Loghound.com Blog

Notablemeals is a finalist!

2011-07-26T23:05:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to say that my newest iphone app (Notablemeals) is a finalist in the evernote developer competition. Please vote for it!

Evernote Competition

2011-07-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

I've been working frantically on an entry for the Evernote Developer Competition -- What I eventually came up with was an idea called "Notablemeals" An app that would let you easily capture any meals that were important for you and store them in Evernote.

This is certainly a scratch your own itch kind of app -- I've always weirdly wished I had more memories of important meals -- A couple of time while traveling I've tried to take a picture of my food but I'm always disappointed with the results (who needs a bunch of random food snapshots mixed in with a picture of the pope -- who needs that?

Anyway I was on a crazy tight schedule (it was about 15 days until the end of the competition and I had *zero* lines of code written) and I knew that if I wanted any hope at all of being competitive I need some help in the design department.

Fortunately KaL MichaeL was available and after a whirlwind two weeks I'm happy to say we were able to turn out app in this last sunday evening with 'hours' to spare :-)

I don't know how it will do in the competition but I do know that I've never felt better about an app. It's design is great thanks to KaL, it's code is some of the cleanest I've ever done and it's one of the more intuitive apps I've produced.

I've not submitted it to Apple yet but I hope to do so in the next day or so... The website should be up in the next few days and I'm looking forward to getting more feedback on ways to improve it.

Google IO 2011

2011-05-09T15:58:00.001-07:00

I'm going.

eshox

2011-03-09T21:20:00.000-08:00

If you go to this link

http://www.eshox.com/site/packages/pricing.html

You'll see what appears to be some sort of joint marketing or sales deal -- It's not.

I have no idea why Ralf thinks he can do this but I have nothing to do with it and would strongly recommend you not use this service.

Won't be on the Mac App store (for now at least)

2010-11-06T23:07:00.000-07:00

I've been working on my first 'real' Mac App (real in the sense that it's standalone, not RapidWeaver related as such and will actually be completed)

One thing I've decided (for now anyway) is that I will *not* offer it on the Apple Mac App store.

Why? I want to actually have a relationship with my customers -- If I go to the Apple Mac App store then Apple is in the middle without adding any real value (except perhaps for a bigger reach)-- I never have details of who my customers are and they feel 'extra removed' from me.

When you buy anything from my store I send you a receipt with (among other things) information about how to contact us if there is a problem, when you download a new version you get it from my server with my release notes (via sparkle) and if I find a problem I can push out a fix in minutes. -- No such luck with the Apple Mac App store.

By the way my new app syncs flickr & iPhoto, hit this if you are interested in beta testing.

Handles Content as Compound Value

2010-09-04T22:59:00.000-07:00

Bindings in cocoa are un-freaking amazing -- You can change a model parameter and bada-bing-bada-boom the UI updates... Fantastic!

For the most part they just sort of work but I've always been a little confused by all of the options -- Honestly the only one I ever really played with was 'updates continuously' which does what it says (updates happen instantly and it doesn't depend on hitting 'return' or tabbing out of the field.)

The docs are actually here but I've mostly ignored them, until tonight.

Tonight my nemesis was 'Handles Content as Compound Value'

Why? you may ask -- it's perfectly clear what it does. From the docs:

Handles Content As Compound Value

A Boolean value that determines if the content is treated as a compound value.

Model objects can store relationship-like data in "compound" values and it may be necessary to use a reversible value transformer to translate those compound values temporarily into smaller pieces, that can be displayed and edited individually. See “Bindings Message Flow” in “Cocoa Bindings Programming Topics” for more information.

If YES, the content of a controller is treated as a compound value and—by using a reversible value transformer—will apply changes as a single value to the master model object if anything changes (edits, additions, removals).

Errrrr.. got that. What the docs should have said was

Handles Content as Compound Value

Click this if you plan on binding an NSArrayController to a NSUserDefaultsController.

Yup -- That is the magic trick to get it to all work. If you don't do that many odd things happen but mostly the bindings don't work right. Apparently (?) the NSUserDefaultsController applies a value transformer for storing the dictionary entries. Don't ask me why as it's not documented but that appears to be the case.

Just tossing this out for to the googleverse so some person flummoxed why they can't easily bind up their NSArrayController to a NSUserDefaultsController.

Evernote Power tip

2010-08-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

Here is an idea -- whenever I pass one of those heart rate machines that are avaialble at drug stores and the ilk I jump on, get a reading and then using the Evernote iPhone app I take a picture of the results.

Then every few weeks I go through and enter the date/time and readings into a spreadsheet (well in my case I enter it into my fitbit account but the point is to keep track of it somewhere)

What makes Evernote great about this is it syncs to all of your computers/devices so when you have a few moments you can go through and transfer the results of your measurements (I then delete them as I have no need to keep pictures of my measurements). Evernote is also great because you can use the thumbnail view to quickly find all of the measurements you haven't entered.

No fuss, no muss and a hassle free way to keep long term track of your blood pressure.

Snow Leopard enumerateObjectsWithOptions:usingBlock

2010-08-22T23:40:00.000-07:00

One of the niftier things in Snow Leopard are blocks -- It's a way to encapsulate a bit of code and pass it around to do useful things.

I won't go into the hairy details but suffice to say it lets you do some interesting design. Recently I was faced with the problem of looking through a 'large (30,000+) array of strings to find matchess. The simple 'containsObject' feature of NSArray was "ok" but slows down as the size increases.

As an experiment I thought to write a version that use blocks and concurrent searching. NSArray has a enumerateObjectsWithOptions:usingBlock: method that exactly fit the bill.

So... replace:

foundIt=[self.items containsObject:itemToFind]

with

[self.items enumerateObjectsWithOptions:NSEnumerationConcurrent

usingBlock:^(id s,NSUInteger idx,BOOL *stop){

if ([(NSString*)s isEqual:itemToFind]) {

foundIt=TRUE;

*stop=TRUE;

}

return;

}];

The results? I tried 4 experiments for a variety of sizes.

In every case the blocks version was faster for ~8000 elements or more (below 8000, the startup costs of blocks are too much) -- These results are on a 8 core mac pro so it's possible it could be worse on a dual core machine but the result would be the same -- at some point there the blocks version will win.

Link to the spreadsheet with detailed results

Get the code to test it yourself on GitHub

My first Android App

2010-06-09T23:26:00.000-07:00

As my previous post mentioned I went to google IO -- One of the smarter things they did was shower us with cell phones so I've spent the last few weeks (on and off) doing Android development.

I just published my first app to the Android marketplace (it's a free desktop widget that monitors your Tender inbox -- Tender is a support system I use)

My thoughts?

Android development environment is both better and worse than Xcode. The reasons are much too numerous to go over but the main differences are Eclipse (Android) has some amazing run time type checking and validation -- If you type something in wrong in almost any part of the IDE it let's you know and recommends ways to fix it (it's really amazing that way) but it's also kind of slow & clunky (and very un-mac like). Xcode is closer to the metal and feels like a good mac app but gives you more rope to hang yourself (on the plus side you can do some crazy cool stuff with Xcode that I haven't seen the equivalent in Android)
Learning Java isn't as hard as I had feared... Partly because I used to do a lot of C++ and it's pretty close to that and partly because it's not so different than Objective C in many ways. Java as a language is actually pretty remarkably well thought out.
The component model of Android development is very interesting and in many ways innovative.. You can do a lot in android with very little work.
Targeting Android devices is interesting -- you don't know for sure the processor, screen size, input methods, etc. that your customer has so you work at a more abstract layer (for example I had to include three pieces of artwork all at different resolutions to account for that). At the end of the day however it's just a matter of adjusting workflows and sort of accepting that on some devices it may not look perfect (it's very similar to designing web pages where you don't know for sure what kind of browser or screen size the viewer will have). iPhone is very targeted -- you know exactly what the user will see and can really target that experience.
Publishing to the marketplace is an amazingly different experience. I finally decided I basically 'exported it', uploaded it, typed in a description and added a screenshot, hit publish and *literally* within about 45 seconds I checked the Markeplace and it was live! If I find a bug I can re-publish it at a whim and have it live within minutes... Amazingly nice

In the end it was a pretty enjoyable experience -- I've been using Android for the last several weeks but I believe that will come to an end about June 24th..... I'll probably not do a lot more developing in Android but the experience is pretty reasonable and the phones are getting better and better.

Long term I suspect Android will become the market leader and iPhone will be relegated to a second or third spot -- This is partly because Android is already at more or less feature parity (actually better in features) and is fast becoming 'pretty enough'

Having said that a second or third place spot in the Cell phone market is still pretty freaking big and Apple will continue to appeal to a certain kind of customer who really appreciates the experience they provide.

For me, as I said, I'll be in line to get an iPhone 4 and on June 24 I suspect my Android will stop being carried around very often.

Google IO

2010-05-22T23:02:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't catch my various tweets (@loghound) you might have missed that I was at Google I/O last week.

Similar to WWDC, I/O is a developers conference part education and part evangelism for developers to use their technologies. Also similiar to WWDC, I/O had a jam packed keynote (more on that later) -- This will likely be a long post as I feel the need to say a lot.

WWDC '10
First let me talk about WWDC '10. Sadly I'll not be attending WWDC this year -- I've gone for the last 3 in a row, the first year it blew my mind. Year two was satisfying but quite frankly last year was dissapointing. This is mostly because the material they covered was largely a repeat of the prior year and partly because of the iPhone focus. When I saw the agenda this year and realized it would be all iPhone and probably (most likely) a repeat of prior years I took a pass.

Google I/O
Fortunatley I had signed up for Google I/O well in advance. I use a number of Google products and have considered going for a few years. While I was dissapointed to miss WWDC I was pretty excited going into I/O.

Google I/O vs. WWDC
It was fun to compare and contrast the two conferences. Held at the same Venue (Moscone West) at almost the same time of year (only about three weeks apart) for the (more or less) same crowd was interesting. In bullet points my observation(s) were.

I/O is much more open -- Engineers actually go 'off script' and answer questions (and sometimes even (shock) share things they shouldn't). This is both good and bad as the Polish to most I/O presentations was quite a bit less than WWDC. Some of the material was poorly done or hard to follow and some sessions made poor use of time (one guy flew through his slides in 20 minutes and then didn't know what to say for the rest of the hour!). By comparison WWDC is always well polished -- Material is timed almost perfectly and the sessions last precisely the same amount of time. Winner: I/O -- While I wish a few of them had been a bit more polished I felt like I was getting information at a more 'engineer to engineer' level with less fear of going off script.
Focus. WWDC is about one thing (ok, two things) -- Mac and iPhone/iPad. there is (used to be) at IT track also but the majority is for developers. You can walk into almost any session and get something useful out of it. Google I/O is all over the map. It went from new storage products to chrome web browser extensions to brand new programming languages. While they had 'tracks' you could follow if you were there for 'one reason' I had a tough time because there are a number of things I wanted to do -- Partly I wanted to sharpen some skills and partly I wanted to learn. As a consequence I jumped from session track to session track probably a bit much. Winner: WWDC
Material Share: WWDC puts videos up afterwards -- it used to take months but last year it was about 2 weeks. Google puts them on youtube (soon?) for everyone. Winner: I/O -- I was able to watch sessions from last year coming in which helped a lot. Apple has this misguided approach to keep information 'secret' somehow (crazy!)
Food: Both had catered service for breakfast, lunch & snacks. Apple provided Odwalla drinksk while google provided more varieties of bottled water and soda. Winner: Draw
Other: both conferences had areas for getting work done. Google went one further with foosball tables, pool tables & wii. Google also had charging stations (WWDC used to but dumped it last year) and a 'tech desk' to get emergency parts. Winner: I/O
Non Conference. Both events have parties, I missed the I/O one so can't comment on that. At WWDC they have the sessions, stump the experts and ADA. Google had sessions and the developers sandbox where devs showed off their google solutions. Winner: I/O
Length: WWDC is 5 days (well, 4 1/2 as the first day is mostly keynote) and that is 'about right'. I/O is 2 days (way too short). Winner: WWDC
Freebies. WWDC gives you a t-shirt and computer bag (the last three years). Perhaps this year the'll get something more but I doubt it. I/O gave me two t-shirts, socks (Google TV Sock no less) and two phones each with a month of service (Motorola Droid and HTC Evo). Winner: I/O (not even a fair fight)
Value: WWDC $1600 for 5 days. I/O: $400 for two days (plus lots of hardware freebies to help you develop). Winner: I/O
Keynote: It's impossible to beat a apple keynote -- the google one was well done and by any normal standards exciting and fun (you should have heard the crowd when they gave us all HTC Evo's) but you cannot beat a Steve Jobs Keynote: Winner: WWDC

Finally on Google vs. Apple -- Google poked a lot of fun at Apple (and I'm sure we'll see it poked back in a few weeks) -- It's been surprising to me to see how many people have come out of the wood work trying to defend apple or claim Google looked defensive.

People: While they work together on many things (Almost all Google employees used Macs and Apple uses Google services for much of the iPhone) they are in many ways competitors. Of course Google will try to use it's developer conference to attack who they perceive is the biggest threat (just like Apple has against Microsoft and I'm sure will do so against Google this year) -- It's actually a compliment (imagine if Google had bashed RIM or microsoft during the keynote so heavily and ignored Apple. That, my friends, would have been a slap in the face!)

At the end of the day though what you have to do (and what I am still processing) is do I buy it? Honestly Google made a lot of very valid points. While I love my Apple products the fact is they are limited by what Apple/Jobs thinks they should do. Having played with my Android phones these last weeks I've been impressed with the kinds of integration and capabilities they have (although they are not nearly as pretty as an iPhone).

I'm not sure where my head is at the end of the day -- I decided to try to use my Android exclusively for the next week or two to see how it works for me -- I'll report back later what I find.

Enough for now, if you are still reading thanks for sticking with it. More so than most this post was something I needed to do to get my thoughts together on what I heard & saw last week at I/O. I'll be curious to see what Apple does at their Keynote (and, I'm sure, I'll be sad that I'm not at WWDC0

Support, Hawaii and the Obligatory iPad post

2010-04-03T22:40:00.000-07:00

First let me give a quick update on Support. I've moved to tenderapp.com for providing support over my old mail based approach. The biggest advantage they offer is i can have more than a single support person helping out -- On that note if you have emailed recently or visited http://support.loghound.com you may have noticed I've got some additional help. I'm really happy to publicly announce that Karn ("WebKarnage") has joined team Loghound doing support -- I couldn't be happier with all of the great help he has been providing.

The really nice thing that this has let me do is take a vacation, I just came back from Hawaii -- While I've gone with my family on vacation before I always logged in every day to do support, answer questions and generally keep things running smoothly. What was really nice about this break was I totally unhooked -- I checked email I think twice but otherwise was 'offline' which was a great break.

My vacation ended last night, April 2, when we returned home -- Now let me be clear, I never planned to come back the day before iPad day but that was just the way it worked out.
Let me start my (obligatory) iPad post by saying I don't regret buying it -- That is an odd way to start the post but you'll see below what appears to be a lukewarm reaction -- I really do like it but I would best describe it as 'meeting expectations'.

I pre-ordered a 16GB model to pick up at our local Apple store -- My reasoning was that it would be mostly a 'bed side' computer and I didn't need a lot of storage but in listening to Andy Ihnaktko talk about it on theMacbreak Weekly -- In the discussion he said "You should buy the 64GB model because you will find yourself putting 'everything' on it" -- That sort of struck me and I thought that 16GB really could fill up pretty quickly if you started adding some heavy apps -- I ended up asking if I could upgrade to a 32GB model when I got to the Apple store and they were able to support my request.

So this morning I trundled off to the store with my 8 year old son and at about 8:20 we were in line waiting (the local paper showed up and snapped a photo here -- I'm the guy with the blue hoodie on the left hand side.

So back to my impressions -- Like I said it meets my expectations -- Expectations that were pretty high so that's saying something. The only thing that really suprised me in an unexpectedly good way was looking at photos. Syncing over some iPhoto libraries and looking at the photos on the iPad is spectacular, much more than I expected.

Things that worked as well as I expected were web surfing (fast, high fidelity), iBooks (crisp text, fun to turn, great book syncing) the Mail app (and the google gmail web interface) and google maps.

Finally there were a few things that were a disappointment: iPhone apps scaled 2x look terrible (almost unusable) - I get it that graphics scaled up look clunky but I assumed they would scale text up better than they did (my guess is the scaling is happning at the graphic card level so perhaps it's not possible to scale text differently than other elements).

The launch apps from third parties were a mixed bag -- I love the potential of the netflix app but it crashes, a lot. Evernote is very nice but also tended to crash -- I'm sure that these will improve quickly however. The device is surprisingly heavy in the hand -- while that feels good from a 'boy this is sturdy' point of view it's extra weight compared to a kindle is a concern -- I'll need to do some real reading to see how that works.

I have a few iPad app ideas that I'll be playing with over the coming weeks & months -- It should be fun.

RapidBlog Problems

2010-03-24T12:51:00.001-07:00

I've gotten a number of reports of RapidBlog plugin now working today and I'm working on it. It seems the blogger folks have changed the data feed and that is what is causing the problem.

I should get a fix out in the next 12 hours.

[Update -- I have a new build that should help -- Testing is not huge but I think it will fix the problem

http://loghound.com/download/RapidBlog_1.94.dmg ]

-John

New support systems

2010-03-05T13:40:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

A quick note that we are trying some new support systems here at loghound.com -- For as long as I've been in business I've used email as my primary support vehicle and although I think it's worked well it has two fatal flaws.

1) I tend to solve the same problem again and again. It would be nice if there was a way for people to see/search for solutions
2) It doesn't allow more than one person to help in support.

To that end I'm testing a new support system this month. The goal is to have it be a smooth transition but please be patient if there are a few bumps as we sort it all out.

-John

RapidBlog And Blogger FTP support

2010-02-02T17:20:00.000-08:00

You may have heard that blogger decided to stop ftp support going forward.

In case you are wondering this has no, zero, zilch impact on RapidBlog -- RapidBlog does not depend on this feature at all so rest assured that your blogs will continue to work just fine.

-John

Where did that space go?

2010-01-30T20:32:00.000-08:00

Making RapidWeaver plugins I often have customers report problems that I can't reproduce. A common way I deal with this is to ask them to send me their RapidWeaver project files so I can see exactly how they have it configured.

Almost every time I ask the common answer is "Ok, I'll try but it's Big!" -- recently I got the question (in an offhand way) about why it was so big so I thought I would share a little secret.

There is a pretty easy way to get a good view of where your chewing through storage in RapidWeaver.

Here is how you do it.

Make a backup of your RapidWeaver project file first… While this procedure shouldn't cause any damage it's probably safer to play with a backup.
Download GrandPerspective (Edit: See note at bottom on Disk Inventory X) -- This is a neat little app that shows you graphically disk usage.
Right click on your rapidweaver project and select 'show package contents'. You should see two folders "Pages" and "DefaultPageAttributes" - You'll need the "Pages" folder later.
Open GrandPerspective and select "Scan Folder" (file -> Scan Folder)
In the open dialog drag the "Pages" folder from your RapidWeaver bundle over to the open dialog (You have to do this because by default GrandPespective will not scan a bundle and will not let you navigate to a bundle)
Hit Scan
Up will pop a pretty picture showing you how space is allocate -- you, of course, will want to focus on the big blocks. As you select one the bottom bar will show the size as well as the 'path' of the data. For instance I have one that is called "1-Home002FPlugins/4-Lockdown/ChildPages/4-FAQ/Data.archive" -- This means it's a page under my Home Plugins/Lockdown/FAQ folder (you will have different paths but the names should give you a clue)
From here you can decide what to do -- Perhaps you need to put in smaller graphics or split the page up.

[Edit]: Biochi pointed me to Dir Inventory X. It's seens to work much better than GrandPerspective for this as you can directly select the package and it will index it (without all of the show package contents nonsense) PLUS it has the advantage of letting you navigate by folder, check it out.

Gone for a week

2010-01-22T22:31:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

I'll be out of town in Asia for the week from Jan 23 to Feb 1. It's a real whirlwind trip (Singapore, Malysia, Hong Kong and China) so support and answering emails will be very slow to non existant because:

I don't have a Mac with me.
I have no idea when I'll get internet access

I have a goal of photographing everything I eat on this trip so I'll hopefully put some pics up when I get back.

-John

Convereting old DV footage to digital

2009-12-26T17:32:00.000-08:00

I've been spending the last few days converting some of my old DV footage to digital format. I've got maybe 30 or 40 tapes and I really have no idea what is on any of them are so my hope is I can import the into a digital format and have them actually available in to enjoy and share.

One of the problems is the DV import process in iMovie brings them in as 'DV' files that are *huge* (several hundred MB easily). My 30 odd tapes will end up chewing through a unreasonable fraction of my TB hard drive so I've spent some time looking for how to compress them to more modern formats.

Initially I thought I could use an automated tool like Handbrake of VisualHub to quickly convert them but the results were less than perfect. I finally sat down and did a direct comparison. For Visual Hub and Handbrake I spent some time playing with settings trying to really optimize them, for Quicktime (using Quicktime X) there are no real settings to speak of.

The results (below) speak for themselves. Even when I upped the bit rate to Handbrake or Visual Hub I couldn't get it even close to what Quicktime can do. In terms of speed they all seemed pretty close (I didn't time them but my perception was the speeds of conversation were all about the same).

On the pictures below note especially the horizontal and vertical lines -- What you can't see from these grabs is some of odd interlace problems while watching the movie in everything but Quicktime.

Raw Footage 57Mb/s	Quicktime to H.264 2.6Mb/s
Handbrake Custom Settings H.264 2.65Mb/s	Visual Hub to H.264 3.6Mb/s

One of my initial concerns with using Quicktime was there was no Batch process. I initially loaded the movie into quicktime and used the 'Export' feature. Fortunately I came across a great solution to that: Create a service to do the conversation.

Now I can just select a bunch of movies, select services->convert to Quicktime and they show up on my Desktop, Nice!

Paperless pays off!

2009-12-23T16:41:00.000-08:00

If you have followed my blog for the past several weeks you have seen me on a bit of an organizational/paperless tear.

Today it payed off -- I had ordered a gift for someone and the first thing I did when I got the package was scan the packing information (essentially receipt) and saved it in my 'Receipts' DropBox folder.

Today I learned that the person I bought the gift for is already getting the item -- Instead of waiting until I got home, trying to find the details, and then trying to call them the next day to process the return I was able to pull up my receipt off of DropBox (I sync my Work computer to DropBox also but I could have easily grabbed it off the DropBox web interface), call up the vendor with all the details and get a return processed.

This whole process works due to a couple of thing that are available today but weren't available even a few years ago.

Painless Scanning -- My ScanSnap makes scanning completely painless. If you have never used one it's impossible to describe but scanning a document is so simple, foolproof and fast that you don't ever think 'is it worth it' -- It's actually less work to scan then to think "Where do I store this"
Files Everywhere (& backed up) with Dropbox. I have the 50GB account but I only use about 5GB so far -- This is after scanning like crazy. The fact is scanned PDF's just don't take much space and with Dropbox I can always get at my files. The nice thing about getting a paid account is that they keep backup versions (Forever?). Even if you later delete it to get more space you can go back later and retrieve it via the web interface.
Evernote. I kept track of my return number and dragged a copy of the receipt into Evernote in my 'To Do' folder. In the next few days I'll mail the item back (Scanning my proof of shipment of course), add it to the note (so it has: my original receipt, my notes talking with the CSR on return details, and proof of mailing in a single Evernote note) -- This note will drop into my 'Completed' folder once my credit card is returned.

It may sound like I'm a serious type-A which is generally not the case. I like being organized as much as the next person but generally don't spend the energy to actually do much about it. With these tools however it's really pretty painless. What makes Evernote & DropBox especially attractive is they are not tied to one computer. They are at Work, at Home and on my Phone.

Finally I want to comment on the ScanSnap. I really hesitated on buying it: $400 for a scanner? but it's one of my better purchases of 2009. It completely exceeded my expectations and I've long forgotten the money I spent on it.

-John

To Do Management with Evernote

2009-12-12T20:38:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is grand, perhaps too grand. It's really just a simple change I've made recently as part of my paperless office drive (which really should be called a simplify your life drive).

One of my torments has been todo lists. While I generally am pretty good at using them it drives me batty that I don't have a consistent way to keep track of them.

At work I've used Outlook to-do's a lot but they are generally unavailable at home. At home I've tried the built in mail to-dos as well as various services such as remember the milk and the ilk but I never found a solution that worked for me consistently everywhere.

Before I go too much further I should explain that the way I do tasks lists/todos is they tend to be associated with a bunch of other media -- For instance if I get a bill I need to call about during the week I'll scan it in (with my SnapScan of course) so I have a copy to refer to when I call. Or I might have a screenshot or just a bunch of notes.

I've settled on a solution in the last 3-4 weeks that really seems to be working for me. Evernote.

I have two notebooks, one is called 'ToDo' and one is could "Closed out ToDos" - I simply put notes in the "ToDo" list and drag them out to "Closed Out" when I'm done.

This is tremendous because notes in Evernote can contain Rich text, images, PDF's and any other sort of file so I can toss any any supporting items to my todo. As I make progress on it I can also make notes on where I am and when it's closed I can archive it for posterity sake.

Since I have Evernote everywhere (phone, work, home and web) I can always get access to work on them or close them out.

The key to this working is I have Evernote open all the time anyway so it's not a new tool I need to get into -- It's the tool I already use.

In defense of the app store process

2009-12-02T23:08:00.000-08:00

I'll admit it -- I've been (privately) pretty down on the app store process. After my first app was released (MovieFlick) I swore never again as the pain of trying to push out updates was too much.

I eventually did a second app (DreamApp). The 1.3 version has been about two months getting out and I was ready to explode today when I got what I thought was another rejection but it all worked out fine.

My first release of 1.3 had a real problem with new user accounts that I never tested and the Apple team found it so although it's frustrating to wait 3 weeks to find out they did a good job of finding a real problem.

My second submit was rejected for using 'undocumented API's' -- you may have heard that Apple has a new static analysis tool for finding usage of non supported API's and my app was caught in that. It turns out that one of the libraries I use did have calls to unsupported API's but only for testing purposes (of the framework) - I never actually used them in my code.

grumble, grumble ok submit again… Tonight I got *another* letter about unsupported API's and I was about to explode but then something odd happened…. I got an email saying 'Your app is now for sale'.

It turns out the third letter pointed out the use of a non supported api (NSHost hostWithName) but instead of rejecting it they said "We'll let it go but please fix it for the next release" -- When I first read it I hadn't noticed that fine print but true to their word it's now available.

So in this era of dog piling on top of Apple and the app store process I have to get them some credit for being pragmatic about this… They made a decision to release it but asked nicely for me to fix it next time.

Nice!

ScanSnap Safety Tips part deux

2009-11-29T17:37:00.001-08:00

A video summary of ScanSnap safety issues

Scansnap Safety Tips

2009-11-26T00:15:00.000-08:00

My ScanSnap arrived today (I'll write up about it later) but with it came a 50 page 'safety precautions' book. It struck me as odd because I couldn't imagine that scanning was a particularly dangerous activity.

Boy was I wrong. I'm really glad I decided to read the book as there are a number of really good safety tips including:

Don't use scansnap while driving a car
When handling documents be careful not to cut your fingers
When carrying the ScanSnap outside avoid rain and snow
Avoid getting a necktie caught in the scansnap

That's just a few of them -- I wish I had known how dangerous this would be before I purchased the ScanSnap

Going paperless

2009-11-23T09:53:00.000-08:00

My wife and I were cleaning our house this weekend and it struck me just how many piles of paper we had. For lots of good reasons you get paper and want to keep it (sometimes it has important info, sometimes it's a keepsake) but I was shocked by how cluttered our house was by the various bits (including copies of bills long paid, expired coupons, etc.)

Even after brutally going through and recycling there were still lots of stuff we 'had to keep'. I made a decision this weekend to see if I could transition my household to be largely paperless.

My first step started with a purchase and a change in bill paying:

My purchase was a Fujitsu SnapScan s1500m -- I've seen Fujitsu at Mac world for several years and while I've always kind of liked the idea the price (~$404 at Amazon) was always more than I wanted to pay. That changed when I spent almost an hour trying to scan in documents with my trusty HP all in one. The HP is fine for a few items but for any kind of volume it's pretty horrible -- It's slow and can't reliably feed more than a few sheets at a time.

I'm hoping the Fujitsu SnapScan fixes all of that. My plan is to shove everything I can find that I don't want deleted in there and pdf it up. For some of the docs I'll keep them in Evernote but for most of them I'll probably just store them away (maybe archive them off every year or so)

For bill pay I enabled a feature that's been on my account for a while. I switched from Quicken for the PC to doing finances online recently and as part of the switch I went to web based bill pay -- One feature of online bill pay is they can send the bill directly to your account and you can view & pay online (no more paper -- Get rid of it at the source!)

I'll report back in a few weeks on how things are going..

Even Easier Scanning into Evernote

2009-11-10T08:47:00.000-08:00

In my last post I showed a easy way to get images from Image Capture into Evernote. While that worked great it had one problem: Image Captured tends to 'forget' the selected application and you need to go find it again.

Fortunately there is an even easier way to integrate Evernote into Image Capture using Automator to create a 'real' Image Capture plugin. (and finally, I get to use Automator for something real!)

Setup is quite easy: Run Automator and select new 'Image Capture Plugin' .

Then add a single item to the flow -- Run Applescript with the following applescript.

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Evernote"

create note from file input

end tell

return input

end run

Save it to to the default location and call it something like 'Evernote' and Voila, it shows up in Image capture as a first class citizen (and will never disappear). Note that this is for Snow Leopard (10.6) - I don't know how if or how this trick will work on earlier version of OS X.

Even Easier!

Scanning Into Evernote with Image Capture

2009-11-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

I've got a funny history with Evernote -- Around the time Microsoft came out with One Note, a small company started making something called Evernote. I actually preferred Evernote over One note but in reality I didn't use either of them much because the data was stuck on one computer.

Since then I've gone through lots of these (Yojimbo, Circus Ponies Notebook, etc.) and while I love the concept I've always given up since my life is just too dynamic.

I spend a lot of time at work on a PC, then I come home to a Mac but on the road it's all iPhone baby. With the amazingly good syncing of Evernote and the great native clients (not to mention the web) I've really started to rely on Evernote.

One thing I've started to do a lot of is scanning documents -- A typical use case is I'll be doing bills on a Sunday night and realize I need to call someone during business hours (say to get something corrected or ask a question). I've started scanning the bill into Evernote, adding a few quick comments and add it to Evernote.

The sync in Evernote works so well that I don't even think about it anymore -- I just add it and forget about it. Monday morning when I get to work the info is right there and I can make the call to fix the problem (and if it's complicated I can keep a running log of discussions in that note -- Since it includes the original bill I've got it all in one spot -- A lifesaver if you are dealing with insurance companies!)

The one thing that Didn't work as well as I would like was getting the scan into Evernote in the first place. I would:

Open Image Capture
Scan to PDF
Drag PDF to evernote
Add comments

Fortunately there is a better way (in Snow Leopard anyway) -- It's also dead-easy to set up. As a one time step step you have to select the 'scan to' drop down in image capture and navigate to the Applications directory and select Evernote. It will then show up in the drop down (like iPhoto, preview & Mail do by default) -- It becomes a first class citizen in Image capture so you can scan directly into Evernote. My work flow is now

Open Image Capture & Make sure Evernote is the selected as the Scan To Target (which it is)
Scan and add Comments

Easy!