Solipsism Gradient

Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone asking a question about Nudge. I replied on the same day, as I always try to do. My e-mail bounced with the following helpful message:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at vega.planetarium.com.br.

I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<somebody@rsandk.com>:

Connected to 24.196.135.162 but sender was rejected.

Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 mail from spam friendly countries with admins who overwhelmingly ignore or bounce complaints not welcome here

In the past, I’ve seen various concise wordings of the “550 5.7.1″ message; usually something to the effect that my address was on some blacklist or another. A polite request to the provider’s postmaster address usually worked.

But from this one I gather that they’re now unconditionally rejecting all e-mails from Brazil. Isn’t that rather excessive…? Should I sue about restraint of trade, or whatever?

So if you’re a user of one of my products, and I don’t answer your e-mail, you may want to switch providers – or post here on the support boards. Sorry about that.

Quick update.

A few hours after posting the lamentation below I found out how avoid the text cursor. Both selecting and editing have to be disabled. Turning editing on (as I do, briefly, when inserting new stuff) turns selecting on again.

Turning all that off messed up some other functionality but I’m happy to report it was all easy to fix, and I now seem to be where I should have been a month ago.

Ah yes, and the contextual menu itself turned out to be a piece of cake… most of the code from Zingg! and Nudge could be reused.

So I hope to have something publishable Real Soon Now™…

I actually posted Nudge 1.01 some days ago, but there were only minute internal changes… and a new installer, which still looks much like a folder alias. If 1.0 is working for you, no need to download 1.01.

The new installer is much more intelligent, automatically routing a CM to the right folder, and creating it if necessary. If you’re suspicious about installers, double-click the installer and it will open the right folder for you, so you can move the CM manually.

This installer (or variations thereof) will be gradually adopted by my other products, and I plan to publish the source and make it available to other developers…

Positive feedback on Nudge is mounting. There’ve been over 3000 downloads so far in 3 days, beating XRay‘s 2800 and Zingg!‘s 2000+ downloads over the whole month!

c.k. over at 3650 and a 12-inch links to Nudge and suggests:

Apple should send him a rather large donation for providing a solution to one of their major Finder bugs…

Not that I would mind…

I’m sure that the Apple folks are working hard at this. However, from the rumor sites, it seems they’re stretched rather thin at the moment, working on Mac OS X 10.3.3. Also, Nudge is more of a stop-gap solution; I certainly wouldn’t want it made permanent.

The links and referrals stemming from John Gruber’s article are becoming too numerous to list. This shows, once again, how word of mouth is important for Mac developers. I also found a flattering side-effect at Ryan Wilcox’s h4ck3r+=boi:

Brent Simmons has created a Mac Software Business mailing list on Yahoo Groups.

The description: “This group is for small, independent Macintosh developers who want to talk with other developers about the business of Mac development. Questions on pricing, packaging, advertising, e-commerce providers, and so on are on-topic. Note that this list isn’t a vehicle for promotion: announcements and press releases are off-topic.”

The members of the group include some heavy hitters in the Mac Software industry, in addition to Brent: Rainer Brockerhoff, Michael Tsai, along with a cast of additional others.

Brent’s mailing list seems to have great potential; if you’re a shareware/indieware developer, I recommend it highly.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed some complaints out on the net about the Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) Finder not updating its windows. Later on, I myself noticed that it happens sometimes.

The thing is, today the Finder usually waits passively for notification that one of its items has been changed. And not all applications post that notification. Yes, it polls certain folders at strategic times, but apparently not in a way that covers all eventualities.

In Panther, parity with FreeBSD 5 introduced the so-called kqueue mechanism (PDF file), but unfortunately it’s still experimental, and the Finder doesn’t use it. I suppose 10.4 will implement that…

…in the meantime, I wrote a little Contextual Menu called “Nudge” and sent it to some people who complained about that problem. Mosty, there were no replies. Since it worked for me, I let it rest until today, when I noticed a MacFixit article about this very same problem. So, I took a few hours off to recompile “Nudge”, have a half-hearted stab at designing an icon for it, and publish it. So here it is (VersionTracker listing).

Preliminary reports indicate it works in most situations. Icon donations are accepted – I tried to draw an elbow (or fist) whacking a folder, but results were unsatisfactory .