On the verge of releasing ReceiptWallet

As I've promised on my website, ReceiptWallet 2.0 is going to be released by mid March. I've been busy putting together all the pieces and am quite pleased how things are shaping up. I had a web designer completely redo my website and managed to "skin" all the pieces of my site (store, support and main site) so that the same theme is carried throughout.

I'm quite excited about this release as I think that the software is very sound and appeals more to a wider audience with ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet combined. In addition, the new website will give the software a more professional look. While I'm not going to reveal exactly when I'm going to push everything out the door before I do, time is running out to hit mid March, so it will be soon :-)

iPhone SDK: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Apple announced the iPhone SDK the other day and there is a lot of discussion about it among those that I know. Overall, I'm quite happy with Apple's offering; while I don't have a huge interest in writing handheld applications anymore (I wrote Newton and Palm software for way too long), it might be fun to dabble in some stuff. In addition, I have some clients interested in apps.

The Good

• Xcode is the development environment.
• There is a simulator.
• Apple is charging money to get a certificate and release applications; this might keep out some of the weekend developers that don't have good development practices.
• The SDK looks very complete.
• Background applications can't be written. Yeah, hopefully this will make the platform more robust.

The Bad

• Apple won't take my money to become a developer, yet. I applied, but who knows if I'll be accepted.
• The $99 fee is too low. Yes, I said it. The barrier to entry is so minor, that every Tom, Dick, and Harry will sign up. I don't want my iPhone to crash and have people write crap. I've been through that with the Palm; there is so much crap that people just throw out there. I want quality and people that are serious about development. I have nothing against hobby developers (except they drag the value of software down by releasing stuff for next to nothing), but the entire iPhone platform will get a bad reputation if people download software and have their iPhone crash. Maybe Apple will yank the apps that crash.
• No Interface Builder support, yet (I'm impatient).
• Enterprise developers are charged more than commercial developers; I'm not sure what this is about, but maybe it has to do with a different distribution mechanism. I have a client that wants to sign up and doesn't have a problem with the fee, but it seems to me that Apple should just have one fee.
• Why were some companies chosen to get early access and others weren't? I've been developing handheld applications for over a decade and no one contacted me. I guess they were just looking for the wow factor; one of the companies that was selected has written garbage in the past on other platforms, but the company name means something...I guess quality doesn't.

The Ugly

• Apple underestimated the demand. It took hours for me to grab the SDK; to top it off, someone brilliant put a link to the SDK on Apple's homepage to drive even more traffic to it.

I've only poked around in the SDK as I'm trying to get ReceiptWallet 2.0 out the door, but will take a closer look in the upcoming weeks.

PDFKit is borked

I love that Apple has lots of frameworks for me to use in my apps and gives me things for free such as PDF viewing and manipulation. This is with PDFKit. The problem with PDFKit is that it isn't very tolerant of PDFs created from various other applications. I reported a bug with this back in the 10.4 era and it got fixed; I simply added a keyword to a PDF using Preview and it crashed (this is the same thing I do in ReceiptWallet). Now, I was pointed to another PDF that has the same behavior. The steps to reproduce this are quite simple:

1. Download the IRS W-9 form
2. Open it in Preview (on 10.5.2)
3. Choose Tools->Inspector
4. Click on the keywords tab
5. Click the + button
6. Add a keyword
7. Do a Save As and give it a name
8. Watch Preview crash

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000000dce481a4
Crashed Thread:  0

Am I out of touch with my users?

I received 2 pieces of email today about the new ReceiptWallet 2.0 beta basically saying that they wanted their receipts and documents in one window since ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet were now one. When they were separate applications, receipts and documents had to be in separate windows as they were separate programs. With the combined program, that is basically still the case. Furthermore, with multiple libraries users can now separate out information more, like for multiple years, multiple companies, multiple projects, etc. If everything was in one window, this wouldn't be possible. Am I missing the point of these users? It has me very confused and almost questioning the major decisions I've made about the products (making them handle multiple libraries and combining them). However, most of the feedback I've received has been quite positive; one user even bought a second copy that he didn't need just because he liked the new version so much.I take what my users say to heart and spend a lot of time thinking about what to implement and how to implement. I don't just discard feedback; I always think about it and wonder how many other users are thinking the same thing. Unfortunately most users don't contact me, so I have no idea what they think of what I've done.