Digging up the past can sometimes be a good thing

I was contacted today by someone looking for a real early version of Eudora for Newton (prior to 1996) to prove that someone's patent claim of email on a handheld is invalid. That's pretty amazing to me that someone would actually attempt to claim email on a handheld so late as Eudora for Newton wasn't the first; there was eWorld and the Motorola Marco which pre-dated Eudora for Newton. As I was searching and digging up stuff, I came across a press release announcing that Eudora Pro for Newton won a CES Innovations award in 1997 (that's 10 years ago!). I either forgot about the award or no one ever told me about it. I wasn't at CES to receive the award (I've never been to CES, I was at Comdex for one day the prior year, I think), but I guess that's what happens in a big company. I was the sole author of the product, so I guess I can claim the award as my own.

Let's Play "Find the UI issues in the scanner software"

Today I received the Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-5110EOXM that I ordered (I couldn't pass up the $100 Macworld discount and the $50 rebate). The scanner is great; it scans to PDFs and doesn't make me look at their ugly user interface too much. However, I thought I'd point out the issues (first off I had to find the version of the software that was Intel native as the CD didn't have it and it wasn't readily available on their website:

• They use Command-S to bring up Settings; it should be Command-, and the menu should be labeled Preferences
• The buttons in the settings dialog are all laid out wrong. Mac applications put the OK button on the right, not the left like it is in their software
• They use low resolution graphicsin the settings dialog
• They are inconsistent with the use of periods; they use them at the end of some radio buttons when they shouldn't
• They should use sheets instead of modal dialogs for some things
• By having too many tabs, they have to put warnings in some tabs, like: "Note: JPEG is available only when "Color" is selected at [Color Mode]." If this were all on one tab, it could have automatically changed (which it actually does, but you won't notice it until you flip tabs) and the user could see it.
• Location of saved files looks like it is an edit text field, but you can't edit it. You have to click Browser ... and choose the folder
• Browser ... button has an extra space in the text
• They don't need so many sub dialogs as they could have accomplished much of it in the main window
• Under "File name format ..., they have "ex.) 2007_01_19_15_56_49.pdf" which is the example of the file name that will be generated. They could have spelled our example or done this another way; there is plenty of room
• When the scanner is off, the dock icon has a big red circle with a slash through it

For such a small application, it really has an awful looking interface. Luckily I won't have to see it much.

Please, oh please, ask for a user interface review by Apple; they'd be more than happy to rip your application to shreds. (I've had a few UI reviews and got my stuff ripped apart, so I know how it feels.)

Fed up with non-English speaking customer service reps

Last week my wife called me while I was at Macworld telling my that the credit card company called to tell us that our credit card number had been compromised and that we had to close the account. I waited until Tuesday to close it as I was out of town and didn't want to deal with it. I spoke to a customer service rep on Tuesday whose accent was very heavy and who didn't seem to be a fluent English speaker. She asked if I wanted new cards sent overnight; I asked if it cost more and she said no, so I said of course. Today is Thursday. No cards. I called again and spoke with another rep who was a native English speaker. After a few minutes (and him getting annoyed reading my record when he discovered a mistake), he apologized and said that the cards were sent via regular US Mail. Lovely, nothing we can do about it now except wait a few more days. Uggh.

Product Version Numbers

The normal scheme of version numbering for products seems to work for most developers. Going from 1.x.x to 1.x.x+1 is a minor bug fix; going from 1.x.x to 1.x+1.x is maybe a few new features and bug fixes. In some cases, developers only charge for 1.x.x to 2.x.x updates which makes a lot of sense to me to differentiate the products. That's how I like to do things. Today I downloaded a new version of a freeware product I was using (I was using version 1.1.2) and when I downloaded the 1.2 version, was extremely surprised to find that it was now shareware ($34). While the developers said that they would be charging in the future, a minor version number update caught me off guard. Furthermore, they didn't provide release notes on what changed, but instead on first launch, I got an alert to buy it. I poked around for a few minutes and then reverted to the freeware version. I'm not opposed to developers making money, but they should have called it 2.0 and added some additional value to it (or charged money from the beginning). I'm a bit disappointed in this, but on the flip side, it reinforces my desire to write a new application based on ReceiptWallet.