Shirt Pocket Watch

I’ve got a huge backlog of topics that I’ve wanted to post about, and hopefully I’ll be able to get down some more extended thoughts soon. But here are some “Hot Dots” style quick thoughts…

Working Toward Phone Nirvana
Overstated a bit, but the new T-Mobile Dash (a/k/a the HTC Excalibur) is a great new “balanced compromise” phone—small, light, with excellent email and browsing, a good keyboard and screen, and—with Missing Sync for Windows Mobile—complete Mac support, too. Incredibly full featured in a small package: WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, EDGE, Quad-Band… good stuff.

A few relatively minor downsides: the battery is small (larger battery = larger phone), the XT9 implementation that helps with typing (if you need it to) doesn’t work properly with multi-line text in Calendar, Contacts and the Web (but can be turned off), the screen’s a bit small at 320x240 (again - larger screen = larger phone), and the phone doesn’t support the DUN bluetooth profile (but does support PAN).

Giving mail a push
On top of that, I’ve been using Kerio Mailserver here at Shirt Pocket HQ for many years, and their latest release—6.3—fully supports “Push” email (and “live sync") for Windows Mobile clients. It works great.

Both products highly recommended.

Slinging
Now that they’ve released their Mac client, I’ve acquired and installed a Slingbox Pro, and it—too—works great. The Mac software is a bit klunky and windowsish, but it nevertheless works. And—even on relatively slow connections—the picture quality is surprisingly good.

There’s even a Windows Mobile client and—installed on the Dash—it works!

Now, I don’t plan to watch TV on my Dash, but it’s nice to be able to access the material on my TiVo elsewhere in the house—or even at other locations. If that’s something that appeals to you, by all means, get a Slingbox, and support their efforts on the Mac.

Edgy
I try to switch my keyboard relatively often to keep the wrist bugaboos at bay, and I’ve recently brought the new Logitech diNovo Edge in-house. Even though the keyboard isn’t listed as Mac Compatible on the box, it’s a standard bluetooth HID device and—save some buttons and features—works quite well. You just need to use the Keyboard Preference Pane to swap the Cmd and Option keys to stay sane.

The keyboard has a nice feel (it’s not “clicky” but is nonetheless responsive and solid), some useful features (like a touchpad cursor—though I can’t get the scrolling feature to work), and some elegant design and lighting effects.

Expensive, but nice.

Taiko
The pup’s continuing to grow quickly (though not too quickly) and has been a delight to have around, though he’s a ton of work. A recent photo (last week):

I look at that and can’t believe he was 12 pounds just a few short months ago. He’ll grow into his tail yet!

No doubt you’ve noticed that I’ve been neglecting the blog a bit recently.

It’s been rather busy here, with various projects taking time as we hurtle through fall toward winter. Taiko’s quickly growing into his paws, and while it’s kinda silly to compare his personality to Ketzl’s, he seems to be a bit more mischevious, and he’s certainly a lot more willing to get up on his hind legs. It’s taking a lot of time to supervise him, correct him when he takes things off counters (or jumps on people) and get him the exercise and socialization he needs. But things are going nicely: he’s about 50lbs and shaping up to be a good boy. More photos soon.

Zabeth’s fourth year of veterinary school is going by quickly as she prepares to take the boards while, at the same time, doing her clinical rotations. She’s running on coffee and adrenaline at this point, and Taiko and I are trying to stay out of the way.

On the Shirt Pocket side, things have been busy. The release of 10.4.8 brought with it what looks to be a bug in Core Graphics: many applications—including SuperDuper!—are crashing on some Intel Macs when two threads are trying to draw at the same time. This happens in a lot of cases, but in ours we have some NSProgressIndicators that use the standard option that runs them on their own thread. If we’re updating the status view (in our main thread) at the same time the progress indicator tries to update, CoreGraphics uses a lock to handle the contention… but crashes.

Of course, it’s intermittent due to the timing issues, which makes it frustrating, but we’ve reported it both through the standard methods (rdar://4789778) and through other channels. We’re looking at workarounds here, since it’s unlikely 10.4.9 would come out based on this one problem.

For testing purposes, I brought a Mac Pro into Shirt Pocket Headquarters, it’s proven to be an excellent Mac. It’s very fast (although its I/O to a striped RAID set is much slower than I’d expect), very quiet and—so far—reliable. My few Boat Anchor applications are running beautifully in Parallels Desktop now that their MacPro compatible version is out—in fact, it continually surprises me how well Parallels works. If you need to run Windows, and don’t need high performance graphics, it’s a highly recommended solution. (Just make sure your VM is shut down before you back it up, of course!)

More as I get time!

Taiko’s in the house. And he means business.

OK! netTunes and launchTunes release (and netTunes re-release—sorry about the Purple Rain) done, so it’s time to get back to what I keep getting asked about: SuperDuper! and Time Machine.

To get the “Frequently Asked Questions” out of the way right at the top of this post: no, we’re not dead, we’re not angry, and Apple has no obligation to leave market opportunities for independent developers, notify us that things are coming, or pretty much anything else.

This is business. It’s difficult for Apple to come up with 150 features to add into the next version of the OS, and harder still to make those features compelling enough that we’ll all pony up our hard-earned dollars to upgrade.

(As an aside, does anyone else out there think there was a definite hint, in the “feature” presentation of the keynote that bragged that OS X is now a “bigger, all-inclusive bundle”, that the price will be higher when Leopard is released?)

Some sort of backup functionality belongs in the OS. It’s been a long time coming. The fact that it wasn’t there left opportunities for 3rd parties, but that doesn’t mean Apple shouldn’t address the missing functionality.

And so, they have, with Time Machine. Really, I think that’s a great thing. People need to back up more often, and I hope Time Machine encourages them to do so.

Now, I can’t really get into a lot of details, because our NDA prevents disclosure of anything that wasn’t in the keynote. But let’s talk about what we’ve seen there, and why SuperDuper! remains both relevant and necessary—a true complement to the functionality in Time Machine.

First, as is likely obvious, Time Machine is designed to provide automatic “temporal” backup (discussed in broad terms in the post The Ninety-Nine-Per-Cent Solution many months ago).  Its primary usage scenario—and the one that the keynote focused on—is to allow quick recovery of files and data that have gone missing, etc. It does this in a way that’s highly integrated with the OS, with a unique UI that’s both cool and kinda cheesy… and, as was the case with Spotlight, with a certain amount of application-level impact (something 3rd parties like Shirt Pocket could never mandate).

What’s important to note is that this isn’t, and never was, what SuperDuper! was designed to do.

Our tagline, Heroic System Recovery for Mere Mortals, tries to sum up the whole idea: SuperDuper! is designed to provide excellent failover support for the all-too-common case where things fail in a pretty catastrophic way, such as when a drive fails, or your system becomes unbootable. We do this by quickly and efficiently creating a fully bootable copy of your source drive. Perhaps more importantly, recovery is near immediate, even if the original drive is completely unusable, because you can start up from your backup and continue working.

You can even take your backup to a totally different Macintosh, start up from it, and work while your failed Macintosh is in the shop… then, when it comes back all fresh and shiny, restore things and keep working.

All of this is done with a minimum of fuss and bother, and with respect for your time. And while Time Machine can restore a full system (the details of which were not shown, so I can’t comment on them), as can other similar products, that’s not its strength. Doing so requires you to actually take the time to restore the backup in full, which interrupts your workflow, requires a destination device, and takes a lot of your time—at the exact moment when you can least afford it.

So, when Leopard comes out, and Time Machine is released, be assured that we’ll continue to be relevant and necessary. We’ll work alongside its rapid recovery of individual files, and will seamlessly augment that with our rapid system recovery.

And, of course, we’ll continue to improve every part of SuperDuper! to make backups faster and easier for all.

(Digg this post.)

Well, the rollout of the new netTunes and launchTunes went well except for one thing—due to what looks to be some API change in the Accelerate framework, the server was sending a purple iTunes image when running on Intel.

Since I’d done the original engineering and testing of the server way back in April, and hadn’t changed the server code, I skipped one part of my final testing… namely, checking the server on Intel. I verified that it started and that the purchase process worked, but I didn’t check its server functionality… big mistake.

That kind of thing always comes back to bite you, and bite it did. Took me most of the morning to diagnose and fix, but 2.3.1 was released to take care of the problem a little while ago. Sorry about that.

Shirt Pocket releases netTunes 2.3 and launchTunes 1.1
The Macworld Eddy Award Winning “No Compromises” iTunes Remote - now Universal!

Weston, MA – August 23, 2006:  Shirt Pocket announces the immediate availability of netTunes 2.3, the latest update to the Macworld Eddy Award winning remote control for iTunes, and the perfect companion to Apple’s AirPort Express and launchTunes 1.1, the application that guarantees your shared iTunes libraries are available without all that pesky walking.

netTunes lets you control iTunes running on one Macintosh from another, using iTunes’ native interface. You get the same window, the same playlists, the same capabilities. You simply run netTunes and take complete control of the “remote” iTunes from any Macintosh in your house. It’s that easy — as easy as iTunes itself!

“It’s been a long time coming, but the new versions of netTunes and launchTunes are ready to go” says David Nanian, the founder of Shirt Pocket. “But we didn’t just recompile—we’ve taken advantage of both the Intel and Power PC platforms by improving performance across the board, and polished the user experience as well.”

netTunes and launchTunes are available for immediate download at the Shirt Pocket web site http://www.shirt-pocket.com. Users can evaluate all of the capabilities of netTunes for free for 30 minutes at a time; full licenses cost $19.95, and can be ordered at the Shirt Pocket web site, or directly from the application. launchTunes costs $7, and the Tune Suite—a bundle of netTunes and launchTunes—is offered at $23.95 - a $3 savings.

About Shirt Pocket
Shirt Pocket, based in Weston, Massachusetts, was formed in late 2000 as a Macintosh-only shareware creator and publisher. Shirt Pocket’s first product, the Eddy award winning netTunes, lets users control iTunes on one Mac from any other Mac on the network with iTunes own intuitive user interface. launchTunes, Shirt Pocket’s second product, made iTunes’ playlist sharing practical by automatically launching iTunes on remote servers when needed. And its third, the Eddy award winning SuperDuper!, is one of the most highly acclaimed backup/cloning programs available for the Mac. All are available from the Shirt Pocket web site at http://www.shirt-pocket.com.

Shirt Pocket was started by David Nanian, co-founder of UnderWare, Inc, and one of the original authors of the BRIEF programmer’s editor and Track Record bug tracking system.

A few quick pictures of Taiko as I prepare for the rollout of the new netTunes and launchTunes this week…

Well, I’m here in San Francisco awaiting the start of WWDC 2006, and hoping it’s a bit more eventful than WWDC 2005 (which was a replay of WWDC 2004)… and I’m sure it will be.

Communication is going to be a bit slower during the next week or so, so if you don’t get a response to your emails, forum posts, etc for a few hours you know why.

And if you’re here in town at the conference, get in touch!

(As far as predictions go, I’ll let everyone else speculate about what’s going to happen… we’ll all know for real soon enough!)

The original plan was to bury Ketzl in the front yard, under her favorite bush.

I had wanted to do that pretty badly, and pretty irrationally—it was a purely emotional thing, without considering the practical matters: soil depth, future dogs digging in the same locations, garden destruction, coyotes. Not thinking, just feeling, wanting her there with us.

It might have worked with a small dog, but Ketzl was not—neither small in body nor spirit.

So convinced, first ice, then fire.

Delivered today via UPS: the remains of her private cremation. Signature required. Bubble wrapped wood box; small, gold lock; certificate; condolence card.

Two pounds of ash and wood to bury in her favorite spot, and feed her favorite bush: the same bush Taiko found on his own his first day here. Of all the choices available, his favorite spot.

Dog’s choice: I know it’s a good one, the one she would have made for herself.

And there you will be placed, Ketzl. Rest in peace, girl.

One of the problems with Bluetooth mice and the Mac is that virtually none of them supply drivers. So, your mouse might have a gazillion handy-dandy buttons, but you’ll only get the wheel + right/left click.

For USB mice, USB Overdrive was the way to go for a long time, to the point where it was pretty clear that Microsoft’s own mouse and keyboard drivers were being done by the USB Overdrive guy. But, unfortunately, he’s been unable to get the Bluetooth support out the door.

Apple’s recent Bluetooth version of Mighty Mouse is out the door, but it, too, has minimal capability—you just can’t do much with the extra buttons, at least, not much beyond what has been pre-programmed. (And don’t get me started on that idiotic side-button-and-way-to-move-the-mouse-while-clicking implementation… ugh. Sometimes, Apple gets it wrong.)

For all this, there is a solution: Steer Mouse.

Steer Mouse is a replacement driver, like USB Overdrive, that enables all the various buttons for all your 3rd party mice, Bluetooth or USB, and even allows your Mighty Mouse to work more flexibly. (Alas, like USB Overdrive, it’s a preference pane that’s not really a preference pane.)

Works a treat with every mouse I’ve thrown at it. Just make sure to turn off the default “Move cursor to OK” action—the system should never, ever move the mouse on the user like that.