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.
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.
First impressions of the Garmin Training Center for the Mac
Last January, Garmin announced that they’d have a Training Center version for the Mac. That was one of the reasons I bought my Forerunner 305. Last week, they delivered (a little late). I saw a few screenshots before Macworld on the Garmin blog and posted a comment that it looked very un-Mac like just from the 3 screenshots I saw; Garmin didn’t approve my comment. I guess the truth hurts.
I picked up a CD at Macworld (they’re not making it available until later this month for download due to localization issues or some such nonsense; they deliver their other software as fully localized or English only; I just checked the page for the iQue 3600 and there is an English-only and an EFIGS-English, French, Italian, German, Spanish version). I loaded up the software on Sunday and my first impression was not very good. Brushed metal has to go and the main screen just doesn’t look right; there is a lot of space around it. It would have been better to put the information (profile information) in preferences. The application has no drag and drop onto the icon to import files (I downloaded stuff from my MotionBased account) even though there is an import menu item. Heh folks, that is about 5 minutes of code to put it in; just add a Cocoa method:
- (BOOL)application:(NSApplication *)theApplication openFile:(NSString *)filename
And add tcx as a file extension to the info.plist file.
Next, I can’t edit any of my activities. The ones I import are all coming in as Skiing instead of running. I can’t sort the columns (clicking on a column highlights it), I can’t turn off columns. I can, however, reorganize the columns. If I choose the Close menu item, the app quits. If I click in the column title for Activities, the sort arrow changes, but does nothing.
Right now I can’t use all the maps I have for my iQue 3600, so I get a totally useless map view in the center of the screen that I can’t collapse.
So, I have no idea what took Garmin so long to do this. Their program didn’t take a rocket scientist to write. My first pass of ReceiptWallet took 2 weeks of almost full time work and then about another month of part time tweaking to release a solid 1.0 product. If Garmin has more than 1 person working on this full time, they should call me to fix it! The MotionBased folks said that they got the USB code for talking to the device from the Training Center developers last March (or so) to get MotionBased working on the Mac, so that leads me to believe that Garmin spent 9+ months on the user interface. Ouch.
For now, I’ll stick with MotionBased; I renewed my subscription last month and it is significantly more full featured that Training Center. Granted, MotionBased is not free, but I would have paid something for a good Mac Training Center.
Too good to be true?
The other day my wife and I went into the Sprint store to get her a new Motorola RAZR to replace her aging phone. The main feature is Bluetooth to use with the car kit. The salesman was real nice and unlike my last experience, I was willing to agree to the 2 year contract to get the reduced price on the phone. He asked where we worked and I told him that I was self employed and my wife worked for the school district; he asked to see if he could give us discounts. Hmmmm…he offered us 4 additional lines for the same base cost (because he’d slash 4 of our lines from $20/month to $10/month and add 4 more @ $10/month) and then he could give us a 15% discount per month. I normally wouldn’t bite, but he assured me that it wouldn’t affect my plan; he also said that my plan was very, very good, so that was reassurance that he knew how valuable my plan is. We’ll see in a month or two the net result. I also have 4 crappy phones sitting on my shelf with activated lines that I have no plans on touching.
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.
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?)
Damn credit card company
I received a call today that my credit card had been declined for a charge that happens every 2 weeks. I go online and see that the bank has a note to call them because there is high risk activity on the card. This is 2 days after I call them to straighten out the last mess. There were only 2 charges on the card since then and both of them with merchants I’ve used before. My guess is the last guy I talked to forgot to take the fraud alert off my card. At least I wasn’t at a restaurant or store and have to go through the embarrassment of having my card declined. Idiots.
Shouldn’t have gotten out of bed
Today is one of those days that I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed. It started with a fraud alert placed on my credit card then one bug after another. I went to look at a bug assigned to me and after I got the application launched (I had to go in circles to clear out the preferences and everything else, which I should have done before I started), found out that one of the components kept crashing. It kept crashing because a framework it needed wasn’t there. I tracked this down to a bug in Apple Remote Desktop 3.0 where it mangles some symbolic links. So after working around that mess, I fixed my bug with one line of code, very simple. Next I went to look at some memory issues. This lead to a crash which brought up our crash reporter which apparently wasn’t working. After awhile of checking the server and the code, found out that the crash reporter was crashing, curiously in the same place the app I was trying to debug was crashing. Seeing where the issue was, I typed:
env CFZombieLevel=3 /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
into Terminal and went to https://store.apple.com (any https site would do) and low and behold, I got the same crash. There appears to be a bug with either the CFZombieLevel (which I need to check for memory leaks) or in the low level SSL code. So I had to report that as a bug to Apple. That brings me to now which is 7 hours after I started working. I’ve fixed one bug today which is a pretty poor performance. This is all on top of not feeling great.
My credit card company sure is on top of things
This morning I tried to renew my jConnect account and it didn’t accept my credit card due to some technical problem with their system, so I kept trying. The system finally accepted my credit card. No more than 30 minutes later, I got a voicemail from my credit card company saying that there was suspicious activity on my card and that I had to verify the charges. Apparently each time I tried to update my credit card information, jConnect send through a $1 authorization. They did this 3 times before sending my actual charge. This pattern of small, repeated authorizations apparently triggers a fraud alert on the card. Unfortunately the voicemail credit card company left for me directed me to an automated system that asked me to verify the charges one by one which was a problem because while I only authorized 1 of them, if I said no to the other ones, my card would have been cancelled and it would have been a royal mess. So, I logged into my account, called the number that was listed and talked to a human who removed the fraud alert.
Having had to replace my credit card twice in the last 5 years, I’m very careful about using virtual account numbers (a service my credit card company provides that gives me a new card number for each online transaction) and make sure I always check my statements. If you’ve ever had to replace a credit card (one card was stolen and the other time, the card number was used fraudulently), you know how much a pain in the butt it can be. I’m glad this was only a minor scare and I knew the cause right away.
Never trust a bank
On Friday I went to the bank to deposit a check for my business; I made a mistake and put in my personal ATM card and deposited the business check into my personal account. I noticed my mistake almost immediately and went right into the bank to straighten it out. They couldn’t get my check out of the ATM and give it back to me, so they transferred money from my personal account to my business account for the amount of the check. I thought that was the end of my mistake. I happened to check my statement online today and found out that the bank (properly) rejected my deposit as the check was made out to my business and debited my account for the deposit. So I called the bank and they said within 7-10 days the check should be mailed back to me so I can try the deposit again. This is fine, but I wish I was told this before I made the transfer as I got real close to overdrawing my account. Now I have to write a check from my business account to my personal account to reverse the “fix” I made on Friday. It’s unfortunate that my little mistake has caused me such a major headache.