What's Up?

This blog has been quite quiet lately (from my side especially). This doesn't really means I've been doing other things -- like many people, when I am intensively in the work mode, I tend to ignore blogs, IMs and other forms of communication more and more.

Lots of work and thousands of lines of code has been made during the past months, and the efforts are finally starting to show up. A bit of the unexciting part: do not expect any glorious brand new haxies or anything in the near near future -- sadly, most of the work I've been doing is either updates to existing product line, or even deeper than that, more foundation, under-the-hood code that isn't probably noticeable much from the user perspective. But overall, it opens some interesting possibilities for us.

Thanks for hanging around. Next coming months will hopefully show what most of the time was spent on, and I am pretty sure some of you will like it.

the joy of support

Our registration scheme is, shall we say, unique. :)

For those who have not registered one of our products, we have three pieces of information that the user has to enter in order to remove the demo limitations. They are: "Name", "Password", and "Code".

When you combine the fact that our "codes" are dictionary words rather than the usual nonsensical serial numbers seen in most products and the limitations of using our software commerce provider Esellerate the fun begins. :)

We don't get to offer full control on the receipt template for each order and as such, the "code" that is generated is placed in the "serial number" field on the eSellerate receipt.

Let me jump right to an example. (sensitive information changed of course)

Hi There -

I saw that is says "phoned" for the serial number. The number I gave you is my home phone number. You may have an easier time getting ahold of me at:

555-555-1234

Thanks

Joe User

This kind fellow has noticed on his receipt that it says Serial number: phoned and as such assumes we want to contact him and even gives us an extra number to do so!

This morning I got a call from a concerned user. He had just finished the purchased process and paid for one of our products "but didn't get a serial number". This was of course cause for alarm as he saw his credit card had been charged. I got a suspicious feeling and asked for his order ID to diagnose the problem. Yeah, you guessed it, his receipt said "Serial number: missing"!!

After I explained the situation, he laughed about it and called it classic, entered the info and went on his merry way...

...other times are not so smooth. ;) We attempt to clear our dictionary of any offensive terms and over time we have managed to clean out a lot of abrasion. But early on, we had pretty much whatever you can find in a simple dictionary being sent out as "codes". (no slang luckily) A few times customers have been extremely upset at us for words like "anti-Semitism" and "swastika". The latter person was so upset he/she wanted to sue and report us to some agency or another. Most of the time a simple explanation and a new code and all parties are happy of course. ;)

These bumps aside, our registration scheme has hopefully made things easier for most people rather than more difficult. :)

On a related note, I want to create a Support Hall of Fame. We've been in the business long enough that we've seen the gamut of support inquiries. All the way from a movie of the problem complete with narration and detailed descriptions to one guy asking us to "make my monitor work with os x". Don't get me wrong, we understand that some people have skills that lie in fields other than computers, and they are probably smarter than us in everything else, but it doesn't keep a bunch of geeks from laughing their butts off on occasion!

Anyone have some good stories to share? :) Extra points if you're the star of the tale. ;) (and none of the "guy used his cd-tray as a cup holder" type stories. we've all heard them. :P )

The Silent Hunter Chuckles at Her Last from Within the Darkness

A few things to say in this post...

1. Menu Master 1.2 is now out. This had no real public beta as I changed one line of code so it wouldn't call -delegate on NSMenu in 10.2.8. This changed fixed compatibility with applications that used cocoa or loaded cocoa in 10.2.8.

You'll notice the readme spells out the version of the Mac OS as Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. This is done in a mocking fashion because I think that it is ridiculous OS X has such a long "official" name. You never see MS referring to Windows NT 5.1 XP or something like that.

The version is 1.2 because 1.1.1 brought a LOT of stuff and should have actually been called 1.2 or 1.5. Not using the proper version number caused quite a few folks to not realize how much had changed between 1.1.1 and 1.1 and how important a fix 1.1.1 was.

2. Silk is currently in beta testing to fix a bug with the font size not being respected and a crash in Entourage due to turning a less than four byte array member into a 4 byte array member. Bad mojo.

3. When looking at FontCard bugs to fix, I saw the Word 2004 bug again. It was reported by a user as to be caused by FontCard. However, upon further examination, the Font menu (in the menu bar) doesn't even work in Word 2004 if WYSIWYG menus is turned off. So it ain't no stinkin bug in FontCard. (*winky* *tongue* *eww*)

4. Speaking of FontCard, You Control: Fonts has finally been released. It was originally scheduled for May of 2004. It is a bit later than that.

Anywho, welcome to the club, You Software. I hope you are successful in your new endeavor. You've one upped us with Cocoa support. Just a few things to say about your new offering. One, it only seems to work with ATSUI/MLTE/Cocoa applications so it won't work in older QuickDraw like applications (read: BBEdit, Eudora) unlike FontCard. Two, it still patches applications. It (the patching thing, at least) is written by the author of Ittec. Even seems to use the same patching mechanism. When first run, it installs a Scripting Addition into ~/Library/Scripting Additions/ called YouSoftware.osax. It does not tell you this and it installs the software before you even accept the EULA so even if you decline it, it is still there. This scripting addition appears to do all the patching work. Or at least loads the bundle that actually does do the patching work. Seems to do the latter. The bundles are stored at You Control Fonts.app/Contents/PlugIns/FontMenu.bundle/Contents/PlugIns/.

Why am I posting all of this? Their original press release said this about FontCard "..., but also they were slow and used some suspect methods to create their font menus that compromised the stability of your computer." Suspect methods... This thing is installing a Scripting Addition without even so much as telling you something is getting installed.

5. There is a new product called iPartition from a company I've never heard of. Their about lists little experience with Macs and especially with HFS+. It sounds like a very promising utility, however.

The problem I have is with their FAQ in which they state:

"Please understand that, even assuming that our software contains no bugs whatsoever, a large number of factors entirely beyond our control can cause loss of data, including power failures, lightning strikes, hardware failure, logic glitches or random bit errors, kernel bugs, interference from third-party software (virus killers, haxies, APE and the like), and even the actions of other people."

Is it just me or are they comparing APE to lightning strikes? Frankly if they properly unmount the volume and mark it as "off limits" as any good Disk Utility should do, APE won't touch the volume. And since the tool runs as root (they say it right on that same page), APE cannot touch it at all. APE will not affect root processes in any case. So no, APE cannot be blamed if your data is lost while iPartition (or any disk utility) is doing its thing.

Edit: They have just updated their FAQ and this criticism is no longer valid. But this is a blog, not a support site.

6. I believe that is all I have to say today. CoreImage looks neat?