slightest cool thing will get me excited.
One of the worst products of the decade?
The other day, my wife and I were watching CNET’s video blog on TiVo and they had the top 5 worst products of the last decade. Number 4 on the list was PocketMail. This really pains me; PocketMail is/was a device/service that allowed you to send and receive email by putting the device up to a phone and dialing a toll free number. This worked quite well before wireless data was relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous. It also appeals to RV owners who drive around the country and may not have access to good cell phone coverage and want to keep in touch. So, I really believed in the product, but what really hurts is that I worked on the Backflip with was the PocketMail device that clipped onto a Palm OS device. So, I was involved in what CNET considers one of the worst products in the last decade. How does that make me feel?