Tag: Software

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Hardware vendors, hire me to do your UI

I always harp on UI as I think that it shows a lot about a product. While the old saying is to not judge a book by its cover, in the case of a UI, it shows me that developers are either lazy or clueless and what else is wrong with the software if they can’t spend a little time working on the UI.

Many hardware vendors make decent hardware, but rush out the software, have it done in a foreign, non-English speaking, country, or just don’t care. If they spent a little time and money on the software (in some cases, maybe half a day), they could have a much nicer looking (and working) product.

I am serious that if hardware vendors want to contact me, I’d be more than happy to take a look at the software and give them an estimate on what needs to be done to clean up their UI.

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State of the Art UI, 6 years ago

In my travels today, I poked my head into the EPSON booth and asked for a demo of their scanner software (I could care less about the scanner), so that guy fires off the Scan from Photoshop and the awful UI pops up. I said, “oh it looks like your UI hasn’t changed in 10 years”; the guy responded “it has only been 6”. You’ve got to be kidding me, they can’t come up with a better UI in 6 years? He did say that the driver is now a universal binary which is good news for all the poor souls still using EPSON scanners with ReceiptWallet.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Macworld off to an excellent start (at least for me)

Even though Macworld Expo 2008 hasn’t even started, it is off to a good start. 2 companies, Fujitsu announced the ScanSnap S300M (similar to the S300 which doesn’t work on the Mac; the Mac specs aren’t online, yet) and I.R.I.S. announced the IRIScan2. Both scanners are portable scanners similar to the Pentax DSMobile and make them perfect fits for ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. I’ll go visit their booths tomorrow when I’m at the expo and check them out. The problem is that I have to buy 2 more scanners; just what I really needed!

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Flexible spending reimbursement is as easy as pie

Every year we have to fill out the paperwork to get our money back from my wife’s flexible spending plan. I don’t ask much of her in terms of accounting, so this has always been her task. She had to copy all the receipts and assemble them from a big mess of receipts. Well, this year, thanks to ReceiptWallet, that was different. I simply selected my “Medical” collection, selected all, hit print, and then filled out the paperwork. It took maybe 15 minutes to fill out and fax in the paperwork. A week later, we received a check for the full amount we requested with no problems. This paid for my copy of ReceiptWallet, just in the time it saved me to do this 🙂

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Bug in Gmail’s SMTP Server or bug in Apple Mail?

Today I tried to send a zip file to a client (I’m using Google for Domains so I use their SMTP and IMAP server) and was unable to do so through Mail.app. It got part way through the transfer and said it couldn’t send it. After a bit of trial and error, I discovered the problem. I use Hazel to automatically move files and set the color of items so I know what is new. When I created the zip archive, Hazel automatically colored it. I reset the Finder label and presto, the file went through.

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VMWare Fusion saves the day

While I was working on a ReceiptWallet issue, I needed an older data file, one that was in XML format and created from an older ReceiptWallet version. I have recent backups of all my data, but don’t generally keep an archive of the data as the amount of storage space to keep regular archives is enormous and I’ve only thought about using archives once or twice in the last 10 years. I thought I was hosed, until I realized I had backups from my server before I retired it. Problem was that my server backup drive were formatted as ext3 (Linux format) and couldn’t be read on the Mac without installing some extra stuff that might not even work on Leopard and could make my system unstable. So I looked for an alternative. I downloaded a CentOS virtual appliance from VMWare’s Appliance Marketplace, ran it under VMWare, plugged in my backup drive, in VMWare, connected the USB drive, mounted the drive, found my backup, tar/gzipped the directory and then FTPd the archive back to my Mac. It sounds complicated, but the most time consuming part was downloading the 691 MB archive of the virtual application. The rest was just a few simple UNIX commands.

While Fusion worked great in this scenario, it isn’t working with the Slide/Negative Scanner I just bought. I bought it to transfer some of my old negatives into digital format even though it got mixed reviews. With the lifetime guarantee that Hammacher Schlemmer offers, I couldn’t go wrong if it didn’t work or the quality was awful. Maybe VMWare will be able to address this issue with the next release; I suspect that the device is trying to pump too much data through USB or is doing something non-standard with USB.

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iPhoto Subscriptions with Gallery2

We use Gallery2 to store and share photos of our son, dog, family, etc. While many people use free sites like Flickr, paid sites like .Mac and SmugMug, I like to have my own site that I can control and customize. Some of these sites offer prettier albums, comments, etc., I don’t like giving up control. One of the cool features of iPhoto that is probably underutilized is the Subscribe to Photo Feed option. In the past, I’ve tried to set this up with Gallery, but have failed. My wife wanted to setup her mother’s computer to get updated pictures of her son, so I gave it another shot in configuring Gallery2. Turns out, it is quite easy. Just choose Configure RSS Feeds for the album, change a couple of switches as shown in the picture below and then copy/paste the resulting URL into iPhoto.

RSS Image

One slight note with this; the feed only contains items that are marked as New or Updated. New or Updated is determined by the date. By default, items are considered new if they were uploaded in the last 7 days. I tried to set this up for my sister’s site as my parents really liked seeing the pictures in iPhoto and for some reason it didn’t work. Turns out the newest pictures my sister has are over a month old. So, change the New Items option in Site Admin to 30 or 60 days if you don’t update your gallery too often.