Noodlings

Typing this up between sessions so please excuse the sloppy writing.

Stacks

When Steve started talking about cleaning the Desktop, my heart stopped for a split second. I thought I was going to be Sherlocked (I was also sitting with the Karelia guys at the time). As it turns out, Stacks is just doing what I’ve been suggesting for a while on my tips and tricks page: download everything to a separate downloads folder. Hazel stores the file’s date added and ships with a sample rule to color newly added files; Finder (or maybe the filesystem, I need to check) now keeps track of the date added as well and uses it to keep your most recently added files at the top of the stack. Nonetheless, those Stacks don’t clean themselves so, I think the main adjustment I need to make is to change the marketing message from “Clean Your Desktop” to “Clean Your Stacks”.

Miscellaneous KeyNote comments

I feel like I’m missing the point of the transparent menubar. You can’t drag windows up underneath the menubar. Are the top 20 or so pixels of your wallpaper that important? What do you need to see under there? While I appreciate the tricks they pulled to maintain legibility, it’s still not as clear as an opaque menubar. So yes, add me to the list of grumpy transparent menubar haters.

Did anyone find it odd that when showing the pie charts of Safari’s current market share and their target marketshare, that they had Safari eat up Firefox’s slice of the pie while IE’s market share remained unchanged? Not sure if one should read too much into it as it probably was inadvertent, but it does give the impression that Apple is gunning for Firefox.

Parties

A big thanks for Chuck Soper and Buzz Anderson for organizing their respective parties. The edge has to go to Buzz though since he arranged for a taco truck to be parked outside. Nothing like eating a taco with meat scraped off the face of a cow to start the evening off right.

I’ll probably drop by the OmniFocus get-together later today but won’t be able to make any of the other extracurricular events because of dinner plans.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I went to my first WWDC last year. I had recently quit my fulltime job. Hazel 1.0 was in beta at that time. Since my app was to be released on Tiger, all this Leopard talk seemed somewhat irrelevant. I was a newcomer and an unknown.

It’s not quite a year later but WWDC is here again. Hazel 2.0 is now in alpha. It is still targeted for Tiger so Leopard-specific features are still just in the concept phase for me. I’m now not a total unknown. Additionally, since the last WWDC, sales have increased by ∞% so things are going great!

I’m on the road already and am trying to squeeze out another release before the conference (most likely later today). I’ll be in SF on Sunday in time for the Mac ISV dinner. If you spot me, feel free to give me copious amounts of money; it’s what they call “networking.” How do you spot me? Well, take Rodney Dangerfield in a tutu and cross him with Zombie Joseph Stalin and you’d get something that not only is hard to visualize, but also doesn’t resemble me in the least. See you there!

GTD/productivity guru Ethan Schoonover at Kinkless has put up the last installment of his “Kinkless Desktop” series of screencasts. Of course, this particular one interests me as it focuses on Hazel, showing how he integrates it into his workflow to keep his folders organized. He even makes the rules he uses available for download. Check it out here and make sure to check out the rest of the series.

Today I got to demo Hazel for the first time at the MetroMac users group meeting. I didn’t do massive prep for it. I just had a general outline of what I wanted to show and talk about. I’m the type of person that can’t deal with too much prep in these types of situations; it makes me nervous. I ran through the demo earlier in the day a few times and it ran fine. I felt pretty loose going into this.

For the demo, I did the typical vacuum cleaner salesman pitch. I had a bunch of files dumped onto the Desktop. I went over the rules I had set up (basically, just a variation on the sample rules Hazel ships with). I activated them all then ran them expecting that Hazel would clean it all up.

Nothing.

Ran them again.

Nothing.

I checked the logs and everything looked fine. The MetroMac guys ran some interference for me (thanks guys) while I did a little flailing and head-scratching. Ultimately, I just moved on with the rest of the demo but I never really recovered. The impact of the rest of demo was blunted by the fact that there was a mess of files all over the Desktop.

Afterwards, I sat on the sidelines and took the time to diagnose the problem. I looked at the Desktop directory in Terminal. Lo and behold. The files were gone. I looked at my Desktop. I looked at the Desktop folder in a Finder window. The files were still there. It finally dawned on me. Finder failed to refresh. Worse than that. It would refuse to refresh after I navigated to other folders and came back. I ended up force-relaunching Finder and was finally greeted by what the audience should have seen: a clean Desktop. In a nutshell, Hazel worked; Finder didn’t.

It was weird in that the subsequent rules I created worked fine on any new files I downloaded. Thinking about it now, it might be related to the fact that I set the clock forward to demonstrate a time-based rule. I did it during my test runs and I guess Finder got very confused afterwards. I don’t remember but it’s possible the setting-the-clock aspect of the demo was added later and therefore not “regression-tested,” so to speak.

In the end, it’s not such a big deal. It was maybe less than 30 people. Nonetheless, it’s not fun sitting up there clicking that button that refuses to do anything. I’m sure there’s a lesson here but at this point I don’t care. What is this? South Park?

Unfortunately, I don’t have lackeys to yell at like Steve but this thing is behind me and I have a bottle of scotch in front of me so here’s to looking forward!

I know I’m late to the party with this but I’ve finally made available a Family Pack. Install Hazel on up to 5 computers in the same household for $29. Direct link to the store.

The ice is thawing. Flowers are beginning to bloom. I can think of no better time grab a pack and get a headstart on your spring cleaning.

It’s been a bit of a wait for a lot of you but Hazel 2.0 alpha is ready to be downloaded and tested. Now, it is alpha so most, but not all of the features are there; be gentle. I have stopped using launchd in favor of a homebrew scheduler. As a result, those of you hitting the “Hazel stops working after logging out then back in” bug will be happy. Hazel also features new icons from Fernando Lins (featured here). A bunch of other stuff is in there so if you’re curious, check it out.

This is a semi-public pre-release, so you have to jump through a couple hoops to get at it. Details are on the beta forum but you must be registered on the forums to view it. I know it’s a bit tedious but I want to make sure all testers are tuned into the forums.

Oh, and for those of you wondering, 2.0 will be a free upgrade. I’ll have a Hazel 2.0 FAQ up at some point.

Just a little heads up. The Infinite Loop folks at Ars Technica were kind enough to interview yours truly. Check it out.

I’ll say up front that I’m skeptical of this whole Twitter thing. Instead of me being a grump about it though, I’m trying an experiment. I put up a profile for Hazel for those who can’t resist getting micro-updates on what’s going on with Hazel. If you want to see what’s going on with development or other related news doled out in little SMS-sized chunks, then check out user Noodle_Hazel .

Hazel’s not the only Mac software on the Twitter circuit. Recently acquired MarsEdit is already there. And if you want Twitter updates on your desktop, there’s Twitterrific.

So, we’ll see how it goes. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

One of the main design precepts for Hazel was that it would do its work without bothering you and I feel I was successful in that goal, unless you are a developer. The one place where Hazel can get chatty is the console logs, much to the annoyance of some developers. I know how it can get in the way when you are trying to sift through your own application’s logs (though I do find that typing the process name into the search field does wonders).

Anyhoo, if you want to redirect the logs, you can use a defaults setting. Just type the following in at the command-line:

defaults write com.noodlesoft.Hazel LogFile file


file, of course, is whatever file you choose, including /dev/null. Removing the default will reverse the change. Note that this only applies to the background program; the UI, being a pref pane, logs wherever System Preferences logs, but it’s not nearly as talkative so hopefully this isn’t an issue. Also, there is no UI for this setting as I consider it to be something only developers would care about.

Random tangential reference to a piece of nostalgia/trivia:
When telling a friend (who was the one who brought up the original gripe) about this setting, I referred to the defaults setting as a dwrite which my friend found amusing (we’re both old NeXTies). In any case, along with dread and dremove, dwrite was the precursor to the defaults command and to this day I still refer to defaults settings that are only accessible via the command-line as “dwrites”. Old habits die hard.

Not-so-random, but nonetheless tangential info:
There’s another camp that would say that Hazel is too quiet. I am working on Growl support so if you have any particular opinions or ideas on the matter, let me know in the forums.

A new year is upon us. As is the cliché, it’s a time to look back before looking forward. While my posts have been mostly technical, I thought I’d start talking about the business and logistical end of things.

Hazel launched some months back and seeing as how you only launch a 1.0 once, I thought I’d post some thoughts on my experiences.

What Went Right

Shipping at all
I had to make some hard choices on what features to cut so I could ship. Otherwise, I would have spent much more time in perpetual beta (the Chinese Democracy Syndrome as Gus Mueller likes to call it). Complicating the release schedule was WWDC. I had originally thought about launching before WWDC but fortunately for me, I waited and ended up revamping a chunk of the UI based on feedback I got there. But in the end, I just had to bite the bullet and ship. I think the feedback I’ve gotten since shipping is far more valuable than any extra time spent toiling on it in isolation. Also, having a clear roadmap for the 1.1 release helped me in terms of my own neuroses about shipping prematurely.

Using 3rd party libraries and services
I used Kagi for my purchasing system. While not without faults (I still do not have in-app purchasing set up with Kagi because of some issues), they have worked well with much less effort than rolling my own. If anything, they freed up a huge chunk of mindspace. Also, using Aquatic Prime has been great for me. Overall, the less I had to worry about, the better.

What Went Wrong

Not shipping with Sparkle
I punted on launching with Sparkle for doing software updates. The main reasons had to do with the fact that it wasn’t just build and go for me (Sparkle needs a bit of tweaking to integrate with preference panes). The result was support issues when upgrading (boiling down to Obj-C not being able to unload classes). This was rectified in version 1.1 but in retrospect I feel that it should have been in there from the start.

A Bad Bug Right At Launch
Soon after launch, someone noticed that the Apple Help buttons weren’t working. While not the end of the world, I felt I had to fix it immediately. It is a new product so having help available was more important now than ever. Oddly, it worked fine for me on my main development machine but I was able to replicate the problem on my Powerbook (even though it had worked in a previous beta version on that same machine). I ended up scrambling and released a 1.0.1 release within hours of launch which is somewhat embarrassing. While the obvious lesson would be more regression testing on different hardware, it’s easier said than done. Being the only person here makes it hard to do all the testing a product needs. Probably the topic for another post some other time but for now this remains an unresolved issue.

What I Learned

When running your own business, I have to say that the hardest part of the job is making decisions. Especially being a one-man shop, I do not have the luxury of someone available to bounce ideas off of at will. It’s the decision making that keeps you up at night. The trials of going solo are better served as the subject of another post but I would say that if you are going it alone, use all the resources you have available for getting feedback on your decisions. Personally, I have found the macsb mailing list and IRC channel to be indispensable in this regard. Perspective is a valuable thing.

The other lesson is that bugs will get out there. The important thing is to have the infrastructure in place to deal with them. This ranges from decent feedback channels (email, forums, etc.) to a good QA process to having an easy way for users to keep up to date.

What I Did Not Learn

What I am still not sure about is the marketing end of things. I chose to be somewhat stealth during beta and focus on marketing at launch time. Of course, the cat got out of the bag earlier but the general notion was to not to not overhype too early. Since I was unsure about my exact launch date for a while, I was afraid of any buzz that I generated dying out if I took too long. So, I’m curious as to how other developers out there dealt with promoting their product before and during launch.

So, that’s it, in a nutshell. Not very exciting but what do you expect from a post with “mortem” in the title.