publicspace.net

publicspace.net moves to its own server

It’s been a while since I last updated the infrastructure on which publicspace.net was running.

In fact, it was back in 2006 when it moved onto a new hardware and software platform. Back then it moved onto a “virtual private” server, meaning shared hardware with software that makes it look as if it’s running on its own machine.

Since then a lot has happened, so I’ve taken the opportunity to migrate software versions, clean up some loose ends in the software implementation, etc.

The new dedicated machine delivers much faster download times and response rates.

If you had any problems with the server yesterday that was probably due to the domain name being shifted around. If you notice anything out of the ordinary just let me know.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new faster and better experience.

Looking for Web Design Partner

Our website is due a re-fresh and there’s lots of design work to be done on the product side as well.

We are looking for a talented and motivated designer or small design outfit for a long term partnership.

Now most of the users of our software happen to be designers and I’d love to welcome somebody on board who already has a genuine interest in the Mac community and would love to see his/her work featured on a leading Indie Software site.

If you are interested, drop me a line at reiff@publicspace.net

New Support Forums added

I have long been sitting on the fence when it comes to providing a discussion forum for supporting customers.

I like the direct personal contact of the one-on-one email exchanges and I hate the organized chaos of most discussion forums.

When you open one of those things, you suddenly become a moderator for community rather than just the guy sitting at home behind his monitor helping people sort out problems his software and trying to figure out what needs improving.

Sounds good, but what about the spammers, the trolls, the flaming wars and all of that? Oh, yes and what if you call “forum” and no one comes? Oh well, we’ll see..

I’ll be running the forums on a “wait and see what happens” basis until further notice.

Please feel free to use and abuse it and don’t hesitate to talk amongst yourselves. I’ll be trying to check in as often as possible and keep it as spam free as at all possible.

Hope you enjoy it!

Frank

Quick! Looking for alpha testers for A Better Finder Rename v8!

After over a year of intense development, I’m quickly approaching the stage where version 8 of A Better Finder Rename is ready to be unleashed on the unsuspecting masses.

I’ve finally got something approaching a first public beta, but since I ripped out the entire back end and quite a bit of the front end (new UI!) in the process, there’s still a few weeks of alpha testing left..

If you’re interested in becoming an alpha tester, please drop me a line at reiff@publicspace.net.

What’s ahead in 2008

It’s been a long time since I last wrote anything on this blog.. it’s been a busy few months and not all of it related to publicspace.net

I became a dad (hurray!) for the first time a very long 18 months ago. Since then everything has been a bit topsy-turvy. I quit my day job to be able to concentrate on my software business, but working from home with a little baby turns out not be the most productive environment to “get things done”..

Anyway, I did get quite a lot done over the past year or so, especially considering the many distractions and 2008 is going to be full of new improved goodness.

First in line will be the long awaited A Better Finder Rename v8.

Version numbering is always a problem. Whether you charge for upgrades or not, a “full digit” release is supposed to be an event. If you do charge for upgrades then it’d better be! If you don’t charge for upgrades then you’ll probably rather stay with version 1.1.2 anyway 🙂

Version 8 thus needs to needs to be chock full of new features and improvements, e.g.

  • A new GUI?
  • File filtering?
  • Saveable presets?
  • A new industrial strength renaming engine that make short shrift of a million renames?
  • Automatic file name conflict resolution?
  • Pairing up jpeg thumbnails and RAW picture files?
  • Sparkle-support?

It’s all in the provisional feature set.

I bet you must have scratched your head when you saw version 7.9.6.1 recently? or 7.9.1 for that matter.

Well another problem with version numbering is that it is has an implicit message, e.g. version 7.9 means that 8.0 is just around the corner. Well it isn’t really.. my policy has always been to make lots of smaller updates. This gets lots of new features and improvements out to you guys quickly and makes sure that the program remains reliable over time (if something’s broken it must be the last thing you changed).

Now the temptation would be to take all these small improvements and instead of releasing them piecemeal, bundle them all up into major new release. I don’t want to name any particular company or product (“Apple”, “Mac OS X”). Looking at A Better Finder Rename’s version history, there’s 42 updates since version 7 came out. Now that would justify a whole new “full digit” upgrade, wouldn’t it?

Only of course, that’s not what I’ve chosen to do. So I basically start from version 7.9.9.9 (just joking) and everything that comes after that is “new in version 8”. Doing something heroic for each major release isn’t easy however. Last time over, I completely rewrote the program from scratch using Cocoa. Now that was a good effort!

This time over, I have lots of new features and improvements, all of which take a lot of effort to implement.. which means it takes a lot of time.. and I haven’t started properly yet. I really don’t want to do this, but I think I might have to go for Apple’s new trendy “7.9.10” numbering strategy.. I wonder whether versiontracker and macupdate can handle this?

There’s another major factor that affects the release date of version 8. When I initially started coding on version 8, I quickly realised that I can do a much better job if I leverage all the new Leopard features. Lots of stuff that I was going to hand-code are already in there and frankly they are better than what I could come up with on my own. Then I quickly realized that “it’s in there, but it doesn’t work (yet)”. In Mac OS X 10.5.1 things are already a lot better and I expect that by 10.5.2 most things will work without a hitch.

So here’s the bombsheel: A Better Finder Rename 8 is going to be Leopard-only. This pretty much means that it will only be released once a significant share of Mac users have made the migration. I wouldn’t want to release something that only a few people can actually use. Right now it looks like about 30% of Mac users have made the switch, but by the summer I suspect it will be most of the people who download software from the internet anyway. Besides, v7 is still perfectly functional.

You might have noticed the “file filtering” on the new feature list. Yes, it’s time to say bye, bye to A Better Finder Select.

This originally was the file filtering component of the A Better Finder Attributes. This is another product that has long lived in the shadow of the mighty A Better Finder Rename, but has recently found a new lease of life after I included the ability to adjust the EXIF timestamps of digital camera pictures. It turns out that lots of people have lots of photos with screwy shooting dates.. the more the merrier. I have also finally found a way of changing the timestamps on the majority of RAW formats including NEF and CR2. I might even include this before the 5.0 release.

Then of course there’s our latest bad boy application, “The Big Mean Folder Machine“. It’s initial releases went fairly well and there’s a lot more in the pipeline for 2008. On top of that, I learnt a lot about Core Data which comes in handy for that new renaming engine. It’s hard to tell with a 1.x release, but I think I might have another hit application on my hands. Now that would be nice!

Last but not least, MacBreakZ, after its 4.0 rejuvenation efforts is once again doing fairly well and I can thus justify spending time on it. Since its release in late 2006, it has been updated regularly on a bimonthly schedule and I have some new illustrations and artwork stacked up as well. The dreaded 4.9 release is going to come up far too quickly again.. oh no! another “full digit” release!

This brings me to another priority for this year: documentation. I keep getting the same emails about documentation: “Where is the PDF manual?”, “Where is the download-able documentation”, “Where is the e-book?”, “Where are the screencasts?”, “Where are the tutorials?”, “Where is the major feature movie?”. You get the idea..

The thing is that no two people can seem to agree on what kind of documentation they would like to have. “Just do everything” is a nice idea, but it just isn’t possible. I’ve spent a lot of time recently finding out how other people deal with the situation and my web logs show that few people actually ever use the documentation anyway. Plus of course, it’s a bore 🙁

The Windoze guys all seem to solve this problem by using “Help & Manual“, the ueber-technical documenation tool. Unfortunately the only reference to the Mac that you can find on their site is an explanation of why it doesn’t work in Safari (it’s not made by Microsoft).

There are various tools available for the Mac, but they really aren’t any good.. I would plug my newly purchased Apple Help tool here, but it doesn’t do images (!) and I’ve been waiting for 6 week for a reply to my support request.. aarrgh.. at long last I have found something that’s better on Windows!

Nonetheless, 2008 is going to be the year of improved documentation on publicspace.net. Period.

I’m hoping to package an Apple Help documentation set with MacBreakZ soon and the other products will probably need to wait for their upcoming big releases. I’m also considering PDF versions of the manuals, which should satisfy most people..

Anyway, that’s all from me from now.

Take care,

Frank

Leopard has pounced

Well, we’ve just survived another OS X migration and it’s time to take stock.

As a developer, I’m kind of committed to having all my programs work flawlessly on the latest operating system on the release day, so I have had quite a bit of preparation to do ahead of the launch.

My first impressions of OS X 10.5 go back to not long after the keynote speech where Steve Jobs presented it. System migrations are usually accompanied by a deep developer sigh (at least outside of Steve’s reality distortion field). This is not because it’s not great news, but because it means a lot of extra work just to stay where you are.

My main development machine is a Mac Pro and of course there’s no way that I want to install an early beta build of an entire operating system on it before it’s pretty much production ready. In any event, it’s safer to do a clean install on a fresh partition every time a beta comes out; which for most developers means installing it on a secondary machine.

In my case that’s my severely underused MacBook Pro that has hardly left my office since I got it. I have to say that the new Leopard look didn’t really impress me much the first time I saw it. It still doesn’t really, I’m afraid.

The challenge for a developer is to make his/her programs look good on the new version and I’m not really sure how to achieve that yet. A Better Finder Rename 8, due out in beta form 2008Q1 (that means March) will probably sport a few look & feel changes to fit in better with the “unified look”, but will it actually look better? or just more somber?

I was never a great fan of the brushed metal look, so seeing it essentially everywhere now doesn’t really improve things much. The new folder icons are of course unreservedly awful. The dock I frankly don’t care about much. I’ve got it hidden by default, and I’m the world’s only A Better Finder Launcher user, so never actually see the thing.

The translucent menu bar is also not a problem as long as you find a mostly black background picture. I use the picture of earth from space that has a completely black background and on my trusty 30″ cinema display that means that the entire menu bar looks the same “somber gray” as the unified look windows. It’s a shame that the rounded corners have gone, but what the hell..

The aesthetic choices that have been made for Leopard are not easily comprehended by mere mortals. Yes, I think it’s a step backwards in terms of looks. Surely a space theme appeals mostly to little boys watching Galactica (I watched the episode where number 3 sees the face of the missing 5 cylons last night) and not to most professionals and (Trekkers excepted) women. What a curious choice..

The new “capsule” buttons on the Mail app also surely must be a bad joke. After two years of people ridiculing the capsule buttons, they’ve simply gone and have made them even worse (quick, tell me which buttons are disabled!). Hhmm..

In terms of actual interaction, however, most of these changes are actually for the better. It is far easier to see which window is active. The keyboard navigation works much better (of course that was the only area where Windows 95 was still better than OS X), and the unified look is, well, more unified.

A disturbing feature of the new Finder is that it looks so much like iTunes that you catch yourself confusing both. “Unified” can also mean “indistinct”.

In terms of performance there isn’t much to report, except that the entire system seems to be more responsive. Tiger had a tendency (especially on Intel machines?) to become fairly unresponsive if it did any kind of disk heavy processing (such as crunching a couple of million rows of database records) or if you dared to mount a network drive. It’s too early to be definite about this, but the problem seems to have magically vanished.

The biggest feature of Leopard is of course the “Time Machine”. It’s terribly gimmicky and I haven’t been able to test it much so far, but it has huge potential.

Backups are a chore. They are expensive (you need a huge external disk, two if you want an off-site backup) and time-consuming (you need to schedule time for the backups). Finally, when you need to go back to an older version, you usually find that something has gone tragically wrong. So on the whole they can be useless and a chore.

My backup strategy so far consisted in two 1TB IOmega UltraMax external Firewire drives and “Retrospect Express”. Incremental backup of my entire user folder at 1AM each morning. Duplication of iTunes and Aperture libraries once a week. The second drive is stored permanently off-site. Every now and then I duplicate the on-site drive completely onto the off-site drive, which for obvious reasons takes “a long time”.

Today, the third 1TB IOmega drive has arrived and I’m about to do the first “proper” Time Machine backup: the entire drive for a full system restore.

The largely unanswered question is “is it good enough to do real backups with?” or is it just a gimmick? I have $300 bet with IOmega that it’s the first rather than the second..

Backup is a huge issue for somebody who makes their entire living off the content of a single hard disk.. but it’s not as easy as all that. There’s disaster recovery (you don’t want to have to re-install everything in the event of hard disk crash), but there’s also “data loss” (you don’t want to lose any crucial files) and finally “archiving” (the stuff that you don’t have any real need for anymore, but that might come in handy one day, say your 1998 tax returns). Related to that is the question of “version control” for things such as websites and source code (“this unique combination of 75,000 files represents version 7.9.5 of A Better Finder Rename).

Unfortunately all this stuff is getting so big that there’s no longer any time and money efficient way of doing it. Archiving your 90GB SVN repository onto DVD would take 25 DVDs and probably over a day of copying.. I had a quick look at backup tapes but those are now more expensive than hard disks. IOMega’s REV system would fit the bill, but at $1 a gigabyte and $399 for the actual cartridge drive, it’s hardly a cheap solution either. Add to that the fact that IOmega quietly drop their old storage formats (Zip, Jazz) every few years and there’s simply no acceptable solution out there.

Now (hint) if you guys at IOmega want to get in touch and send me a REV system for review, I would only be too happy to review it for you 🙂

My compromise is to put an archive section on my main hard drive for now.. do I still need to put everything in my SVN version control repository? I guess so since Time Machine does not support snapshots (yet?).

This leaves getting used to the new applications that come with Leopard. Mail app is quite a bit faster than it was and it now deals gracefully with large mail boxes (I’ve got around half a million emails). Putting aside the awful “capsules”, it’s a fine mail application. I’m not sure about the non-hierarchical to-do list; this seems kind of simplistic and with a million things to do and limited time, you need something more heavy duty. My current solution is a huge whiteboard and several hundred “to-do” post-its all over the office walls..

For me the fact that the new “Terminal” application has been improved is a not insubstantial gain. Tabs are great and there simply wasn’t anything worthwhile out there to challenge the built-in terminal application..

Another big change is that the Unix foundations of Leopard have changed quite a bit. A lot of things that you used to have to install yourself are now built-in: svn, ruby (a proper working version), rails, etc.. This is a double-edged sword (how easy is it going to be to upgrade the built-in unix tools?), but it’s a step in the right direction. It only took me about a day to migrate my “in-house” ruby/mysql system and another hour or so to figure out what’s wrong with svn.

As a developer of course the most significant change is XCode 3.0. I’m looking forward to getting more acquainted with it..

Is it a successful upgrade? Yes, it is. It might take some getting used to the new look, but there’s a lot of hidden goodness and the panoply of small improvements soon add up to an improved over-all experience.

Most importantly (unless you use Application Enhancer and other haxies), you’re in for a simple, largely trouble free upgrade to a more refined product. It’s not a giant leap right now, but once developers like myself can start using 10.5-only features (expect that to be around the time 10.6 launches and everybody who buys software has migrated to 10.5), you’ll see a lot of improvements in actual applications. And isn’t the applications that make an operating system great?

Take care until next time.

Yours sleep deprived..

Frank

Getting ready for Leopard

After yesterday’s release of “The Big Mean Folder Machine” 1.0, my attention is now shifting towards the imminent release of Mac OS X Leopard.

The rumor mill has it that it will be released the last weekend of October and as always we’ll be ready.. there are only minor visual glitches to take care of.

I’m not sure what your thoughts on the new and much darker “space” theme are, but I think it will take some getting used to. I’m still not convinced that the new “darker” Apple site looks anything as good as the old “aqua” one.. it’s the first time that I’m wondering whether Apple is actually taking a step backwards rather forwards at least in visual style..

As soon as Leopard is officially released, work on A Better Finder Rename v8 will start in earnest.. no rest for the wicked.

TheMacNurse competition

What makes the “world of mac” different from the Windoze world is largely the spirit of community and it’s fascinating that after 30 years of Apple, the community is probably as vibrant as it is has ever been.

There are community sites, news sites, rumor sites (this is no doubt the Mac speciality) and all kinds of other enthusiast endeavours springing up all over the net.

TheMacNurse, is one that has piqued my particular interest. They offer free online support for all things Mac. That can’t be right “free”?

Well it seems it is, and their volunteers will help you out at no cost.

This kind of inititiative is just too great to stand idly by and do nothing. As I can’t honestly say that I want to join their volunteers and provide free Mac support in addition to the technical support I provide for our own products, I’ve taken the easy way out and chosen to give away two copies each of:

So go ahead and visit their competition page at: TheMacNurse.

All the best for the future guys!

Birthday kid gets harder, better, faster, stronger server

publispace.net is this year celebrating its tenth birthday.

It started as a way to publicize my Ph.D. prototype program called "publicspace". The original publicspace program was a group support tool that gave Macintosh users a shared workspace with file areas, notification services, threaded discussion groups and other goodies to help them collaborate more effectively.

In many ways it was what we would today call a "wiki". In 1996 this was still fairly "out there" stuff and especially the absence of any form of access control was heresy to many of my fellow academics. I guess that the very same academics are now writing about the unstoppable rise of wikis and how they all saw it coming 🙂 publicspace was a moderate academic success (hey, I got my degree!) and a total and abject commercial failure, being paradoxically "too cheap". Still I got around 100 groups to use and (in many case) love the program and this encouraged me to continue my "shareware" adventure.

While the original product died, the "publicspace.net" website and company not only survived but thrived. The "A Better Finder" tool series established me as a "top tier" Mac developer and the "MacBreakZ" Personal Ergonomic Assistant has helped many Macintosh users prevent repetitive strain injuries or make a full recovery from it.

In 2000, with the help of George Wantz, a friend and a great programmer, these tools were let loose on the unsuspecting Windows masses. After the initial cheapo hosting solution became more and more inadequate, publicspace.net moved to its own high-performance Solaris server account in June 2000. Back then Solaris was the right choice for a pricey, but stable and fast website project.

In the past 6 years, however, much has changed both on the internet itself and here at publicspace.net. Today the birthday kid is moving to its new home on a bigger, faster, stronger, harder web server based around all-open-source technologies, such as OpenBSD, MySQL, PHP, etc. Over the next few months, I hope to introduce more dynamic features into the website and this blog is only the start of this. You as a user will benefit from increased responsiveness and faster downloads. The increase in available storage area (from 700Mb to 15Gb!) will allow me to post more demonstration videos, maintain a larger base of old versions, allow you to post your own contributions and much more.

All these changes, at the end of the day are designed to benefit you, the users of publicspace.net and help me stay in touch with your needs, suggestions and opinions.

Thanks for a great ten years.