Where has time gone?

Last Saturday, we celebrated our son's first birthday. It seems like just yesterday that we brought Aiden home from the hospital. We have learned so much over the last year, have had many sleep deprived nights, but most of all, we love being parents and seeing Aiden smile and be happy (most of the time).

Congratulations to my competitor!

I'd like to congratulate my competitor, NeatReceipts, for finally shipping a Mac version! I know that this has been a long time coming. Way back before I started ReceiptWallet, I contacted them about a Mac version. They said it was coming next year. That was more than 1.5 years ago. ReceiptWallet was first released in November 2006 and that has given me lots of time to make a product that I use everyday and have thousands of customers that also use the product.

One of the things I find interesting about their Mac product is they keep stating what it doesn't do more than what it does do. They also promise features for the version that will be out early 2009. Well, what about the people that want a product now? I've decided to offer those users that want ReceiptWallet a competitive upgrade. Information about this offer can be found over at the ReceiptWallet site.

While the NeatReceipts Mac scanner won't work directly with ReceiptWallet (they chose to use Apple's Image Capture Architecture), users can scan into Image Capture and then import the scans into ReceiptWallet. I'm looking at supporting ICA, but there are far too many issues with it to make it usable. I am working with an engineer at a major scanner vendor in an effort to help Apple fix the issues with ICA and make it usable. I have ICA support in ReceiptWallet, but it is disabled. I'm not a huge fan of the TWAIN drivers most vendors ship with their scanners, but those drivers work better than ICA at this point in time.

Anyway, I'm hoping that competition in the receipt management space brings me more publicity. I know that I'm the small fry in this space, but my heart is completely into ReceiptWallet. I listen to every piece of feedback that comes in and try very hard to get new features added as quickly as possible and to address any issues that arise. I'm currently releasing new versions at least once a month (sometimes more often) so that I can quickly address issues and provide the most stable product as possible. As a small developer, I have that luxury and users don't have to sit around waiting 6 months to a year for a bug to get fixed.

If you don't have anything nice to say about someone, don't say it

Everyone has heard that if you don't have anything nice to say about someone, don't say it. Well, I guess politicians haven't heard this saying. In your local city council race, a former local news personality is going up against an unknown CPA. The new personality (Marti Emerald) has sent campaign mailers touting what she has done and what she will do. Her opponent (there are a few other candidates, but these are the top 2), April Boling has only sent us campaign flyers that sling mud at her opponent. What kind of campaigning is that? We know nothing about her and she just wants to say what Marti Emerald isn't. If the signs around the neighborhood are indicative of the outcome of the race, Marti will win by a landslide.

Good API ideas gone bad

Back when I started writing ReceiptWallet, I wanted to add scanner support and the easiest way looked like I could use Apple's Image Capture (ICA) framework. This worked quite well for the first scanner I tried, but the second one only scanned in black and white or had some other problem. So, I gave up on that, learned enough TWAIN to get ReceiptWallet working with most scanners that had TWAIN drivers. I was quite content for 1.5 years (except for the crappy scanner drivers and crash reports I regularly received). Last week I was contacted by a developer who asked me if I was going to support ICA because some newer scanner drivers were going to be written around ICA. I already had ICA code in ReceiptWallet (I actually tried again right before ReceiptWallet 2.0 was released), so I took a look at it. Well, there is either a problem with my scanner or ICA in Leopard (10.5.2) as I can only scan in black and white. Furthermore, there is a really simple function, ICAImportImage, that should reduce the amount of work I have to do and presents a standard user interface.

There are a few major problems with this interface. The whole area near Scan To Folder is unnecessary if it is called from within an application. I don't want the user to specify where it goes, the format or automatic task. The second major issue is if I change Scan Mode to Flatbed (even though I have a sheet feed scanner), parts of the UI dim and I have to quit the app (same thing happens in Apple's Image Capture application).

So while this is great in theory (I've seen one app use this and apparently not care about the issues), it is a poor user experience in any app other than Image Capture. I'll write up a bug for Apple on this, but who knows when it will get fixed. As for my other issues with ICA, I opened an Apple DTS incident and some of my issues were confirmed as bugs. Wow, that makes it almost impossible to use ICA as I found several bugs in just a simple use of the API.

Will Apple fix ICA? Hopefully. When? I don't have any clue. My hope is that it is sooner rather than later.