Planning for Aiden's first birthday

Our son, Aiden, is rapidly approaching his first birthday. We're trying to figure out what to do. Should we have a clown? How about a pony? How about one of those jumpy things? Wow, this is going to be huge. We're going to spend a lot of time and money planning a party that our son will never remember! Just kidding, we're not going overboard with his first birthday, maybe another birthday down the line, but why one that he won't appreciate? My wife has told me that some of the mothers she has run into are planning elaborate parties for their child's first birthday. What a waste.

Can't please everyone

Today, a very irate user sent me email complaining about the merging of ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. He wrote a very long email messages saying he felt ripped off and there is no mention of this on our website. Well, it isn't mentioned on the website because it is in BETA and hasn't been put into general release. There is no need to mention beta versions on our website (except for a small mention on how to get the cutting edge version).

As for being ripped off, shouldn't people buy software for what it does today and not what it could do with an update tomorrow? Does the software stop working just because a new version comes out? Personally I think that the cost of ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet at $44.93 (50% off the second program) is easily justified. If it saves a few hours of work, then it can be justified. I was originally going to charge $39.95 for ReceiptWallet alone, but decided to start at $29.95 and never got around to raising the price. I've always been clear that the products are similar and even have articles here and here explaining the differences. The products do serve different purposes when you can only have 1 library open at a time. However, with the upcoming ReceiptWallet 2.0.0, you can have more than 1 library open at a time, so the reasons I've given no longer apply. People have never been forced to buy both products.

I had one user that loves the beta so much that even before I decided to merge the two, but just by adding the multiple libraries, bought a second copy of the software just because he thought the product was that good. A person was willing to pay $60 for ReceiptWallet!

I'm very pleased with my decision to merge the two products and think that it will help me compete and have a better, more feature rich product.

Bit by a linker issue

Apple has some great code to handle adding and removing items as login items called LoginItemsAE which uses AppleEvents to talk to System Preferences. I've used it on a number of projects and found it to work well. That was until today. A client complained that my install code wasn't working that added it as a login item. I couldn't reproduce this on my Mac Mini (Intel) and I use the same piece of code in another app in the same bundle and it worked fine. After a bit of fighting with the system and remembering that sometimes Carbon framework needs to be linked, I linked it in and the problem went away. Why, oh why, didn't I get a linker error?

Merging ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet

After a bit of mental wrangling and taking some email to heart, I decided to merge ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. This means that ReceiptWallet can now open DocumentWallet libraries in addition to ReceiptWallet libraries. When you create a library, you choose for it to be a receipt or a document library. This now makes a lot more sense since multiple libraries can be open at once. The libraries still have a few things different (number stuff doesn't make sense in a pure document library).

What does this mean for DocumentWallet? Well, DocumentWallet serial numbers will now work in the new version of ReceiptWallet. This will be a free update for all users. When this new version comes out, I will be raising the price as I have added a significant amount of functionality with the last few updates. My current price was meant to be an introductory price, but I never got around to raising it. Now is a good time to do so.

One kind of weird thing is that DocumentWallet users can't automatically update to ReceiptWallet using the auto update mechanism because the applications are named differently and the application identifiers are different. So, users will have to download ReceiptWallet and update through that.

The new ReceiptWallet beta is available in the standard way.