The rollout’s going well, though it totally killed my entire birthday—I’ve been SuperDuper!ing from about 7am until now (11:43pm), non-stop except for a 40 minute break for dinner.

People seem to be really liking it, though:

• We have about 10 users who have reported a weird, crashes-as-soon-as-it-starts problem we’ve been unable to reproduce or figure out
• Two users are reporting another weird crash with a pop-up
• And a few people running into a bug where we don’t list Apple-created RAID sets as possible source or destination volumes (we do work, though, with SoftRAID).

Plus, one “please register” page in the application lists the old price, and one user accused of Bait-and-Switch because of that. (Honestly, it’s a bug, not an attempt to deceive. Sorry about that.)

Considering what 2.0 contains, that’s awfully good… but I’m totally exhausted. I think I responded to over 300 support cases today, some up to 30 round-trips, and it takes its toll. There will be a 2.0.1 in relatively short order to address these initial release issues.

Anyway, gotta sleep. If I’m slower tomorrow, it’s because it’s Thanksgiving and I’m going to take part of the day for that… thanks, everyone, for the reception you’ve given the new version!

PRESS RELEASE:

Shirt Pocket releases SuperDuper! 2.0
Heroic System Recovery for Mere Mortals - Better, Faster, Scheduled!

Weston, MA – November 22, 2005:  Shirt Pocket, creator of the 2004 Eddy
Award Winning netTunes, announces the immediate availability of
SuperDuper! 2.0, the most extensive update ever of its popular disk
copying utility for Mac OS X. Every aspect of SuperDuper has been
polished and re-engineered to add new functionality while improving upon
its legendary ease of use. Backups are easier and faster than ever!

SuperDuper can be used as a flexible backup program, but it goes well
beyond mere duplication. Its unique “Sandbox” feature lets you install
potentially risky drivers or system updates without fear of creating an
unbootable or unworkable system – or losing access to your critical
personal data.

SuperDuper 2.0 improves on the acclaimed original in many ways,
including: the ability to easily schedule backups; additional imaging
options; more control over shutdown; better AppleScript support;
hundreds of UI improvements; and a completely rewritten, task-based
User’s Guide.

"We’re incredibly excited about this major upgrade to SuperDuper,”
says David Nanian, founder of Shirt Pocket. “We’ve been working on
it for over a year, taking the time to include the things our users
have been requesting—as well as refining and improving the
usability they expect from us.”

SuperDuper’s power is accessible to all Macintosh users, thanks to its
easily understood interface and complete documentation. Everything that
will occur is presented in a clear summary section entitled “What’s
going to happen?”, ensuring that even the least experienced user is
guided through the process step by step.

“I really like SuperDuper’s speedy and reliable backups,”
says Rich Siegel, author of BBEdit and CEO of Bare Bones Software. 
“Scheduling and Smart Update make it fast and easy to protect my
important data, so I can concentrate on my next great
release—congratulations to Shirt Pocket on theirs!”

SuperDuper 2.0 supports Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and is available for
immediate download at the Shirt Pocket web site
http://www.shirt-pocket.com. It’s a free update for existing users. The
unregistered version will perform full backups for free. Registration
costs $27.95, and includes many additional timesaving features,
including Smart Update for faster backups, Scheduling, and others.

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 2004 Eddy Award winning netTunes, lets customers 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. SuperDuper!, which allows mere
mortals to back up and restore their systems accurately and confidently,
was released in January 2004.

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.

Somewhere in the world, it’s November 22nd.

SuperDuper! v2.0 emerged from our engineering labs and was placed into the hands of our first external testers one year ago today.

Over this past year, we’ve released—on average—a build every two weeks. We’ve done thousands upon thousands of test runs, and ended up with over 80 individual testers who put the product through its paces and offered incredibly valuable feedback. We’ve torn into nearly every aspect of SuperDuper!, and have tried to improve the experience in as many ways as we could.

It’s not an easy thing, writing backup software—and it’s not easy to ask testers to depend on a Beta version, no matter how thoroughly tested it was before put into their hands. Every tester contributed to improving the reliability, usability and polish of the product as the months went on.

We had 13 external testers who ran over 200 individual backups each over that time, and one who ran over 600 (655, as of this writing). Major props to each and every tester: you all know who you are, and you should feel incredibly proud.

So, we’re coming to the end of the long process. The web site is ready to go. The press release is written. The documentation is complete. The software is just about as ready as we think we can make it.

Get ready, people. SuperDuper v2.0 is nearly in your hands.

We hope you love it as much as we do.

I come before you today to sing the praises of Bruce Lacey, my collaborator on SuperDuper!

Bruce doesn’t get a lot of direct play in these pages, mostly because it’s my personal blog, but SuperDuper! wouldn’t exist at all without him.

A few years ago, Bruce and I were both testers on some software that most of you use on a daily basis. Bruce had written a little tool—“Seed Volume Utility”—that made dealing with testing a lot easier. What was great about SVU is that it had a terrific copying engine, fast and reliable. Good stuff.

I saw a lot of potential there, and I approached Bruce with a proposition: if he’d agree to have me publish the program, I’d redesign the UI, write documentation, take care of marketing and support, and work with him to do the product planning. Basically, he could concentrate on the programming—the fun stuff—and leave the rest to me.

I’d been doing this with my own products for a while (since 1983), but had always shared in development, so this was a new thing for me. Bruce thought it over for a while, and—even though we’d never met in person—he took a chance, and agreed. We’ve been working together ever since.

You may not see him up here every day, but you certainly benefit from his hard work. Bruce spends a lot of quality time implementing, polishing and improving SuperDuper!—not to mention dealing with my constant tweaking of wording, behavior, layout, functionality—and always with dedication, good humor, and a shared focus on producing a high quality product.

So, while I might use I a lot when I talk about the stuff that’s going on with SuperDuper!, behind the scenes here Bruce is working like crazy to turn our shared product dreams into coded reality.

Here’s to you, Bruce!

I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but I’m a fan of the i-mate SP3 Windows Mobile Smartphone.

Mobile phones are one of those things that are difficult to generalize: your reaction to the phone is likely based entirely on what you expect to get out of the device. So, if you’re looking for style and “fun”, there are phones for you. You want an email monster? Got that covered with the Treo or—for the truly disturbed—the Crackberry.

I have some basic requirements:

1. The phone has to be GSM.
2. It has to be able to be used as a bluetooth, tethered modem for my PowerBok.
3. It has to be a good phone, of course.
4. It has to be reasonably pocketable.
5. It should work well with Salling Clicker.
6. It has to support a bluetooth headset.
7. It has to have a full-featured, totally synced phonebook that isn’t just a list of names/numbers.
8. The mail client has to be full-featured, with IMAP support and folders.
9. The web browser has to be fast, reasonably modern, and render well on a small screen.
10. The calendar/tasks module has to sync, too.

I’ve gone through a lot of phones—a disturbing number—and the big problem I had was getting the “balance” right: they were either focused too much on being just a simple phone (Motorola v600, Sony T610), had flaky software (Sony P800/P900), weren’t phone enough (i-mate PDA2k, i-mate JAM), or just plain sucked (HP 6315).

But, with the SP3, i-mate/HTC got it right, at least for me.

It’s small, light, fast. Unlike a lot of Microsoft stuff, you can tell they not only thought about what the user needed, but actually came up with good solutions for those needs. A perfect example of this is the way you look up names in the phone book—you just start typing on the keypad, and it finds names that match those keys by number, any of the various letter combinations, etc.

It just works. And that can be said for the whole package: it works. Well. That’s a really good thing, and too rare in this market.

And now, they’ve gone and one-upped themselves with the SP5/5m.

The SP5 uses Windows Mobile 5, rather than 2003, and WM5 has made a lot of subtle improvements that definitely make things better, in little ways. The screen has been massively upgraded to a full QVGA unit, and it’s bright, sharp and gorgeous. And, somehow, they’ve put in both EDGE and WiFi support, while keeping the battery life and—for the most part—the small size.

It does have some faults, of course. It’s slightly underpowered, and has some problems pushing all those bits on the new screen. The radio stack, as is the case with most just-released HTC units, is a bit flaky. And it doesn’t have as much free memory as I’d expect it to have.

Plus, Salling Clicker doesn’t work with it yet, though it does work very nicely with the SP3. C’mon, Jonas—the SP5 needs some love!

But the biggest issue right now is that it doesn’t sync directly with my Mac, because it’s not supported by Missing Sync for Windows Mobile yet. No doubt they’ll fix that, but in the meantime I’ve actually managed to get things working reasonably well by making use of my Kerio Mail Server’s Exchange functionality and—of all things—Entourage. More on Entourage and this whole sync solution in another post.

In the meantime, it’s good stuff, and recommended.

Yeah, clichéd title, sorry.

Well, the Computer America show went pretty well last night—it’s amazing how fast an hour can vanish. For those interested, here’s an archive of the show that’ll be up for about a week.

Thanks to Craig and the staff of Computer America for asking me to appear!

Most of you probably don’t know about it, but I contributed to the OSX portion of Slim Devices’ Squeezebox—I wrote the Preference Pane, Installer… basically, a lot of the Mac-specific stuff.

I’m happy to see that Dean, Sean and the rest of the team have come out with a brand new Squeezebox, and the thing looks smokin’! Really nice industrial design, with a beautiful metal stand and a new upright profile. Gorgeous fluorescent display; wireless (802.11g— acts as a wireless bridge, too) or wired; supports virtually every codec you can think of, including AAC, WMA, OGG, FLAC… the list goes on and on.

The Slim Server component is open source, so you can mess around with it, or—since there’s a very active community—make requests and watch the whole thing evolve! Not to mention the neat Squeeze Network, alarm clock, visualizers, multi-player synchronization… the list of goodness goes on and on.

Not to mention that the new features are even available to their existing Squeezebox 2 customers, who they continue to treat as first-class citizens.

It looks terrific—if you’re interested in distributed digital music, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Great work, guys!

I’ve posted before about my personal “boat anchor” that keeps a Windows machine close by—Microsoft Money. There was just nothing close enough on the Macintosh to allow me to move.

I was a bit more successful replacing another bit of business, though: my document manager.

I used to use PaperPort/Pagis to manage my bank statements, receipts and the like, but neither product was available for OSX. (PaperPort had an old version of desktop that ran, kind of, under OS9, but it hadn’t been updated for years and didn’t work very well in Classic… and I wanted to avoid Classic if possible.)

PaperPort’s sheet-fed scanner—the Strobe—was a really cool little unit that let you push a bit of paper into it. It’d turn on, automatically scan the paper, launch PaperPort Desktop, and place the scanned document there, all pretty easily. Pagis didn’t work quite the same way, but did do lots of other cool little things like automatic document orientation correction, OCR to allow searching of a scanned document while preserving its graphical appearance, etc.

I found them pretty indispensable for years, as they enabled me to organize of the mass of paper that arrived—and continues to arrive—every month.

But, the scanner wasn’t Mac compatible, so I had to buy something that was. The only duplexing scanner I could find with a sheet feeder, at the time, was by HP: the ScanJet 5590.

At first, I tried to use its own ability to generate PDFs, but the thing generated absolutely huge PDF documents, even at low (200dpi) resolution black and white scans: we’re talking on the order of 25MB for a single, 20 page bank statement. And multi-page scans were a huge pain to knit together. Utterly unreasonable.

It took a while, but I was able to find a similar product on the Macintosh—Dominion Software’s Working Papers. It wasn’t perfect, nor was it as elegant as either PaperPort or Pagis, but it did the job.

Unfortunately, it was also plagued with a decent number of annoying bugs. And while the developer no doubt had the best intentions, it’s clear that the product isn’t in active development any more.

Not to mention the fact that the scanner has bad drivers, especially in combination with Working Papers’ TWAIN handling. I was spending too much time mucking with drivers, working around crashes, skipped pages, unreadable scans… quite frustrating, and because of that, over many months , my system fell apart and paper began to stack up.

Well, I’m happy to say I’ve found the solution. Fujitsu (Fujitsu?!?) has released a Mac-compatible version of their ScanSnap scanner, the memorably named Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-5110EOXM (affiliate link). This scanner does duplexed, color scans at 15ppm, has an excellent paper feed mechanism that doesn’t seem to jam, has a decent driver that doesn’t crash, comes with Acrobat 7, and generates excellent quality, well-compressed scans. And a higher resolution, multi-page, color PDF from it is smaller than the one-bit, black-and-white compressed scans, in a proprietary format, that I was getting from the HP/Working Papers combination.

As they say, w00t!

There are some downsides:

• It doesn’t work with anything but Acrobat, as the driver isn’t a standard TWAIN driver.
• The driver is a standard “application”, and occupies space on your dock when running.
• The Macintosh version only comes with Acrobat and the driver; the PC version comes with a full software suite including a standalone paper management application, business card reader thingy, and a $40 rebate, making it cheaper than the less-capable Macintosh version. The Mac version is white/aluminium, but it’s like putting a sock over the boot that’s kicking in your teeth. But at least they released the Mac version, so kudos for that.
• Scanned documents default to a single file location, with an automatically generated name, rather than being an untitled document in Acrobat that can then be saved to the location of your choice. So, it’s more awkward than it needs to be.
• Acrobat 7 is kind of slow doing OCR, if you want the scans to be searchable. But at least it’s possible!

But, they’re relatively minor points. The ScanSnap is an excellent unit that I highly recommend to those who need to do—or have considered doing—document management.

Hey, looks like Jonas Salling has released Salling Clicker 3.0, with both a Macintosh and Windows version! Very cool—here’s hoping that one of the hardest working men in shareware gets lots of new customers.

Well, summer’s almost over, and I haven’t done a Ketzl update for a while. So, here’s perhaps more than you wanted to know. (As with previous posts of this nature, I hope the details involved help others who might find themselves in a similar situation.)

K’s disease progresses. We slow the inevitable with exercise, physical therapy, drugs, harnesses, wheelchairs: whatever we can.

In fact, if you’re wondering why Shirt Pocket technical support is slower than usual on some afternoons, it’s usually because I’m down in Walpole, MA at Sterling Impression. There, Ketzl gets massage, electro-stimulation, and hydrotherapy from the fine people there. It takes a few hours out of the middle of my day once a week, but I feel it’s time well spent.

Up until a few months ago, Ketzl was able to use their water treadmill. Alas, her rear legs are no longer under any kind of conscious control, and are almost entirely atrophied: bones covered with a teeny bit of muscle and tendon where there used to be large, strong, cart-pulling tree trunks. So, she now does laps in the therapy pool (22 last week—she was rarin’ to go), wearing a life preserver to improve her buoyancy.

After the swim, it takes me nearly an hour to dry her completely, which is important since she spends so much of her time lying down: you don’t want her to remain wet, as it tends to lead to hot spots.

Although her front limbs continue to weaken, she’s still able to support herself, and we use her wheelchair to walk every day at 80 Acres—some conservation land near my house. There’s a pond there, and it’s always a bit of a challenge to prevent her swimming—which (despite the momentary delight) would involve hours of drying. Her frustration is palpable, but I try to alleviate it with a cookie or two: an effective tactic!

Ketzl is, at this point, almost entirely incontinent, but it’s much easier to deal with than I had feared. Her patterns are regular and relatively easy to anticipate—and if we do things right, she goes outside when and where she’s supposed to.

When she’s in the house, we place her on an absorbant “diaper pad”, just in case there’s an accident. While they’re rare, they do happen—and this makes them very easy to clean up.

Part of the reason this hasn’t been a huge problem is due to a condition called “neuro bladder”. Basically, the muscles around the bladder atrophy along with everything else, and the bladder itself expands. The result is that she can hold an awful lot of urine before she needs to go—too much, in fact, so it’s important that we take her out often during the day.

The muscle wasting means we must assist her, which involves helping to position her rear legs, moving her tail out of the way, and putting light pressure on the bladder to help it empty. Doing this while also holding her back end up is a challenge, but Zabeth and I have managed to get pretty good at it over the past few months, and Ketzl has been very tolerant as we’ve figured out the best ways to help her.

Probably the most difficult part has been nighttime, as we’ve always let Ketzl sleep on our bed. Dogs with diseases like this tend to get a kind of separation anxiety at night, Ketzl included, and sleep erratically, occasionally whining or panting for an hour at a time. It’s not conducive to sleep, and I don’t think I’ve managed to get more than about two hours of continuous rest for many months. Recently, we’ve been giving her a light tranquilizer at bedtime, and it’s helped quite a bit—but if you see me around and it looks like I haven’t slept in weeks… well, basically, I haven’t.

So, there you go! Details aside, she’s doing really well. Dogs love “routine”, and there are a lot of routines involved in her daily care. She’s alert and in excellent spirits, with no noted depression or mood changes… in other words, she’s still Ketzl.

And while that’s a great thing, it’s also part of what makes this so incredibly difficult.