After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to put my WirelessModem program up for sale. I’ve neglected the software for too long due to my own lack of interest (I haven’t used the software since I got rid of my Treo 300 a few years back). If anyone is interested in purchasing the source code to both the Macintosh side and the Palm OS side, please contact me. Serious offers only.
USB to PCMCIA Adapter – hope for EVDO cards
I stumbled across a USB device that accepts a PCMCIA high speed data card (EVDO). This looks like an excellent solution for switching to a MacBook Pro and still being able to use my EVDO card. The problems are: 1) it isn’t shipping, yet, 2) they have no Mac drivers, and 3) it doesn’t list my card, the Sierra Wireless AirCard 580 as compatible. I’ve sent them email to see if they’d be interested in having me write a Mac driver. I’ll cross my fingers, but won’t count my chickens before they hatch.
Another new blog system
Last weekend when my wife were on a weekend getaway, I thought it would be neat to be able to blog offline and then upload my entries when I got home (we had no Internet access where we were). (The getaway was to get away from our house, not our work.) I started down the path of writing a program to do this, but didn’t finish over the weekend. Yesterday I discovered a program called MarsEdit which did exactly that. However, it didn’t support the blogging system I used. So I decided to switch over to WordPress as it is supported by MarsEdit and is quite popular. To top it off, the interface was a bit more to my liking. However, the transition was not easy, but I managed to get all the articles moved over.
We’ll see how this new system works out.
The downside of upgrading
I’ll admit it, I’m a geek and wanted the latest and greatest. Do I have a need for it? Not usually, however, I upgrade most of my software as soon as an update comes out with 2 main exceptions, Quicken and QuickBooks. Upgrades for both seem to do very little for me. I had to upgrade QuickBooks in April because it didn’t function properly in Tiger.
Today I went to my accountant and brought along my data file exported from QuickBooks Pro 2005 for Mac to the Windows format. My accountant hasn’t updated his QuickBooks Accountant edition from 2004, but luckily he had no trouble reading my data file. Now if I had upgraded to QuickBooks Pro 2006 would I have had problems? Possibly and it would have been much harder for my accountant to do my taxes.
Lesson learned, don’t upgrade software if you have to be compatible with someone else.
When we were talking, he really doesn’t see what else an accounting package can do. He did make some good points and I can’t think of what I’d want it to do either.
I’ll keep upgrading most of my other software just because I’m a geek.
Installing Windows XP
My sister wanted to wipe down her husband’s old Windows XP machine so that he could just run WordPerfect on it (he’s switched to a Mac for everything else), so I offered to do it for her as she’d probably call me for help anyway. I started the install with a hard drive re-format around 7:30 am. I didn’t finish the install and applying all the patches until somewhere around 2 pm. Holy cow there were a lot of updates and each time I applied one, I had to apply another one. Luckily I only had to click a few times to get it working. I’m so glad I don’t deal with Windows on a daily basis.
Useful Applications for the week
I do a lot of work on two machines; one for testing and the other for development and is my main machine. When I’m testing, I regularly have to copy logs and files back and forth. This requires me to copy the file/log to my server and then pull it down from the other machine. After awhile, this gets quite repetitive. There is/was a program called Clipboard Sharing that allowed me to synchronize the clipboards of all my machines, so I could copy from one and simply paste on the other. However, the auto sync part stopped working in Tiger. I sent the author email, but was impatient so I started writing my own. I got as far as having everything work well before the author got back to me with a version to test under Tiger. It worked beautifully and now I’m pleased as punch. The author has published it as freeware, but has asked for donations. I sent him a nice donation yesterday because of how much time it has already saved me. (In fact my donation was more than I spend on most software.)
The second program is one called DropCopy. It lets me quickly and easily send files/folders across my local network to other machines. It works quite well, but the user interface is just awful. It is another free application. Definitely worth checking out and I hope the author can clean up the interface as it will make a top notch utility.
Spark – Cool tool for keyboard shortcuts
When Mac OS X 10.4 came out, Apple broke the ability to assign a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript in the AppleScript menu. Normally I wouldn’t blame Apple for breaking something this obscure, but it is clearly documented in the Apple Help. Now 7 months later, I finally had to find another solution as I miss my AppleScripts (they are to get around a design change Apple made that I argue is a bug, but despite by exchanges with them, they refuse to acknowledge it). I looked for apps to do this and found Spark. It looks slick and the price is right (free). So far, I got it doing what I want, but now I’m intrigued as it looks to do a whole lot more.
USB – Is there magic sauce to make it work?
I really like the concept of USB where devices from different manufacturers plug into hardware made by lots of different vendors without having to worry about getting the right plug. From a user’s point of view, it is great as long as their are drivers for a particular OS. Some types of devices such as hard drives have drivers built into just about every OS, so you just plug it in and you’re golden. Other devices such as PDAs, you have a big problem. I’ve been writing USB drivers and applications that talk to USB for over 3 years now and must say that as a developer, I hate USB. It seems that no one knows enough about USB to implement it correctly on the devices plugging into the computer, so as a developer, I have to code around their issues. Furthermore, each USB device should have a unique vendor and product ID. Vendor IDs seem to always be fine, but the device manufacturers, for some reason or another, give multiple devices the same product ID. This would be fine if the devices had identical USB implementations, but they don’t. Two companies in particular that seem to play games are Palm and Sony with their PDAs. They’re probably either trying to conserve product IDs or someone didn’t have a clue that it should be changed as they expect that they’d be the only ones talking to the devices. It is such a nightmare to deal with these devices. Right now my desk has 8 PDAs so that I can test my code. Things were humming along fine until an issue was reported and the log indicated a problem with some code I changed. Now, I have to find every Sony CLIE that has the same product ID and test my fix against them. Right now, there are at least 7 devices with the same product ID.
Crashes, crashes, crashes
One thing I really hate about releasing software is that no matter how much testing you do, it is bound to crash on users. Now the problem is, how can I reproduce the crashes and fix the issues? Users swear they can reproduce the issues, but I usually can’t no matter how much I stand on my head and type with my feet. There must be a better way to extract data from customers and troubleshoot issues.
Missing Sync for Palm OS 5 Shipped!
For the last 6 or 7 months, I’ve been working on Missing Sync for Palm OS. We have finally shipped and it is a big relief. I acted not only as the lead engineer, but as product manager due to others at Mark/Space being quite busy. Needless to say, at times, I’ve been overwhelmed taking on two major roles. I think that this product has killer features. It has much better syncing support for Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks, as well as the features I worked on: overhauled UI, auto sync vs sharing detection, iTunes conduit, folder sync conduit, iPhoto to handheld, as well as a number of bug fixes. If you’re a Macintosh and Palm OS user, I highly recommend you purchase or upgrade! If you’re on the fence about upgrading or purchasing, trust me, it is well worth the money as it is leaps and bounds better than Palm’s HotSync Manager, Apple’s iSync Palm Conduit and even Missing Sync for Palm OS 4.