Outstanding customer service

Last week before I left for Macworld, the screen on my Parrot CK 3100 car kit went blank. I sent email to Parrot and even though the kit was far out of warranty, they said they'd send me a new screen. They never asked for my serial number and a new screen arrived today. I'll box up the old one and send it back. This, I must say, is one of the best customer service experiences I've had in a long time. Thanks, Parrot!

More UI Overhauling in ReceiptWallet

Another part of my UI overhaul is to redo my preferences. They've completely gotten out of hand and everything has been in one window like this.

I like how iTunes and other apps (including the Finder) have a tabbed toolbar interface, so I went that route. Using Matt Gemmell's SS_PrefsController as a base, I re-worked my preferences into different panes. The source uses plugins for the preferences which I don't need, so I modified the code to embed everything. I'm waiting to hear back from my icon guy, but things are looking better. Ignore my icons for now.

Wow, what a huge difference a few tweaks can make to a program. I also turned on autohiding of the scrollbars. Due to some bugs in the OS, I had to do some magic to get things drawing correctly. Having a blank toolbar looks bad, but I didn't want to deal with it before.

Tech Support is the bane of my existence

ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet have done fabulously well, almost beyond my wildest dreams (OK, maybe not, I dream that I can sell 100 copies a day and then I could just sit back and relax). One of the downsides with this success is that support requests are on the rise. Some of the questions are simple and are just inquiries as the documentation could use a lot of help. Some of the requests are crashes; a majority of these crashes are due to poorly written scanner drivers and there is nothing I can do about them. A small number of requests have to do with bugs in the software. While I don't (usually) mind some of the requests that are nicely worded and relatively short (the longer the message, the less inclined I am to read it; bulleted questions have a higher chance of getting a good response), some just drive me crazy. I answer every question myself, even if it is a canned response. I don't like questions unanswered, so I feel the constant need to check my email and answer right away.

This, of course, causes me a great deal of stress as I'm not a very patient person. I do my best to answer questions in a professional manner, but sometimes I feel like answering questions with flippant responses.

Proposed Tax Rebates send the wrong message

President Bush's proposed tax rebates send the wrong message in my opinion to the American people. The rebates stop if you earn a certain amount of income which might be fine, but the purpose of the rebates is to get people to spend money. Americans already have a negative savings rate and this tax rebate (if it is to work as designed) sends the message that people who get it should spend the money instead of save it. Those who earn less money already have a hard time saving money; something should be done to encourage people to save and use credit wisely.

This poor plan didn't seem to go over with Wall Street as it is doing too little to late. I think it is a complete waste of $185 billion dollars that our government doesn't have anyway. While I don't have a fix for this recession, getting those that can't afford to spend more money to spend money by giving them a rebate is not helping anyone. This is completely politically motivated and unfortunately, those that fall for it and think that it is going to help, just don't know any better.

While I'm not a fan of Mike Huckabee, his tax plan is interesting in that it taxes what you spend thereby (in a little way) encouraging people to save. We need more saving and less spending.