ReceiptWallet on Sale!

For one day only, MacUpdate Promo will be selling ReceiptWallet at a discount. Visit MacUpdate Promo at: http://www.macupdate.com/promo/index.php?buy=OoOlQDvPDeq2 on Thursday, May 31, 2007 for the special promotion. MacUpdate Promo has a special deal everyday on some great software; while I’m not encouraging people to wait to make a purchase to get the discount, if you’re looking for some new software at great prices, check out MacUpdate Promo.

Note: if you miss this special on ReceiptWallet, I don’t know if or when it will run again and I can’t give discounts if you miss it.

New family addition

It’s been awhile since I blogged last and there is good reason for that! On May 3, we welcomed our newest addition to our family, Aiden Pierce Gruby. He has been keeping us busy and I’m sure he’ll do so for the next 18 years!

Aiden

Dumbest ReceiptWallet comment

Over on VersionTracker, someone posted a comment about ReceiptWallet saying that Quicken for Windows allows users to scan in receipts and attach them to the register. This is great, except that it is Windows! Most Mac users don’t want to use Windows and that’s why they use a Mac. Will this feature ever come to Quicken for the Mac? At this point I think it is highly unlikely. Quicken is a very old code base and needs to be made a universal binary to move forward; it is going to take a lot of work to do this and if Intuit was smart, they wouldn’t touch scanning on the Mac due to the poor TWAIN drivers that companies like HP and EPSON put out.

Another run in with AOL

I had another run in with AOL today. I got bounced mail from a customer with the following error messages in it:

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mailin-01.mx.aol.com.:
DATA
<<< 421-:  (RLY:CS4) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421rlycs4.html
<<< 421 SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE
... while talking to mailin-02.mx.aol.com.:
DATA
<<< 554-:  (RLY:CS4) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554rlycs4.html
<<< 554 TRANSACTION FAILED

So I checked the error message and it said that there was a compromised script on my server. OK, yeah right. I called AOHell and they opened a trouble ticket. I then tested sending email to an AOL account I setup and it worked fine. I then tried sending mail from a PHP script. It failed with the same error message which got me looking down the right path. My script was extremely simple, so I didn’t understand why it was being rejected. I searched on the net and didn’t find anything. I looked at the headers and the only thing that struck me was the X-Envelope-From address was apache@linux.gruby.com. Hmmm. So more searching and found a reference to php.ini. I looked in there and found:

; For Unix only.  You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

so I changed it to:

; For Unix only.  You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f anotheraddress@domain.com

Low and behold, I can now send email from my scripts to AOL users. So AOL’s error message is misleading and their detection is wrong. They check for apache@domainname and assume that it is from a compromised script. Lovely. This is a misguided attempt by AOL to combat spam.

Anyway, hopefully someone else that encounters this problem now has a fix.

Disappointment with Leopard Delay

Like many people, I’m quite disappointed that Apple has delayed the release of Leopard until October. Many of the features that Apple is touting look really cool, and I want to use them! While major OS updates take time to get them right and we all want to see a stable release, it would seem that a company as large as Apple could get the resources to do such an upgrade in the time they promised. Apple’s “excuse” is that they’re working on the iPhone and resources have been shifted to it over Leopard.

I see a number of problems with the delay. First off, putting the iPhone over the core Mac OS X shows a disturbing shift towards a consumer electronics company that started with the iPod. There is a lot of money to be made in cellphones, but it is a cutthroat business. Second, Apple should be able to hire adequate resources to do two major products at once. Apple is quite picky about their hiring of engineers and for the most part requires engineers to be a) employees and b) must be onsite in Cupertino. Many of the most highly qualified Mac OS X developers don’t want to relocate to Cupertino (have you seen the housing prices lately or looked at the traffic?) and want to remain contractors for flexibility. In addition, Apple has very draconian policies about doing outside projects while being employees. While this may not be legal in California as long as projects are done on their own time and using their own resources, very few, if any, Apple employees that I know of are afraid to doing projects such as shareware with stymies outside of the box thinking.

Another problem is outside of Apple’s control is that many people that apply for jobs say they know Cocoa, but in reality there are a limited numbers of developers/engineers that have commercial Cocoa experience. Many people say they have Cocoa experience, but that is based on a few small shareware applications. I’ve been developing using Cocoa for about 4 years now full time and I’d like to think that I’m highly qualified. Granted it is a chicken and an egg situation that people can’t get Cocoa experience without a job doing Cocoa and can’t get a Cocoa job without known Cocoa, but if Apple put aside being employees and the location, I’m sure that, for the right amount of money, Apple could find qualified developers/engineers.

I hope that the Leopard delay products a solid OS release, but based on the large number of features that Apple has indicated will be in Leopard and the features that Apple hasn’t revealed, I’m not very hopefully that 10.5.0 will be stable. It took up until Mac OS X 10.4.9 to make 10.4 very stable.

Good luck, Apple!

Unusable iTunes User Interface

I’m not sure what Apple has been thinking in its recent updates to iTunes in terms of user interface. The changes have taken the product many, many steps back in terms of usability. Just the other day I installed a new DVD drive in my dad’s iMac and when we were testing it, I went into iTunes to burn a full DVD to see what happened. I created a new playlist with 3.75 GB of music, changed the iTunes preferences to burn a data CD/DVD and clicked burn. A few minutes later, I tested the DVD in my machine and found that it only had 551 of the 1054 items in the playlist. My dad mentioned I needed to check all the items in the playlist to burn them; I did this and got the full DVD. No where in the interface does it say that only the checked items will get burned; the burn button tooltip says something like “Burn Playlist to CD/DVD”; it doesn’t say “Burn only the checked items in the selected playlist”. That was my first problem.

The second was that I saw the browser window on my dad’s machine and wanted to see it on mine to play with. After a few minutes I found “Show Browser”, but I then only had 2 columns and my dad had 3. We searched under the View menu, control clicked, and everything else we could think of to get the column turned on. We stumbled upon the item in Preferences to “Show genre when browsing”.

While I’m beating up iTunes, let me continue. In the General Preferences section there is an item labeled Shared Name. When isn’t this under the Sharing section? Moving on. In the source list, you can’t click on Library, Store, or Playlists. Apple has mixed controls in this list to make things confusing. I also discovered that if you try to delete an item in a smart playlist, it won’t delete which is understandable, but in iPhoto if you delete an item from a Smart Album, it is removed from your library. Ever hear of consistency?

Let’s not forget that none of the controls are standard controls from the wacky toolbars to the odd color of the toolbar. How about the eye button in the lower right?Picture 4.png The tooltip says “View library by artist, album, and genre.” I’m not quite sure how an eye fits that? Let’s look at the view icons in the upper right. The first two change just the bottom half of the window if the browser is shown while the third one changes the top and bottom. Does that make sense?

I think Apple just keeps cramming stuff into iTunes without paying much attention to usability. I’m sure people will disagree with me.

Opened my own store

My software sales have been doing well in the past 12 months which meant that my rate for eSellerate went up (the initial rate is a teaser rate). I could handle the initial rate even though it was a bit steep for the pieces I use, but the new rate was a 50% increase and that really hurt. So on Sunday, I started figuring out how to put up my own store. I looked at a few eCommerce solutions and settled on Zen Cart. I then setup a merchant account with PayPal as it was easy, had decent rates, and I never see the credit card numbers. Today I finally got the pieces together to integrate my registration codes into my store. To make people feel safe, I bought an SSL certificate (a wildcard one). I really didn’t need one as I don’t see credit card numbers, but I think it was worth the investment. There is still more work to be done to the store, but I think it is good enough for now. So without further ado, I present my web store.

10.4.9 is like a rock!

For the most part, Mac OS X has been solid and reliable. However, there are times when I have to restart. Recently my machine wouldn’t always wake from sleep requiring me to power cycle it; I don’t shutdown my machine all that often, but opt to sleep it so it wakes faster. I saw this a lot under 10.4.8 and it also seemed to occur when I unplugged my machine from my external monitor, keyboard, etc. With 10.4.9, I’m quite happy to say that I haven’t seen any of that. Some apps have crashed, but I haven’t had to restart my machine.

Way to go, Apple! Hopefully this will keep up with Leopard, but there are supposed to be lots of changes, that we might be starting over with stability.

Whoa…Sprint actually came through!

I’m now through a few billing cycles with Sprint after the guy at the Sprint store mucked with my account. As I posted before, I got 4 additional lines (and phones) and my bill was supposed to drop by about $20 per month. Low and behold, it actually has (it takes a few billing cycles to work out the plan changes)! So I have 4 phones sitting on the shelf doing nothing. I probably could get a few bucks more off per month (one discount I have wasn’t applied to 4 lines), but I’m not going to sweat it. I would also have liked free mobile to mobile calling on all lines (there are 10 on my account and only 5 have mobile to mobile), but since we don’t go over our minutes, it isn’t a problem. I did have to sign up for another 2 year contract, but that’s minor as I don’t see switching off Sprint any time soon; coverage is good for me (and my family) and they finally have phones that I like (my wife and I have the Motorola Razr V3m). You might be asking why I have 10 lines on my account; 4 lines are idle (phones on my shelf), one used by me, 1 by my wife and the other 4 by my family members. They get a sweet deal piggybacking off my account, but I don’t mind as long as we’re under our allotted minutes.

For all my complaining about Sprint, this time I can really say, thanks for doing something right!

Success with Amazon affiliates

When I started ReceiptWallet back in October, I thought that it was a good idea to become an Amazon Affiliate and point people to scanners and collect a little money off the referrals. It turns out I was right. While I can’t retire off the 4-6% that Amazon pays me for each sale, it’s still a little money in my pocket. The DocketPORT 465 is one of the top sellers as that’s a scanner I recommend for ReceiptWallet. If I could sell the DocketPORT myself, I could make a little more money, but then I’d have to deal with inventory, returns, questions, etc. One problem with the affiliate system is that if I personally buy anything, I don’t get credit for it which is understandable. Oh well.

So, if you want to order from Amazon, please use the search box on this page and start your purchase so that I can afford to feed the dog 🙂