Solipsism Gradient

The J-Walk Blog, among other goodies, points at a site that turns any website into a screenplay. So guess what I did?

FADE IN.

INT. TRENDY CAFE

WINONA RYDER is lovelorn and sad. She is complaining to her best friend BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT) about the lovelorn and sad state of her life.

WINONA RYDER

Oh, BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT), do you think that I will ever find my true love? I am so lovelorn and sad. Surely, you, as my best friend, have some wisdom to offer

BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT)

Sorry, but to set everything up properly you must first run XRay once from an Administrator account.

WINONA RYDER

Yes, you said that from the very beginning, didn't you? Oh, if only I'd listened to you,BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT).

...

She shoots angrily again. LEONARDO DI CAPRIO comes running up.

LEONARDO DI CAPRIO

I must talk to you, WINONA RYDER. I can explain.

...

BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT)

This mode builds a smaller, faster program without debugging symbols and other encumbrances.

WEDDING GUESTS

Hear, hear.

BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT)

Well, all of this usually takes several hours and is extremely tiring.

Everybody laughs

LEONARDO DI CAPRIO and WINONA RYDER

Hahahahahaha!!!! Oh BROCKERHOFF.NET (SOLIPSISM GRADIENT). You are one of a kind.

THE END

Story of my life…

Acabo de publicar um update para o Aurélio Século XXI para Mac.

A versão 1.05 agora roda sob o Classic do Mac OS X 10.1.5 em diante. Detalhes aqui…

One of my favorite constantly-used applications, NetNewsWire, wins the Eddy Award. Congratulations to Brent Simmons! Well deserved.

Joel Spolksy has a new, unfortunately all-too-brief, article out: Craftmanship. As most of Joel’s articles, this should be required reading for any shareware developer.

It comes down to an attribute of software that most people think of as craftsmanship. When software is built by a true craftsman, all the screws line up. When you do something rare, the application behaves intelligently. More effort went into getting rare cases exactly right than getting the main code working. Even if it took an extra 500% effort to handle 1% of the cases.

Reminds me of when I moved away from home and asked my father (a master carpenter) to check out some furniture I was considering for my apartment. He always reached underneath to check if there were any rough edges – and there always were. He said a true craftsman always sandpapers all edges, even the ones nobody can see.

“But no one else would know!”

“He would know.”

So last Saturday morning (or was it Friday?) I was chatting with my editor at Macmania magazine about Panther stuff… we were commenting on the strangely missing “Fax received” notification, when I said I’d seen a suggestion to attach a folder action to the Fax folder; there’s a “new item” script at /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/add – new item alert.scpt.

So he said, why don’t you change that script a little and write a note how to install it? Hmmm… I said that I knew zilch about AppleScript, but would give it a try.

I thought, perhaps it’ll be too boring to write this up… why not write a little installer in Cocoa… and learn some AppleScript while I’m at it? So four hours later (two were used for drawing the icon, of course!), there was born – ta-dah! – the Fax Alert Installer!

Freeware, for Panther only. There’ve been about 700 downloads already…

I was tabulating the income from XRay registrations and thought the graph might be interesting for other shareware authors:

The initial peak is probably due to the fact that I had a relatively long public beta period – about 6 months, if I recall correctly – so the product was already well-known when 1.0 came out. I suppose that software released without a public beta would have a registration peak some weeks after release. After such a peak, if the product is left alone, registrations fall exponentially, approaching but never quite reaching zero.

The 1.0.5 release seems to have been well-timed; the curve had already stopped falling steeply and there was demand for new functionality, so the new version attracted a number of new clients. Publicity was favorable and XRay had been included on several CDROMs (some of which published the previous version), so there was a new, shallower peak.

For various reasons I then stepped on the ball, as they say here, and essentially left the product alone for nearly a year, except of course for user support. I should have begun working on 1.0.6 (or even 1.1) immediately, aiming for a release date around November 2002, to jack the curve up again. When I finally went back to the old drawing board a couple of months ago, the initial buzz about the product had long died down, and some of the functions which made it attractive when Mac OS X 10.1.x was new had been gradually added to later releases over time.

So the slight peak for the recent string of releases is due solely to some new users attracted by the release notices; there’ve been no reviews for some time, though I believe a couple will come out now. So part of the lukewarm reception is probably due to a lack of proper publicity; the bulk of downloads, from what I gather from my e-mail statistics, was from already registered users.

So the correct strategy now seems to be, release 1.1 with sufficient additional functionality to attract a substantial number of new users, and generate sufficient publicity around it. I’m working on that…

So I spent a somewhat more relaxed day starting up my new application, <censored>, which will be the new killer app for doing <censored> to <censored>. (Sorry, can’t be more specific at this time – all I can say is that the name starts with an “Y” ).

As I said before, real Mac application development’s step one is to design the application icon (step zero is to design the T-Shirt, which I usually skip, as it makes no sense unless it’s a team effort). After making three mock-up icons I ended up with one which I liked, but some friends who saw it were less than enthusiastic. Perhaps I should make a design contest? Winner gets a free lifetime registration and About Box whuffie? Hmm…

Meanwhile, I found the story of my life in this comic reenactment. See how a fellow geek/marginal Asperger sufferer handles interpersonal relationships! This sort of thing happens to me all the time… (for the record, I did see “Maid in Manhattan”, on a plane, but thought it a little silly).

Ben Hammersley points at Umberto Eco‘s great essay Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books:

Good news: books will remain indispensable, not only for literature but for any circumstances in which one needs to read carefully, not only in order to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it. To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book.

…

After having spent 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls, and I feel the need of sitting down comfortably in an armchair and reading a newspaper, or maybe a good poem. Therefore, I think that computers are diffusing a new form of literacy, but they are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating.

Very true. I rarely look up anything in a reference work anymore, but reading fiction on-screen is not as satisfying as with a physical book – and the latter can be read at table or on the toilet, too

Well, it turned out that I had skipped step 16 on my long list of “just to make sure”, or rather, I’d neglected to do that after uploading a corrected image. For the second time.

No idea why it went wrong two times, but on the third everything seems OK. Meanwhile, new XRay users should download 1.0.9 again if they see a message “…Sorry, but to set everything up properly you must first run XRay once from an Administrator account.”

I woke up about 3AM to get a glass of water and on the way back from the kitchen I somehow felt I had to check my e-mail… I know that’s a symptom of something-or-other, but anyway it allowed me to see one user’s alert about my error several hours sooner than usual, and do damage control.