• Nov 22, 2006

    Value of software

    The shareware software market has really changed how people value software. Many hobbyists create their shareware for $5 or $10 to make some spare change. This is fine and dandy, but with the sheer amount of shareware out there (a lot of it is junk), when a commercial product (not by Adobe or Microsoft) comes out for $30 or $40, people complain that it is overpriced. This is truly sad as software isn't cheap to create. The shareware market allowed me to personally get into software development, but I started my first product off at $15 and that was over a decade ago. Software also costs money to support and one support email/call can wipe out any profit.

    I've seen some recent rumblings from other developers about the same thing, so I'm definitely not alone in my feelings.

  • Nov 21, 2006

    Thanks MacUpdate, you slimy spammers!

    I've never liked these folks as they have been stealing (or used to steal) update information directly off VersionTracker. I had posted an update to a program of mine to VersionTracker once and made a spelling error. The same spelling error appeared on MacUpdate pretty quickly. Coincidence? Unlikely. Now the good folks at MacUpdate have decided that they couldn't make enough money on ad revenue, so they've sold their mailing list to spammers. How do I know this? For every different website I visit and give an email address, I create a new email alias in the form of website.com@mydomain.com. From the header of the spam, you can tell where it went and that it came from a spammer:

    Received: from transit-r1.garyzoom.com (pptpoe-pool-195-114-8-88.rustel-dsl.com [195.114.8.88]) by linux.gruby.com (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id kAMDbIFi023692 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NOT) for ; Wed, 22 Nov 2006 05:37:20 -0800

    With a title like "Subject: One free MAC title download: latest Ableton, Adobe, Corel, Extensis , Macromedia for MAC OS X" and coming off a DSL line, you can tell it is spam.

  • Nov 20, 2006

    Behind the technology times

    Yesterday I picked up a Motorola RAZR V3m on Sprint. While this phone has been out on every other carrier for ages, Sprint just got it. Normally I get technology stuff when it first comes out, but here's a case where I didn't have a choice (I don't want to switch carriers) and I'm happy about it. Instead of getting a half backed phone, I now have a phone that has had its kinks worked out by others. Why did I switch from my Samsung A900? The main reason is to be able to sync my contacts and calendars. There are some "hacks" out on the net for enabling this in iSync (hacks are just modifications of some text files to identify the phone), so I put one in and iSync happily syncs my contacts. Calendars are another story. I'm not quite sure the right mix, yet, but it would appear that certain types of events don't sync and cause the connection to barf. I think I'll figure out the right mix soon. While I understand that synchronization is hard (that's what I do for a living), I'd expect Apple and Motorola's software to be a bit more tolerant. Oh well. So far I'm pleased with the phone; others have complained that the screen resolution is less than that of the A900 and that the menus are slow, but I'm finding the phone a bit more useable than the A900. To each his own.

  • Nov 15, 2006

    ReceiptWallet finally released!

    Today is a very exciting day for me as I just released my latest product, ReceiptWallet. It's been a long time since I've released my own product. This product allows users to scan, manage, and organize receipts. It came out of my own frustration in finding a receipt one day. With the help of a few testers, I think this is my best application, yet. I think it has the most user interface polish, the right feature set (for a 1.0 release) and works quite well.

    While the basic development of the product took about 2 weeks (that's about 100 hours while I was still trying to do my regular job), it took another few weeks to have the icons done, to write the documentation, and to do the website.

    Unlike some of my other applications that have come out of my head, ReceiptWallet is the first that requires virtually no documentation and can be used by the novice user. Both my parents are using it and usually they ask me a ton of questions about how to use some programs, but ReceiptWallet is an exception. They've asked me a few questions and had a number of good suggestions, but nothing to drive me crazy. Normally my ideas are quite complex and work for me, but are far too complicated for normal people. This has also been one of the most enjoyable products I've worked on in a long time; I had a chance to learn new Apple technologies and was able to pour my heart into it as it is a program that I'll be using several times a week, at least.

    I hope that others find ReceiptWallet as useful and as compelling as I do; if you have a big drawer full of receipts and can't find anything like me, then ReceiptWallet is for you!

    (How's that for a product plug?)