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.

Manual Auto-Updating.. Sorry guys.

I’ve recently spent a lot of time doing behind the scenes stuff to get my development practices up to the state of the art.

I’ve migrated from svn to git version control, I’ve started automating builds and release management. I’m synching my home office with my office machine, etc.. all in the name of working more efficiently and thus getting more stuff done..

The problem comes when things start going wrong.. they kind of spiral out of control.. as they did yesterday.

My first TNG (the next generation) release yesterday just went very slightly wrong.. nothing catastrophic.. A Better Finder Rename 8.15 has a very slight bug that means that the contextual menu item in the Finder only opens the application but does not add the selected files to the preview.. you’ll have to drag and drop them there anyway.. oops.

It took me a while to track down the reason for this and it’s quite simply that the 64-bit APIs in Leopard are not 100% backwards compatible and this caused the problem. I solved it and thought, wow! now I can really use that fully automated build process and do another release in less than a minute.. haha (evil laughter)..

And I did and it went wonderfully smoothly and fully validated why this was a good idea in the first place. I tested everything and it just worked first time over. No problem.. until I tried to update A Better Finder Rename 8.15 to the fixed 8.16 release using the auto-update feature.

I was greeted with an “Application is incorrectly signed” message.. oops.. especially since I have never signed the application updates.. how can it be incorrectly signed when it’s not even signed?

As it turns out when migrating A Better Finder Rename to 64-bit I included a new 64 bit friendly version of “Sparkle”, Andy Matuschak’s free auto-update framework that powers half the auto-updating applications on the Mac (Thanks Andy!).

Fortunately (or in this case not so fortunately) Andy is very concerned about security.. so much so that he has removed the ability to update without using digital signatures from the latest release of Sparkle that I’ve included in A Better Finder Rename 8.15.. which means that 8.15 needs my public key to verify any update that it downloads is valid; otherwise it just refuses to install the update.. only 8.15 does not have my public key.. which kind of means it can’t auto-update.. which means you have to manually update it.

I’m really sorry about this.. you’ll have to click on the link below:

http://www.publicspace.net/download/ABFRX8.dmg

and drag the application icon from the left to the right onto the Applications folder and confirm the overwrite.

It’s little consolation, but I seem to be far from the only developer who has fallen into this trap. So there’s a bunch of applications out there using Sparkle that will/ have already required a manual update after all.. it’s a bit unfortunate because Andy’s done more than anybody else to bring auto-update features to Mac applications.. security is important, but then again so is backwards compatibility.

It’s not really what an auto-update feature is supposed to do.. but at least now you get securely signed updates delivered.. and I’ve learned a lot more about version control, automated builds, 64-bit APIs and code signing than I had bargained for this early in the morning 🙂

As a small aside.. I’ve spent yesterday working on the promised speed and scalability improvements on A Better Finder Rename and it’s coming along very nicely. The preview is now between 3 and 5 times quicker and the new version only uses 320MB of real memory to preview 180,000 files.. I think you’re going to like it.

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.

MacBook Air on Holiday: Awesome

A little update on my MacBook Air comments. I did say that I thought it was a great “no hassles” machine for taking away with you for casual use (not running your video editing business on).

Well it is.

I took my MBA on holiday to Spain over the Easter break and it’s just awesome as a light travel companion.

It worked flawlessly, was no hassle lugging around the airport, worked fine on the Hotel’s free wireless network and best of all: it fits into a normal size room safe. No more chaining up your notebook to the radiators (of which they were of course none) or just worrying about it getting stolen.

The MacBook Air: the only way to travel.

MacBook Air – My 5 cents

Here we go again.. Apple brings out a new product and makes a controversial claim (“The world’s thinnest notebook”) and the entire gadget-loving internet is going bi-polar again. Oh well, I guess that was Apple’s marketing goal in making this claim anyway: get everybody talking about its new product.

Mission accomplished.

The Gadget sites all seem to be taking the wrong approach once more, by comparing the MacBook Air to other (sub-)notebooks based on:

  • features
  • price
  • weight
  • size

The usual arguments re-surface: “It’s too expensive because Acer does the same thing for 20% less”. “It’s missing connectivity (DVD, firewire, ethernet, ..)”. “For $XXXX, I’d expect it to be faster”, etc, etc.

In my personal opinion all this misses the point. The sentence below summarizes my take on the MacBook Air’s “unique selling proposition”:

The MacBook Air is the most portable Mac.

It’s perfect for taking down to Star Bucks (please open one around the corner, so I can take it there!), answering your mail, doing a spot of programming or just plain surfing. True it’s not as small as your iPhone, but it has got a bigger screen, and yes, it does run Mac OS X, which is nice.

How is it possible that almost all reviews of the MacBook Air forget to even mention, it’s main feature: It’s a Mac stupid!.

Is the Lenovo X300 a Mac? No? So why would Gizmodo let you vote on which is better? Surely if you want a Mac, you’re not going to buy a Lenovo?

I guess now that Macs can run Windows or Linux, the question that Gizmodo is asking is: “As a Windows user, is it worth buying the MacBook Air rather than the Lenovo X300 so that you can run Windows XP (not Vista!) on a box that looks nicer?”

The mere thought of buying a Mac, just to erase the Mac OS X partition and install Windows instead makes my skin crawl.. Arrgh.

Anyway, my MacBook Air arrived a week or so ago and it has kept everything it promised: It’s a Mac that I can slip next to my notepad (which happens to be thicker) in a bag and take out with me without breaking my back.

It’s not going to replace my Mac Pro and my triple monitor setup, which I’ve grown to love. Its tiny screen means that I need to switch between windows incessantly, its small disk means that I can’t just mirror my 600Gb Mac Pro installation via Apple’s Setup Assistant, but had to install things by hand.

Sure it would be great if it had a larger disk, a faster CPU or faster wireless networking, but you don’t really expect those things in this small a package. You just know it’s not going to be a tiny version of a full-blown Mac Pro and if you don’t well..

The MacBook Air is a Mac that you can take with you everywhere; without breaking your back. In this market segment it’s unique. Apple had to make some compromises, but I’m happy to live with them. The main thing is that I can just take it with me, in case I need it. It has already supplanted my MacBook Pro, which is a more capable machine, but simply doesn’t offer the same convenience.

The MacBook Pro won’t be anybody’s main machine.

It will be too expensive for teenagers to run facebook on, but it’s ideal for professionals who rely on their Macs and need to take it pretty much anywhere.

I can’t just close shop for a two week holiday. I need to keep on top of my email and I need to be able to fix my website should it decide to go down.

The MacBook Air will pay for itself, just by letting me go on holiday without having to lug my MacBook Pro around for a couple of hours while trying to reign in my 18 month old toddler.

Thank you Steve!

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

Big Mean File Processing

What a couple of weeks it has been since the launch of Leopard..

I’m not sure whether I’m the only one to find this, but it does look like one of the buggiest Apple releases in recent history..

By in large, a new operating system release should have zero impact on existing programs. This time over, however, it looks like lots and lots of programs have been broken all over the place..

Of course, as a developer I spend most of my time in Apple’s development tools, namely XCode and the brand-new “Instruments”. I’m sad to say it, but the current XCode 3.0 is a no more than an alpha release. The editor hangs, the snapshot feature doesn’t work (force quit), half the time after running a program in debug mode, you need to quit XCode to “reset” it.. it will be great when it’s finished, but it has been released at least a year too early 🙁

Time Machine is great, but lacks configurability and feedback. Every hour it will pretty much freeze the machine and backup 360Gb of data (build directories do not seem to be excluded from backups), the only indication that you have that it’s busy is that the external hard disk starts making a racket, there’s no easy way of delaying a backup, etc, etc.

My own applications have also been hit by Leopard problems despite having tested them on various beta builds of the new operating system.

For A Better Finder Rename, the migration problems were largely due to changes (and apparently new bugs) in the Finder and in AppleScript. For MacBreakZ there are some oddities to do with Spaces (which does behave in some fairly strange ways).

At the moment, however, it seems that it’s the Big Mean Folder Machine that has been the hardest hit. This is largely due to some very nice progress on Mac OS X’s built-in Core Data database engine. It’s much faster, but it also seems to leak memory fairly badly where it didn’t before. As a consequence, “The Big Mean Folder Machine” appears to be both a lot faster (great!) and lot memory hungrier (no!) on Leopard than it was on Tiger..

Unfortunately the vastly increased memory usage on Leopard makes the whole application crash when it runs out of memory. Luckily this doesn’t happen during your garden variety 6000 file re-organization, but can quickly become a problem when you’re dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of files. Well using Core Data was supposed to provide “The Big Mean Folder Machine” with fantastic scalability rather than make memory a problem!

I have therefore spent much of the last week optimizing “The Big Mean Folder Machine” for Leopard by manually testing each bit of code for its memory usage.. this is very tedious work, but at least it seems to be working:

My current test version now deals gracefully with half a million files and has a very small memory foot print even when it’s working flat out..

I hope to have a new version of “The Big Mean Folder Machine” that will gracefully deal with over a million files out very soon, so expect “The Big Mean Folder Machine” 1.3 very soon.

This is also good news for the upcoming version 8 of A Better Finder Rename, which will inherit much of The Big Mean Folder Machine’s processing pipeline.

If anybody is stuck with the current version of “The Big Mean Folder Machine”, please just email me and I can send you a development copy via email.

Best regards,

Frank

A Better Finder Rename and Leopard

A while back the 7.7.6 release of A Better Finder Rename introduced the “ultra-fast, ultra-safe” renaming mode.

Renaming files on Mac OS 9/X has always been a tricky affair because of file comments. In earlier releases of Mac OS 9/X these were called “Finder comments” and starting with Mac OS X 10.4 “Spotlight comments”.

The thing about them has always been: they keep disappearing for no reason.

The reason is actually all too clear: they are not properly linked into the file system programming interfaces. Every time to you save a file under a new name, move it off a Mac HFS+ file system, send it via email, move or copy it under Unix, etc the file comment stays behind because the Finder doesn’t know about the operation.

Generations of Macintosh users have stored crucial data in those comments, only to find that when they need them, they have disappeared.

Now renaming files outside of the Finder is one of those things that make file comments disappear, precisely because the Finder doesn’t know anything about the renaming having happened.

A Better Finder Rename to my knowledge is the only file renaming utility for the Mac that actually preserve file comments. It does so by telling the Finder about each rename. Unfortunately this is hardly the fastest way of doing things. Usually this does not matter too much because renaming 500 files in under 5 seconds isn’t really all that slow.

Unfortunately, this method does not work on FileVault encrypted home folders. The reason for this is that AppleScript does not work on FileVault files. This is a problem that I (and many others) reported to Apple when 10.3 came out, but that has not been solved yet. Perhaps because it can’t be solved?

This is why A Better Finder Rename in the “Advanced Options” sections lets you choose your own renaming mechanism. A full description of the different mechanisms available is in the manual.

Which brings us back to the “ulta-fast, ultra-safe” renaming mode. For a short while Apple managed to fix their renaming programming interface in the Cocoa APIs, so that file comments did not disappear, as long as you used a brand-new system level call to do so. If memory serves this was between Mac OS X 10.4.7 and 10.4.8. In Mac OS X 10.4.9 they promptly broke this again and file comments started disappearing again..

So in between the implementation and the release of version 7.7.6 the new feature stopped working and then had to be “removed” from version 7.7.7 as a bug fix. I did report the problem to Apple again..

Now it seems that in Leopard things are fine again. The renaming mode was never actually removed, but simply renamed. It is still available as “ultra-fast move mode (potential file comment loss)” and appears to work flawlessly and very fast under Leopard. So if you are under Leopard, by all means use it!