Ill informed sales guy

One of my stops today was to see the IRIScan Express2. It seemed like an OK scanner, but with crappy software. The guy demonstrating used their Readiris 11 software to scan. I happen to have a copy of Readiris that was free with my Fujitsu ScanSnap. Here's a screenshot of the version I have (the one he demoed looked the same).

I asked him if it was TWAIN compliant and if I could use it in other programs (for instance, ReceiptWallet). He swore it was. I asked if I could try using Image Capture to scan; he said I could. It didn't show up. Image Capture should show all TWAIN compliant scanners. Next I looked in /Library/Image Capture/TWAIN Data Sources. It was empty; all the TWAIN drivers should be there. I decided to stop arguing with the guy as he obviously didn't have a clue, unless they somehow used some magic TWAIN driver that only shows up in their app.Now here is the dilemma. I'm going to have people ask about the scanner and my answer right now is "I haven't tested it.". They have a show special that makes the scanner $99 (normally $149) which is pretty good. Should I get it? I probably will and then if it doesn't work, I'll warn people to avoid it. They have a more expensive version (IRIScan Executive 2) that has the same hardware, but includes Cardiris 4 for scanning business cards. It doesn't seem all that impressive, but I'll reserve final judgement until I try it out.This leads into another one of my rant; why do hardware vendors have such crappy looking software?

NEAT Receipts could be quite slick

I know in the past that I wondered if NEAT Receipts would take some of my UI and put it in their Mac product. I stopped by their booth today and was pleased to see that their UI didn't take anything from me, in fact, they have some ideas that I'd like to use in ReceiptWallet! They have an iTunes like source list on the left that is separated with things like Library and Collections (I can't recall exactly what the titles are). That definitely makes the app look more up-to-date than ReceiptWallet (not that ReceiptWallet's interface is all that old). In addition, their "image" view (like my thumbnail view) is actually useful; my thumbnail view has small thumbnails or receipts that I personally think is useless. In their implementation, they have decent sized receipts on the left side and the metadata on the right side. So when you scroll down, you see the receipts and the metadata. Finally, they do have a Cover Flow like view of the receipts. I'm not sure how useful this is, but I've had a user ask for this in the past, so it has been on my radar, just not high up on my list.

I don't have any plans to do UI changes in ReceiptWallet, but the next time I do, I think I'll re-visit iTunes to see how it does things. However, I do have some issues with iTunes and am not sure it is the perfect UI, either.

Quicken is sort of not dead

As I was entering the South hall of Moscone, Intuit people were handing out "Quicken Online" flyers. I immediately thought that this was the end of Quicken for the Mac. Considering that Quicken still doesn't ran natively on Intel Macs, I didn't think this was strange. When I got to the Intuit booth, I was pleasantly surprised to see them demoing a successor to Quicken which I was told was a complete rewrite in Cocoa. However, as another blog has mentioned, it will be missing a number of features of Quicken 2007. As long as it is equivalent to Quicken 2005 (which I use), I'll be happy. One feature that struck me as a gratuitous use of Cover Flow is the ability to scroll through your accounts with a Cover Flow like view. It seems like a lot of eye candy; hopefully the product will be solid. We'll have to wait until September to see.

Macworld Expo Newbie

Right before I saw Jesus, I was crossing the street and some guy was coming towards me handing out flyers. I learned a long time ago not to take stuff from strangers (Have you seen the people handing that stuff out? They really are strange.), so I steered clear. However, the guy next to me hadn't learned the same lesson; he was a bit older than me (and probably twice my width) and he pushed and shoved to get the flyer. I glanced over after he got it and saw that he got a flyer for porn or some smut like that. I almost burst out laughing, but just smiled.