Solipsism Gradient

Either Panther has an unusual number of hidden gotchas, or Murphy is singling me out for special treatment this time… perhaps both. XRay 1.0.7 is getting good reviews but users are also stumbling over several bugs – due, I’m sorry to say, to somewhat hurried testing. Details at the 1.0.7 discussion forum.

I was figuring on spending this week and the next on reviewing the not-too-good plugin architecture; writing a few plugins which do new things is usually the best way to find out architectural limitations. Hopefully I’ll be able to close the last bug over the weekend and then start on that, but I’ll try to publish 1.0.8 as soon as I get at least two new plugins working.

In other words, expect light blogging for the next weeks, as they say. In the meantime, if you’re an aspiring Mac OS Xshareware programmer, here’s excellent advice from Brent Simmons (of NetNewsWire fame) about making money with shareware. I seem to have lucked out, doing instinctively most of what he recommended…

Posted by taliesin’s log:
taliesin’s log linked to this post

Apple bites, frank views and a flower for my favourite feline

A “long and winding road of litigation”.

It’s been some time since I wrote about the World of Ends meme. Now Dave Pollard writes about how it might (or rather, will) apply to large corporations:

You know business is in trouble when it starts suing its customers. Bad sign. What has led to this terrible state, and what does it mean for the future of business?

…

What remains is the business ‘world of ends’ in Figure 3, no different from Figure 2 except that it has ‘imploded’, with the removal of the no-longer-necessary large corporation getting in the way of true, open, networked commerce. This is a world of entrepreneurs, perhaps even New Collaborative Enterprises, agile and responsive to customers, specialized but working as a network, no middle-man required.

Well worth reading. I’ve been remiss in not linking more to Dave’s articles, they’re always intriguing…

Wired is moving into hosting weblogs. The first one is, appropriately, Bruce Sterling’s “Beyond the Beyond”. There are some nice links there already, among them this interview. Bruce responds very tersely, but I liked this:

Q: Do you view our inability to see the higher reality as a problem related only to human perceptions or does it involve our spiritual aspect?

A:There is no “higher reality” in the sense that you mean here. If one sees a spiritual higher reality, that in itself is a major problem.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Take that, Paulo Coelho! 😉

That said, there’s no RSS feed. Tsk, tsk… how un-beyondly…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link!

Well, the old drawing board is getting an unusual amount of wear lately… and I’m glad! Exactly a week after XRay 1.0.6, I’m now announcing XRay 1.0.7. This has several bug fixes and new features, runs on both Jaguar and Panther, and can be invoked from the Finder by selecting an item and typing Command-Shift-X. More details in the release notes. Please post comments and suggestions to the XRay support forum.

About 4000 people have downloaded 1.0.6 so far. Since only a fraction of users (perhaps 1 in 5?) check compulsively for a new version every week, I estimate that there are about 20000 regular or occasional users around… I don’t have exact numbers for 10.0.5 downloads, but I think about 40000 copies were downloaded from my site and a few mirrors, and dozens of shareware CDs are around with 1.0.5 on them. So I’d estimate, again, that perhaps 1 in 5 users that try XRay will keep on using it regularly, and 1 in 10 of those have registered. From what I know, that’s way above the industry average. Thanks to all of you!