Angus Thinks

Author: AngusThinks

  • Runesoft updates games for Lion

    Last year I bought  “Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood”; it’s a fun, 3d person, tactical combat game where you play Robin Hood or one of his merry men in the fight against the sheriff of Notingham. When I bought it, it was a PowerPC game and I ran it under Rosetta on my Mac. With the arrival of Lion and the departure of Rosetta, it stopped working and I’d pretty much expected that I wouldn’t be able to play it except by installing 10.6 on a separate partition somewhere.

    However this last week I saw something really surprising; Runesoft has released a patch to bring Intel compatibility to the game and it now works on Lion 🙂

    I’m really impressed with this, thank you Runesoft!

  • Flash player updating on Mac

    Flash Player on the Mac is always in need of an update – or so it seems.
    One particular problem is that the current update checking system seems to merely displays a web page with the current version numbers. That page also appears to contain no direct download links at all. The page it should link to is the Flash download page.

    What it should ideally do is to automatically update using Sparkle or similar. I don’t want it to check constantly in the background, simply check and update when I click the “check Now” button.

    Failing that, it should clearly state whether the current installation is up-to-date or not.
    I don’t want to have to compare version numbers on a page that lists 8 different product version numbers. The software knows which variant it is, its own version number and a web service can be provided to display the latest numbers. It’s trivial to download the latest version number and test to see if it is the same as the installed version, then provide a direct download link if it isn’t.

    In fairness some progress has been made in flash installing, at least they now include a standard pkg installer and progress is being made on providing release notes. But much more progress (or the demise of Flash) is still clearly needed.

  • SQLEditor upgrades

    One of the big questions I’ve been thinking about recently is how to price upgrades for SQLEditor. So far upgrades have all been free as 1.0 became 1.1 and eventually 1.7. But with the new 2.0 release appearing soon, the question is what should be charged.

    Personally I’ve been annoyed with products where I paid money and a new release appears two weeks later which requires a paid upgrade. On the other hand, SQLEditor 2.0 will be a considerable upgrade from SQLEditor 1.0 (the first paid version), so I do think some additional fee is justified to fund development efforts.

    But obviously I don’t want people who haven’t bought yet to have doubts as to whether they will be required to pay for the upgrade.

    The stated policy is that anyone who bought SQLEditor within 12 months of a paid upgrade being released gets a free upgrade.

    However given that the release date for the new version hasn’t been decided yet, I’ve decided to improve the arrangements for version 2.0:

    Customers who bought SQLEditor 1.x after August 1st 2010 will get a free upgrade to SQLEditor 2.0.

    This means that if you buy SQLEditor today you get 1.7.8 and when 2.0 is released you would get an upgrade to it free of charge.

     

  • Xcode 4 – Great!

    Xcode 4 took a little while to get used to, but as I’ve been using it more, I’ve been liking it more.

    The change initially is significant, and there were new ways of doing things and certain other things that had to be rethought altogether. But now, I’m starting to choose to use Xcode 4 when I have the choice, so I think I’ve got used to it

    I recently released some new project files for Tesseract OCR cocoa, and they are built with Xcode 4 now. The simplification in the build system and the linking of the frameworks is a vast improvement. Workspaces are a gift to this type of multi-project build. 🙂

    The only issue I have is that it doesn’t support 10.5 or PPC, so SQLEditor is stuck on Xcode 3 for a while longer.

  • Lion Released

    Lion is released!

    Things seem to be going well. SQLEditor appears to work correctly.

    There is one identified issue which means that you cannot register the app for all users of a machine. Each user must register the app separately in their own account. (This is due to the /Library/Preferences directory now only being writable by root).

    This doesn’t affect Macs which are already registered. Administrators can also manually set the preference keys in the
    /Library/Prefererences/com.malcolmhardie.sqleditor.cocoa.plist
    file to register for all users.

    This problem will probably fixed by making the registration process separate and running it with higher permissions.

    HTMLValidator still needs some more work and isn’t currently compatible. A revised version is in the works and should be available soon.

    TesseractOCR seems to be working fine (and if you haven’t seen them, please check out the xcode 4 source release, it’s a big improvement)

  • SQLEditor and OS X 10.7/Lion

    The release of OS X 10.7 Lion is approaching very fast and the question must be: is SQLEditor compatible?

    The answer is that I expect that SQLEditor will be compatible with OS X 10.7 when it is released in July.

    There is a new page up on the support site about this,

  • MySQL 5.5 + Ruby + Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6

    The trick is that the library install path isn’t right in the gem bundle.
    The following commands fixed it for me:

    $ cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/lib
    $ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib mysql_api.bundle

    $ cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/ext
    $ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib     mysql_api/mysql_api.bundle

    The install name is set to the absolute path of the library that the bundle links to.

    Original source for the fix is here:
    http://lightyearsoftware.com/2011/02/mysql-5-5-on-mac-os-x/

  • Talk Talk Door step selling

    A truly remarkable piece of door step selling occurred to me this afternoon.

    Three people turned up at my door, claiming to be from Talk Talk, complete with ID badges. (So possibly genuine?)

    I said I wasn’t interested, but one of them started arguing with me. He started by claiming that the exchange had been upgraded and then claimed that all broadband was now free. (!)
    This is a particularly odd claim given that they certainly seem to have prices on their website. There were also various other points made which I believe to be partly or wholly inaccurate.

    I’m truly amazed at the stupidity of the whole thing. If I tell people I’m not interested I expect them to go away: they’re not going to change my mind. The only thing the argument did was make me annoyed and I cannot see how that can be a viable sales strategy. Especially when giving information which is actually wrong, surely they will get caught out as soon as the order is submitted to the company and the customer is billed for the service?

    What am I missing, where is the advantage in these practices?

    I am also somewhat concerned that someone with less technical knowledge might get caught out and switch to this crowd.

    It is truly disappointing that this sort of behaviour is permitted.

    As a final, ironic twist, I found this page on the talk talk website, describing how to avoid door step sellers. 🙂

  • SQLEditor Diff Support: A Sneak Peak

    Development work is continuing on SQLEditor, and I thought I’d post a sneak peak of some features that will be arriving fairly soon.

    Today the feature is Diff support. Yes, it’s something that people have been asking for and something that I’ve wanted to add for some time and here it is:

    In this example the original table probably looked something like this:
    The table as it was before the alterations

    The diff panel shows the SQL instructions that you need to execute to get from the original table to the new table.

    This is useful for any number of things, but the most obvious one is if you’re running a database on a remote web server and you only have command line access, you can make changes, grab the instructions needed to make the change and paste them into the command line client on the server. Other people may want to a record of alterations to their databases for change tracking; or they might not trust SQLEditor to get the changes right and might want to inspect any changes before applying them.

    With new diff support you can now do all of these things 🙂

    The observant will also notice the new side bar which as well as the usual source view and the new diff view, also contains a new object search panel as well.
    (more on that in another post).

    Right now the diff system allows you to choose between comparing the last save of the document or comparing it against any other open document.
    The “Compare With” popup allows you to choose what you compare to.

    It’s still being worked on, but it should appear in the next major upgrade.

  • Adobe and Growl

    I recently spotted the following line in an online forum by a person associated with the Growl notification system.

    I’m tired of being yelled at and having my life threatened, but that’s at least better than being insulted like this.

    If I understand the background to the comment correctly; Adobe included the open source Growl library in their CS5 suite. They also modified it so that it doesn’t use the standard Growl installer, but instead installed it ‘silently’, without notice to the user.

    Assorted CS5 suite users then noticed that a mysterious piece of software had been installed on their machines and instead of blaming Adobe, blamed Growl and the Growl team. Some of them appear to have become very heated indeed.

    The whole situation is disgraceful.  Adobe appears to have taken an innocent and very useful open source library and cause an unimaginable amount of harm. At least some of the angry users appear to believe Growl is actually spyware or malware of some kind. For an entirely open source project distributed free of charge, without any expectations at all, this is a remarkable and most unwelcome development.

    Adobe needs to fix the problem and make things right. (If that is even possible).
    I would also suggest that Adobe pays the Growl team for the time they have spent dealing with all of this.

    Perhaps I’m biased, but if this was a little indie mac developer with a $15 app who’d messed up then there might be some allowance made, but this is Adobe – one of the biggest 3rd party developers around – and a company that charges hundreds or thousands of dollars per license.

    As a final irony, it appears that the CS5 suite only uses growl once, to advertise some kind of marketing offer after installation. Then it never uses the library again; so much damage for so little actual benefit.

    My opinion of Adobe has been getting worse recently, but this whole situation is particularly bad.

    Adobe needs to do better.