You know you're in trouble when...

you step onto an elevator and there is an employee that says "count to 3 and hope this goes up". Well, that's what happened today when we were out at the San Diego Wild Animal Park today. We go on their new elevator (today was the first day that it was open), when it wouldn't go up. The employee hit the button a few times and after the door opened and closed, it eventually went up. Also, the employee had a radio in case it got stuck! As we were leaving the park, I heard over one of the employee radios that the elevators (one was already out of operation when we were there) were not working. Not a good opening day for the elevators!

MacHeist, another round of cheap software

MacHeist is back with another bundle of software. In case you're not familiar with MacHeist, it is a really well developed series of games that when you solve gives you free software and at the end of all the "missions" you get a discount on the full bundle. The free apps are an interesting marketing tool. Most of the developers that put their apps in give one version of the software that isn't upgradeable. Most of the software, I had no use for, but a few apps caught my eye, including 1Password which has changed how I browse the web! I wasn't planning on buying the current bundle, but I needed a graphics app and while I think the UI of Pixelmator is awful, and the bundle price was less than a normal license, so I bit. I don't have a whole lot of use for most of the apps, but they donate 25% to charity and I might find some utility to the apps.

I used to have mixed feelings about the deal as it is a great deal for consumers, excellent revenue generator for the people behind it, donates to charity, but the developers only get a small portion of the profits. Last year there was some debate over this. After talking with one developer this past week, he indicated that when they do these types of deals, the sales on their own site doesn't decrease! I've seen similar trends when I've done the MacZOT! promotions. Those people that know about these deals is very small and if the deals spread the word, then how bad can they be?

Kudos to MacHeist for another job well done and for putting together an excellent way for developers to get their software known.

ReceiptWallet UI Overhaul

I've started to do some work on the ReceiptWallet UI based on some ideas I got this week as well as customer feedback. I found that I personally had a number of "recent" smart collections, so I decided to make them a standard part of the interface. Also, I used some features of Leopard to get the "Source List" view (it looks OK on Tiger, but isn't as slick). For some reason, this was harder than it should have been; I had to verify that drag and drop still worked and lots of other things didn't break such as contextual menus, adding/removing collections, etc. However, I think it is all working now.

I am still working on some things, but will be putting out a beta next week.

Don't chop off your finger!

As I mentioned in a previous post, UPEK has their software written in Prague and that sometimes leads to odd wording of dialogs. I installed their latest software today and had to chuckle at this dialog. Better not harm yourself!