In the mining model of software companies, the charismatic, flighty founders and their investors stand to make a lot of money. Their workers, their customers, and their secondary investors all get boned, because these companies and their products tend to suck.
So true…
The people who really change the world are farmers.
Unfortunately mining seems to be very popular these days….
A while ago I ranted about “making money in the Appstore” and that EUR 3,- are too much for an application. Most probably the people reviewing those apps never wrote code on their own… that said, there is a great list of 13 reasons why software is not free… and I could not agree more with Brittany… some of my highlights:
Read the full 13 reasons here and please think about this before you rant about spending money for software…
Long long time ago I wrote about The Hit List – that it is going to be the best GTD software on earth.
A little after that I wrote about how to not write software and especially about how to not communicate with users.
Finally it is time to say that The Hit List is not going to be a hit…. let me quote some statistics from CAS:
Last tweet: December, 2009
Last forum post: December, 2009
Last blog post: September, 2009
Last significant (non-fix) upgrade to THL: May, 2009
To me this looks like THL is finally dead…. too bad, would have had a great future!
RIP, The Hit List!
OpenOffice is a really neat office suite which works perfectly fine on the Mac. Unfortunately the startup times are… “not the best”, but here is a little trick of how to improve startup of OpenOffice on Windows, Mac and Linux:
This will considerably improve the startup time of OpenOffice, while disable i.e. Java based macros. In the very unlikely event that you need them just check the box again…. but until then – enjoy!
Where are students supposed to learn about version control, bug tracking, working on teams, scheduling, estimating, debugging, usability testing, and documentation? Where do they learn to write a program longer than 20 lines?
Well, I could not agree more. Most students and new-hires do not know to work in a team for longer than a night (the last night before the deadline). And unfortunately a single, long night with energy drinks does not require source control or anything else that is required in real-world code in a real-world team…
Read the full article on JoelOnSoftware.
In the Mac world so called “Application Bundles” exist – this means that about a dozen commercial software packages are sold together for a pretty cheap price (usually $50 instead of more than $500!) for a limited time. Experience has shown that there are one or two packages that are pretty “strong” and try to convince the users to buy the package, the other applications are rather unknown, but might also be useful. But it pays off.
For example I recently bought my “upgrade” to Parallels Desktop 4.0 – the whole bundle including other software cost me about the same as just the upgrade directly from Parallels. So even if I don’t use any of the other applicatins included in the bundle it does not really matter, as it did not cost me anything.
Now that I already bought 4 bundles (from MacHeist and MuPromo) I have a lot of commercial software to test and rant about… and trust me, there are great differences when it comes down to support, updates and quality. Therefore I want to write about some of the top notch applications included in the bundles:
1Password
1Password is still the most used application on my Mac and I’m very happy that it was included in the first MacHeist bundle. The password manager includes support for all major browsers on OSX, syncs its data flawlessly across an iDisk and “just works”. It allows me to “remember” very complicated passwords in a secure way and it also synchronizes to the iPhone, so I have my passwords with me all the time.
They release new versions of their software very regularly (usually every 3-4 weeks) including bug fixes and new features. Recently they came up with the best WiFi iPhone sync process I every saw – 1Password automatically detects the iPhone using Bonjour and synchronizes automatically. That’s how every software should sync with the iPhone – flawlessly and automatic!
1Password is highly recommended to every Mac user to manage passwords! And all other application developers should have a look at how easy it is to sync across Macs and to the iPhone.
Parallels Desktop
This was the reason to buy the first package from MuPromo – it included a cheap license of Parallels Desktop 3 and the recent bundle included the new 4.0 release. A great deal to get a license for an amazing piece of software that allows me to run Windows on the Mac. It just works and got even better after I upgraded my Mac to include 4GB of RAM. Highly recommended to test Websites in IE or execute Windows-only applications.
The Hit List
The recent MacHeist bundle included The Hit List, a GTD app I already wrote about, as their main application. While still beta the developers are very active and release a new version every few weeks. They also listen to the forums and communicate with their users – and because the MacHeist sold more than 88.000 bundles I’m sure they receive a lot of support requests these days 
Nevertheless the very promising application is still unfinished – to be a real, serious GTD application it misses two featuers – a rock-solid way to sync tasks between different machines and an iPhone counterpart. But until now, long time after the Heist, there is no iPhone application available, rendering The Hit List pretty useless (at least for me). So I’m still waiting (together with a lot of other folks) for the release of an Hit List iPhone application…. hopefully they look into 1Password to learn about synchronization!
Espresso
The article is named “the good and the bad”, now let’s talk about the bad one… MacRabbit released Espresso 1.0 just before the last MacHeist took place, but to be honest this application is still in “heavy beta mode”. It tries to be an source code editor which matches up with Coda, TextMate or BBEdit and it was one of the reasons for buying the bundle.
Unfortunately the application is not anywhere being ready for production. While the overall approach looks great it lacks required features, that you would expect from a source code editor. For example Espresso only supports syntax highlighting for a few languages, the application crashes too often, and I can’t even enter the ^ character, which is used quite often within regular expressions. Even worse, the support does not reply to bug reports at all – see the forums (i.e. here) for details. Just on a side note – they don’t seem to participate in their own forums at all.
So how about updates? Well, there have been some, but neither did they fix a lot of bugs nor did they bring Espresso anywhere near a serious text editor.
Unfortunately Espresso has been a waste of money and I’ll stick with the free TextWrangler instead.
Voila! and MoneyWell
Now that I complained about the Espresso support being not responsive at all I want to highlight two great software companies where the support is just amazing!
Voila v2.0 enhances the OSX built in screenshot feature and allows editing, rotating, modifying screenshots without any need to fire up Pixelmator. There are still some bugs and missing features (copy to clipboard!), but the support wrote back within minutes on all my requests!
The same applies to MoneyWell, a simple but powerful personal finance application – the support wrote back within minutes (from the iPhone) and they participate actively in their own forums. That’s how it should be!
The summary 