ansemond.com

The beta has been out two days.

Spam Filters

Again it seems some spam filters are preventing people from receiving the download information… No one has been turned away from this beta, so if you requested it, please tell your spam filter that mail from ansemond.com is not spam. If you email me again, I’ll be happy to send you the information a second time.

Bugs

• Input Managers, aka Plugins: Two crashes on launch were due to third party plugins
• Cocoa: One bug seems to be that Cocoa gives me the wrong information (weird!)
• Flash plugins disabled: I believe this is due to a misconfigured computer, but I need to dig into it further.
• Rosetta: One report of Rosetta crashing on an Intel Mac, and thereafter Find It! Keep It! would not start again. To deal with this case I made a small program for Intel Mac owners that restarts Rosetta before starting Find It! Keep It!

Overall observations

Because people who are willing to run betas are people who try new things, they run plugins I’ve never even heard of, and have interestingly configured computers. Beta testing is trial by fire for the software being tested!

People downloading the tool use a wide spread of browsers: 60% use Safari, 21% use Firefox (1.5 & 2.0), followed by OmniWeb, Camino, Opera and something called iGetter

A few people seem to be hoping that it will work on 10.3.x… I’m afraid it won’t.

At 1 am today (Thanksgiving) Find It! Keep It! became feature-complete. It also has no known bugs.

I’m currently running it through my test plan to check that no bugs crept back in while I was sleeping…

This afternoon after the traditional meal with friends, I hope to send it out tonight. At the worst… it should be tomorrow.

I finally received my Intel Mac, and was able to test Find It! Keep It! on an Intel Mac. It works fine under Rosetta, which is very encouraging. A previous test failed badly. Apple’s fixes in 10.4.8 must have done the trick…

The beta was ready to go out on Monday, but before letting it out I was given the advice to add some form of protection. Apparently piracy of Mac shareware is a thriving industry: Spending less that 10 minutes searching, I found licenses to every piece of shareware I know!

Wil Shipley doesn’t believe it’s a big deal, as pirates would not buy in the first place, but could be the software’s loudest advocates. To some extent, I agree with him.

On the other hand, Colin Messitt makes a very convincing case that unprotected software does not sell well. Having spent a year and my savings working on this tool I cannot afford to lose 4/5ths of my customers.

So… I’ve been adding encryption and registration code to Find It! Keep It!. Many simple solutions violate people’s privacy or are annoying. For instance, I could tie each license to a single machine. But then, people could not upgrade easily. But doing it right takes time… Once this hurdle is over, I’ll release Find It! Keep It!.

I’ve been getting my first feedback, and it’s really great: people use software in such amazingly different ways. Two bugs I never encountered in a year of usage have been fixed.

The PowerPC beta looks to be delayed a few days to fix any other issues that crop up, and to allow me to catch up from the lost days due to the recent storm and talking to my bank: see below.

On the other hand, it looks like the Intel beta will have to wait until next week: somehow my company credit card application got lost going from my bank’s branch manager’s desk to my bank’s headquarters… losing me at least a week. Anyway, the Intel Mac is now ordered and is supposed to arrive on Friday.

I’ve sent out a pre-beta copy of Find It! Keep It! to the reviewers who signed up. It’s PowerPC only because I’m still waiting for my Intel mac. It lacks two functions: importing bookmarks and emptying trash, which still need pre-beta testing. Hopefully we’ll see some reviews soon!

If you’re a reviewer for a magazine or popular blog, you can get a copy too by writing me at Beta Test, pointing me to your website.

MacHeist is now live on an invitation only basis. Like Gmail, invited people will be able to invite their friends. It seems to be another Phill Ryu and friends initiative, with some nice graphics, and upcoming cheap/free mac shareware.

Which segues nicely into Pzizz. I was given a free license by voting in the MyDream App competition. Initially I was very skeptical, given how poorly their webpage reads. “Following great success with pzizz hardware we have now developed pzizz software, powered by pzizz nap technology™.”. Aha! I don’t see… I downloaded it only to find that it comes as an installer package which makes it impossible to know where it’s installing itself . So much for first impressions!

Trying it out reveals its function: it is a mashup of various relaxation techniques, namely the Alexander technique, autosuggestion, binaural tones overlaid with your standard soothing asian bell music…

But, unlike most of the free software I’ve tried, this one has survived on my hard-drive because I actually use it. It works! I perceive the low frequency binaural tone to be moving around inside my head, but it causes me to start falling asleep. At the end of the nap it wakes you back up.

So why use it? Sometimes I work late at night until I fix some bug, but I make breakfast for my wife at 6:45am. Once I’ve woken up I can’t sleep during the day. It’s too bright and I have too much energy even just to lie down… I feel like getting on. Meditating is an option, but sometimes I’m too tired to do that too. I think Pzizz helps me because I feel that I am doing something (relaxing) rather that nothing (wasting time). After 20 minutes I usually feel refreshed enough to get on with my day, or to go meditate.