Solipsism Gradient

The 2006 MacFixit Toolbox Awards are out and XRay is listed first, with a Gold Award! (It won a Silver Award previously in 2001). Before you ask, yes, looks like I’ll finally be able to restart work on XRay 2 this week.

Other Gold winners are Charles Srstka’s Pacifist, which I use quite frequently (thanks Charles!), and SuperDuper, which I really should begin using Real Soon Now.

Congratulations also to my pal Mark Douma, who got a Silver Award for Font Finagler…

Michael “Dowbrigade” Feldman wrote:

Sometimes the Dowbrigade feels stumped for subjects to Blog on. It’s not that your faithful correspondent lacks for ideas, rants or motivation. Rather, it is that so many fecund fields are off-limits to our free-ranging interest.

We cannot blog about our place of full-time employment, after an unfortunate incident last semester in which only our wicked wit saved us from untimely termination…

…We cannot blog about the intimate details of our married life, as we know Norma Yvonne reads the Dowbrigade, and its a bad idea to share a bed with one of your expository subjects…

…In fact, we cannot blog about women, since if experience has taught us anything, it is that we understand less than nothing about the opposite sex. That is, much of what we thought we understood about them has been proven disastrously wrong…

…We are reduced to meta-blogging like this, and reprinting amusing minutiae and telling details from the media pool in which we tread water, waiting for good fortune or bad to deliver us from this literary purgatory

Well, I feel his pain; sometimes there’s much happening, but very often it’s not a subject.

However, I’m pleased to report that some marginally bloggable stuff is actually happening inside the twisty, little passages of XRay 2’s code. I stopped worrying about the UI for a couple of months and became obsessed with writing the Ultimate File Item Browser Cache Background Engine. (You should be glad I’m not writing this in German, where this would be one huge compound substantive. )

Anyway, most of it is actually working well enough now, and once I get some weird interactions with volume mount points working, the U.F.I.B.C.B.E. will be pronounced “good enough for a beta”, and I’ll get back to work on the actual file browser frontend(s) it is supposed to be the backend for.

In order to do so most efficiently we (meaning my wife) decreed that a working vacation is called for, where we’ll be away from normal life and mostly offline for a full month. We’ll leave in a few days – details will be posted soon – and proceed to Northern Italy, where two nearly consecutive mediterranean cruises are scheduled. More as it happens!

Just found a nice review of XRay (and some competitors, but that’s cool) by MacFixit’s Dan Frakes in an article called “Troubleshooting Tools: File Utilities“. Thanks Dan!

In other news, work on XRay 2 is continuining although I hesitate to insert the word “apace” here – there have been many offline emergencies to take care of, unfortunately. Basically, I think I have the general UI reasonably well defined and now am working on the background file engine. I’ve retreated from using WebKit for the main info view because of efficiency issues. However, the benefits of reading the WebKit source code were great, and I may still use it for some parts.

As usual, UI considerations are very important in my mind and I got sidetracked, although profitably, several times. The longest delay happened when I got tired of battling NSSplitView and took several months off to write RBSplitView. The experience gained from this proved invaluable later on, although at a time it looked like my other UI revisions would make a split view completely unnecessary… but right now it’s in again.

More on this as it happens!

In a little over a week I’ll be off to WWDC, so I’ve been busy preparing.

First of all, I’m trying to tame the intricacies of applying WebKit to a purpose not really intended by its designers. The idea is to use it in XRay 2.0 for displaying file info and contents in a more flexible manner. Also, if all goes well, I might take a shot at starting work on an interim XRay 1.2 release in order to learn more about showing Tiger metadata. I want to have at least the broad outlines of both releases working so I can ask people about details.

It’s been hard to disengage a little from my work on RBSplitView, though. The current 1.1.2 version seems to be working well for most people; a few feature requests have come in and I’m slowly working them into a 1.1.3 version, which hopefully will be ready for publication after WWDC.

Whew! I finally succeeded in downloading and installing 8A428, the “Golden Master” build of Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). So far everything works great. And AAPL also closed up at $37.24… I’m happy.

I was just looking at my user’s version stats – that is, the versions recorded when XRay and Zingg! check for updates – and I’m amazed. Tiger came out officially on April 29th, yet April closed with a 10% adoption rate! And for May so far, late on May 6th, 52% of my users are already running Tiger!

For the record, 4% are still on Jaguar, 35% on 10.3.9, and 9% on other Panther versions. I thought adoption rates would be high, but this is beyond all expectations. It quite confirms my decision to make XRay 2.0 Tiger-only.

Also, RBSplitView 1.1.1 is in final testing and should be out tonight or tomorrow. I’m just polishing the docs right now, so look for it later…

Apple Cocoa

All cat metaphors seem to have been overused already, so I’ll spare you.

If you’re developing for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), or just interested in more technical details, John Siracusa’s review is essential reading. He just about convinced me to make XRay 2 a Tiger-only application. More details on that as the ideas develop… in the meantime, I’ll probably have to do a 1.1.1 bug-fix release on the current version.

Talking of bug-fix releases, RBSplitView 1.1.1 is also in the works… if you have any suggestion or bug reports, send them in soonest.

Regarding issues of trust between shareware authors and users, an interesting discussion has developed over on the XRay 1.1 support forum.

It appears to be based on a difference of mindset between old-time Mac users and users coming in from Unix or Linux platforms. I’m squarely inside the first camp, of course, never having used Unix or Linux (nor Windows, either, except on a very few occasions).

XRay‘s original purpose, as regular readers well know, was to offer a user-friendly way to view and set file/folder attributes, including BSD permission flags – the latter being a completely new concept to me and, judging by the software’s popularity, most Mac OS X users. As such, both the installation process and normal use try to insulate the user from the details as much as possible; the rationale being that anybody knowledgeable enough to use various Terminal commands such as chown and chmod would prefer using them directly, while old-time Mac users would prefer using XRay as a graphic wrapper for these commands.

I think is this the second (or third?) time, in the 3+ years that XRay has been available, that a former Unix/Linux user has thought that XRay’s installation procedure is “suspicious”; either because it asks for an administrator password to copy stuff into /Library/Application Support, or because it sets world-writeable permissions on the folders it creates there, or something. I must confess I had a hard time even understanding those arguments at first…

Of course I’m concerned with that and will try to make the whole process more transparent, but I’m not entirely sure how to go about that. Should I ask the user first “are you an old-time Machead or a suspicious former Unixer?”…

So far the least disagreeable solution seems to be to list, on demand, all steps that are done – or perhaps before each one is done – and explain why, and offer the user a chance not to do that, and say what restrictions will result from cancelling. Seems an awful lot of work, though, to accomodate a very small proportion of users.

Comments?

Shareware

An excellent article by Eric Sink is out: The Tenets of Transparency. Thomas Warfield also has some good comments. If you’re a developer doing (or considering doing) shareware, you should read it.

I observe that buying software is closer to the “high trust” end of the spectrum. When people buy software from your ISV [Independent Software Vendor], they are expecting a lot from you, both now and in the future:

• They trust that your product will work on their machines.
• They trust that you will help them if they have problems.
• They trust that you will continue to improve the product.
• They trust that you will provide them with a reasonable and fairly priced way of getting those improved versions.
• They trust that you are not going out of business anytime soon.

…

Transparency is an ISV’s way of trusting your customers. By letting your customers see behind the corporate veil, you extend them your trust, making it easier for them to trust you in return.

He then goes on to list 8 ways of implementing transparency:

1. Have a weblog.
2. Offer web-based discussion forums.
3. Don’t hide your product’s problems.
4. Don’t annoy honest people.
5. Offer a painless demo download.
6. Offer a money-back guarantee.
7. Share a little about your financial standing.
8. Talk about your future plans.

I hope most of those sound familiar… . You’re reading the weblog now (#1), and there are discussion forums (#2) for each major product. Not that people take as much advantage of that as I hoped, but support over e-mail or AIM is often faster.

Don’t hide your product’s problems (#3): Eric takes this to refer to bug fixes and updates:

…But not only do users want you to keep improving your product, they usually care about specifically how the product grows and matures. They want to be reassured that your product will be growing deeper, not just wider. I define these terms like this:

1. A product gets “wider” when it appeals to new users.
2. A product gets “deeper” when it works better for the users it already has.

My bug fix and update policy is relatively simple. My freeware stuff is nearly all written for my own use too, so I try to keep it running on current releases, and try to keep it reasonably bug-free and functional. Beyond that, I’m open to suggestions for fixing stuff or adding functionality, but I can’t promise any huge efforts. So far, it looks like all my freeware will continue to work in the upcoming Tiger (10.4) release.

Regarding my shareware, which at present consists only of XRay, I of course try a little harder than that. If a paying customer complains of a specific bug I always try to fix it; if several customer declare they can’t live without a certain feature, I’ll implement it or (sometimes) convince them it’s not such a good idea. The latest release (1.1) is getting a little long in the tooth; a few minor bugs have surfaced, but on the other hand recent Finder versions have progressed to incorporate most of the functionality I originally wrote XRay 1.0 for, way back in the 10.1.x days; so fixing those isn’t on my high priority list anymore, unless more people suddenly start complaining.

Still, as I’ve mentioned before here, I’m working steadily on making XRay both wider and deeper, by recoding it from the ground up and calling it XRay 2.0. And at no charge to current users. However, I’ll be taking away some features that duplicate, by now needlessly, modern Finder capabilities.

Don’t annoy honest people (#4): I think I’m doing well on this. In fact, some users wrote in complaining that they couldn’t find any way to download the “real” XRay, without noticing that the serial number gets entered for them when they buy online… I suppose Eric also means this in the sense of not having any complex copy-protection or product activation. Rest assured I’ll never do any product activation on XRay, although this would of course be a defense against the bogus serial numbers and hacked binaries that are floating around.

Painless demo download (#5) is of course a given with shareware; just entering a valid serial number will convert the demo to the registered version. Eric says:

Nonetheless, although there should be no question about “if” you have a demo download, there are good questions to be asked about “how” you manage it. The high-trust path looks like this:

1. Use time-limited demos, not feature-limited. (People who use “crippleware” as their demo are not willing to trust me, so I don’t trust them.)
2. Don’t ask people to register just to see a demo. (I want to evaluate your product, not your privacy policy.)
3. Don’t make people agree not to talk about your product. (People who try to prevent me from talking are trying to hide something, and are not to be trusted.)

OK, XRay is 15-day feature limited, and even after that it still has nearly all features; you just have to rerun it more often. I’m very puzzled at the last point… I want people to talk about my product, I can’t imagine someone requiring silence!

I’ve read conflicting views on money-back guarantees (#6); some developers don’t offer them, some tell horror tales about customers demanding refunds en masse. In practice, for me there has been only a single case of having to refund a customer’s money, and that was because he had paid twice because of a network glitch…

Share a little about your financial standing (#7):

When I buy software from a small ISV, I usually wish I could know all kinds of things about the company’s financials:

• Is the company profitable?
• How much cash does it have? How much debt?
• What kind of corporation is it? Who are the owners?
• Do they have outside investors?
• Is the founder still involved? Does she still have a decent equity stake?

I’ve never touched on this issue before, and I don’t release sales figures for a variety of reasons. However, I can say that sales have been more than I expected, that they’re not high enough to make a living from (although I probably could do so if I were able to work fulltime at shareware), and that I and my wife have independent income. We have no debt and never had; not even a mortgage. It’s not even a corporation; just myself… so, rest assured my software won’t go away because of financial issues.

Talk about your future plans (#8 ): I often do, right here… so stay tuned!