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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.
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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.
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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.
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Threading rears its ugly head, again
It seems to be a recurring topic here on my blog, threading. I was asked to look at a problem for a client yesterday and discovered a very subtle threading issuing (I actually didn't create it, one of the other people on the project created the problem when he added some code). Basically in order to show progress while the app is doing stuff, some code is executed on a separate thread. However, the main thread basically spins in a loop using something like: