| Title |
Excerpt |
Author |
Date |
Total Comments |
Recent Comment |
| The Ninety-Nine-Per-Cent Solution |
A recent post on Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch’s Tales from the Red Shed reminded me to give a bit more of the philosophy behind what we’re doing in SuperDuper! Wolf points out that we don’t do “temporal versioning”—i.e. traditional “incremental backups”—and he’s right. The Technical Problem Doing versioning “right” requires both… |
Dave Nanian |
10/30/05 |
77 |
10/25/06 |
| Slowly going insane while waiting for a fix |
Every day, I get asked one question over and over—namely: My backup is failing, and it’s saying that it couldn’t disable ignore permissions! What’s going on? This started the day Tiger shipped, and has continued on a hundreds-of-times-a-week basis since. And the worst part? It’s a bug in Tiger. So,… |
Dave Nanian |
10/26/05 |
16 |
02/14/06 |
| Shiny New Squeezebox! |
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… |
Dave Nanian |
10/24/05 |
0 |
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| Paper Management on the Macintosh |
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… |
Dave Nanian |
10/22/05 |
11 |
12/15/06 |
| Lies, Damn Lies and AppleScripting |
As two of you know, SuperDuper! has provided an AppleScript interface for some time. We’ve used it to provide the rudimentary scheduling in the v1.x series, and we’ve enhanced as necessary to improve the experience in v2.0. But, one rather tricky thing fell out during the process: users can (and… |
Dave Nanian |
10/21/05 |
2 |
10/21/05 |
| Gentlemen, Start Your Clicking! |
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. |
Dave Nanian |
10/11/05 |
0 |
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| Blogrolling in our time… |
Looks like Rich Siegel, of BBEdit fame, has started blogging. And he’s ragging on bad drivers! Go Rich! (And don’t miss the great Oktoberfest Special they’ve announced over at Bare Bones. $99 is an incredible bargain for the exceptionally well regarded editor… if you’re even remotely thinking about snagging a… |
Dave Nanian |
10/05/05 |
0 |
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| Burning with Optimism’s Flames |
Yeah, OK, so the technical definition of a Beta test is that it’s feature complete. But, that’s not how I’ve ever really done it. I consider a Beta a build sent to external testers that’s stable and usable. And, SuperDuper! v2.0 has been in this type of testing since November… |
Dave Nanian |
10/05/05 |
7 |
10/28/05 |
| Teddy the Bear gives SuperDuper! a Hug |
As a long time Mac user (since 1984) a have one really big complaint about MacOSX, and that is the incapability of the Finder to easily copy a bootable System folder to an external disk and boot from there. Enter SuperDuper!, a 20$ software for MacOS X, that allows you… |
Dave Nanian |
09/19/05 |
0 |
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| Greenman |
Given the amount of traffic he’s been getting, I’m not sure he needs another plug from me, but Shaun Inman’s Mint is a terrific new webstats package that focuses on clear presentation and extensibility. Mint’s a framework that supports a plugin architecture called Pepper, and there’s already a vibrant 3rd… |
Dave Nanian |
09/12/05 |
0 |
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| Ms. Cranky Pants (Alice Wang) Loves SuperDuper! |
Right after Tiger arrived on my doorstep, I went shopping for a firewire harddrive. I waded through a ton of reviews and finally settled on an OtherWorld Computing Mercury harddrive. So far it’s working very well. Although I could have used the included Retrospect program, I opted to go with… |
Dave Nanian |
09/12/05 |
0 |
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| 43 Folders Gets Things Done with SuperDuper! |
Just noticed this: Painless disk cloning - Just a quick plug for SuperDuper which may end up joining DiskWarrior as my must-have Mac utility. It does exactly two things very well: a) it creates bootable DMG clones of Mac disks and b) it lets you very easily update the disk… |
Dave Nanian |
09/09/05 |
0 |
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| Summer’s Cauldron |
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… |
Dave Nanian |
09/06/05 |
9 |
09/07/05 |
| All of a Sudden (It’s Too Late) |
Hey, so it’s been a while since I’ve written specifically about SuperDuper! v2.0. And it’s not because I’ve got nothing to say. So, let’s do a bit of a status update, and another sneak peek. Where We Are Now As you might expect, we get asked when SuperDuper! v2.0 is… |
Dave Nanian |
09/04/05 |
7 |
02/25/06 |
| Wait ‘Till Your Boat Goes Down |
When I left Windows for the Macintosh years ago, there was one thing I didn’t count on: there are no good personal finance programs available for the Mac. Yes, there’s Quicken 200x, and I tried it for six months (and have looked carefully at every version when released, including the… |
Dave Nanian |
08/23/05 |
16 |
09/24/05 |
| Blame the Weather |
The Pavlov’s Beep post got me thinking a bit about how user expectations can set a product up for failure out of the gate… and that made me think of the late, lamented (by some), lambasted (by many) Newton. Ignoring the obvious hype surrounding the rollout—something the product could never… |
Dave Nanian |
08/20/05 |
0 |
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| Another gem! |
Once again, I’m really happy to announce that a Shirt Pocket product has gone all gemilicious! netTunes was just reviewed by Dan Frakes of Macworld Magazine, in the Mac Gems section. netTunes 2.2 was awarded 4 mice—and also mentioned, in another recent MacGems column, as “the best solution, by far”!… |
Dave Nanian |
08/11/05 |
0 |
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| Pavlov’s Beep |
In the first Bang & Olufsen multi-line cordless phone system—the 6000 series—the designers and developers clearly had a problem. Basically, when you picked up the phone, it took a while to actually “connect”, something on the order of .5 seconds or so. Long enough for the user to get out… |
Dave Nanian |
08/07/05 |
4 |
08/08/05 |
| Bang & Olufsen - CE UI |
So, conventional wisdom about Bang & Olufsen is, as far as I can tell, overpriced, bad sounding junk for the “Jet Set”. ("Jet Set” being a particularly old fashioned way of saying “stupid, snobby idiot”, given the context.) I think that it’s easy to try to slot Bang & Olufsen… |
Dave Nanian |
07/19/05 |
0 |
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| The Limited |
We’re asked, every so often, why we don’t offer a time-limited full version of SuperDuper!. It’s pretty simple, really. If you’re going to time-limit a program, you have three choices:"Cookie" the user’s system in some hidden way so you know when the program was first run, and can therefore calculate… |
Dave Nanian |
07/09/05 |
9 |
06/14/07 |
| How much? |
Here at Shirt Pocket World Headquarters, we’re often asked about our upgrade policy, and—specifically—exactly how much v2.0 is going to cost if you already own v1.x. Here’s the deal: SuperDuper! v2.0 will be a free upgrade for registered users of v1.x. That said, not every major upgrade of SuperDuper! will… |
Dave Nanian |
06/26/05 |
11 |
04/24/06 |
| The Missing Woof |
I remember back when Ketzl was a pretty young puppy, we always used to wonder if she had a bark at all. She never felt the need to let out a full “Woof!”, and pretty considerately used what we termed “mini-woofs” to get our attention (which involved blowing out her… |
Dave Nanian |
06/25/05 |
5 |
06/26/05 |
| It’s a gem! |
I’m really happy to announce that SuperDuper! was just reviewed by Dan Frakes of Macworld Magazine, in the Mac Gems section. SuperDuper! 1.5.5 was awarded 4.5 mice—with the only failing being a lack of scheduling. (Those of you here likely know that scheduling will be featured in v2.0: I’m discussing… |
Dave Nanian |
06/20/05 |
2 |
06/21/05 |
| Ketzl at the Beach |
Be gentle to my server, but here’s a quick little (3.5MB) movie of Ketzl in her wheelchair at the beach in Chatham, MA over Memorial Day. |
Dave Nanian |
06/15/05 |
8 |
06/18/05 |
| Pull up! Pull up! |
I think the best way to sum up my feelings at the end of the usability test would have been “despairing”. A lot of work went into what we did, and yet—somehow—it all went totally wrong. But why? We’d thought that users knew/understood that “Saved Settings” were present, were documents,… |
Dave Nanian |
06/14/05 |
7 |
07/22/05 |
| The Usability Test |
At the end of the last part of our tale, Bruce and I were feeling pretty good about the state of Scheduling in SuperDuper! We’d solved the technical challenges involved, the UI for setting up the times looked good, worked well, and seemed logical. In short, we were ready to… |
Dave Nanian |
06/03/05 |
0 |
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| NetNewsWire v2.0 Design |
Brent Simmons has just blogged a bit about the design of one feature in NetNewsWire 2.0on his blog. If you’ve been enjoying my posts about this, you’ll probably enjoy Brent’s, too! Brent classifies himself as an Experimenter/Gatherer, which I usually am too, when actually doing the coding. When I’m doing… |
Dave Nanian |
06/03/05 |
0 |
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| Scheduling: Losing the Light |
During the development of v2.0, almost everything went according to plan. Almost. What didn’t go right, at least not entirely, was scheduling. In fact, the usability testing for scheduling went absolutely horribly. Embarrassingly so. And it wasn’t just isolated to a single tester: in fact, only one user in the… |
Dave Nanian |
06/02/05 |
3 |
06/05/05 |
| Schedule This! |
It was pretty clear, after we’d released the first version of SuperDuper! that, scheduling was something users were clamoring for. We kind of knew that was coming—it’s a pretty common feature of this kind of program. So, after Bruce and I talked about whether or not it was something that… |
Dave Nanian |
06/01/05 |
0 |
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| Dogs in Wheelchairs - Life with a DM Dog |
Our Bernese Mountain Dog, Ketzl, is a great girl, but she’s been through a lot in her 8 years. Even knowing that Bernese have a tendency toward health issues didn’t quite prepare us for: Entropion (eyelids turned slightly inward, which causes the eyelashes to irritate the cornea - surgically corrected)… |
Dave Nanian |
05/24/05 |
9 |
05/28/06 |
| Bob “Dr. Mac” Levitus Loves SuperDuper! |
Super Duper by Shirt Pocket Software, http://www.shirt-pocket.com, is free if all you want to do is clone one hard disk to another. But if you register your copy, for $19.95, great new features appear, including filters, scripts and the amazing Safety Clone, which lets you install new software and still… |
Dave Nanian |
05/18/05 |
0 |
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| Behind the curtain |
We try to keep “upcoming release” information quiet here at Shirt Pocket, or at least relatively so, until we’re close to releasing new a version. The last thing we want to do is frustrate our users by announcing something and then not shipping. But, let’s pull back the curtain a… |
Dave Nanian |
05/14/05 |
101 |
09/07/05 |
| Ted Leung on SuperDuper! and Support |
My conversation with Dave goes above and beyond what I’d call “support”. Not only that, I hadn’t even registered SuperDuper! yet—I planned to if it worked for me, but I was in the middle of proving that out, and I didn’t mention that to Dave at all. This kind of… |
Dave Nanian |
05/13/05 |
0 |
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| Dog Nurse, Going Macintosh and the Birth of netTunes |
It’d been a few months since I’d left Compuware and set out, once again, on my own. Shirt Pocket was initially formed to create products for PDAs, a market segment that I’ve always found interesting… hence the name. I was still working on a PC—an IBM ThinkPad T23—and while I… |
Dave Nanian |
05/10/05 |
0 |
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| SuperDuper! design error #78,272 |
I didn’t know it at the time, I made two huge mistakes when I settled on the various sweated-over terms used in SuperDuper! While the vast majority of the wording is clear to the vast majority of users, it’s pretty obvious at this point that Safety Clone and Copy Script… |
Dave Nanian |
05/06/05 |
3 |
10/05/05 |
| Mister Squid Hates SuperDuper! |
You know, I was about to purchase SuperDuper but I found it incredibly confusing. I wanted SuperDuper to produce a disk image that could be restored using Apple Software Restore. I did NOT want SuperDuper to make the target drive “identical” to the source drive as I have files resident… |
Dave Nanian |
05/05/05 |
0 |
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| Dan Slagle loves SuperDuper! |
I restored my clone using SuperDuper! and, as usual, it went flawlessly. (Side note: He could charge triple for that program, and I would pay) Just tell me where to send the bill, Dan! (via The Unofficial iMFAQ News—Thanks, Dan!) |
Dave Nanian |
05/05/05 |
0 |
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| MacCompanion Loves SuperDuper! |
My experience — the software backed up my 80 GB (actually available 74.52 GB) containing 42 GB of data (204,483 files) in I hour and 15 minutes, a time comparable to other products I have reviewed for macC. Hurray, it passed the ultimate test of the backup software. My backup… |
Dave Nanian |
05/04/05 |
0 |
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| Is it safe? |
Hey, look ma, no exclamation point in that title! Had to happen sometime. So, the Safety Clone. The Safety Clone is one of the most unique things that SuperDuper! does, but also one that is potentially misunderstood. I was really happy to see Ted Landau’s Macworld post suggesting it for… |
Dave Nanian |
05/03/05 |
0 |
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| Khoi Vinh Loves SuperDuper! |
First, I made a complete and bootable duplication of my PowerBook on a recently assembled 300 gigabyte external FireWire drive. In the past, I’ve used Carbon Copy Cloner for this task, but due in part to the fact that it hasn’t yet been updated for Tiger, I opted for Shirt… |
Dave Nanian |
05/02/05 |
0 |
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| Super, thanks for asking! |
Wow, a lot of you are upgrading to Tiger! And I mean a lot! Thanks to everyone who snagged a copy of SuperDuper! over the past few days: I really appreciate the registrations, and it’s great to see that you’re appreciating the program, too! I’m in the middle of a… |
Dave Nanian |
05/02/05 |
0 |
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| Macworld Loves SuperDuper! |
There are many excellent programs for “cloning” your drive. My recommendation here is SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket. It boasts a unique Safety Clone feature that creates versions of your old (Panther) and new (Tiger) systems on two separate volumes. Both systems remain current with the files in your Home directory,… |
Dave Nanian |
04/29/05 |
0 |
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| New netTunes & the Release Jitters! |
Wow, yesterday was a hectic day. I’d had a new release of netTunes in process for some time, and had completed the final testing a few weeks ago. Since the main focus was Tiger compatibility, it seemed appropriate to release closer to Tiger’s release (and I didn’t want to leak… |
Dave Nanian |
04/29/05 |
0 |
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| How “unique”! |
So, what should you expect from this blog? My plan is to write about a relatively eclectic set of topics. I’ve sketched out my first 30 posts or so, and they seem to be falling into the following broad catagories: News about Shirt Pocket Software design and development Computing from… |
Dave Nanian |
04/27/05 |
0 |
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| TUAW loves SuperDuper! |
Backing up has never been so easy: SuperDuper is an incredibly useful piece of software. It doesn’t hurt that it’s virtually idiot-proof, with excellent documention, superb support and a visually attractive interface. I have been using it for several months and it didn’t take long for it to become one… |
Dave Nanian |
04/26/05 |
2 |
04/27/05 |
| So if a witch weighs the same as a duck… |
To follow-up on yesterday’s post, the inevitable question is: how do files get like this in the first place? As far as I can figure out, this floating owner “feature” is part of OSX’s OS9 compatibility, and also has to do with the “Ignore ownership on this volume” checkbox you’ll… |
Dave Nanian |
04/25/05 |
13 |
03/19/07 |
| Floating ownership nearly sinks us |
Bruce and I had spent a long time designing, writing and testing SuperDuper!—as you might expect, backup programs need to be extremely reliable, and we worked hard to make that happen. And it’s trickier than you might think—there’s a lot of obscure stuff in HFS+ and its metadata, and getting… |
Dave Nanian |
04/24/05 |
19 |
03/19/07 |
| Tiger Compatibility |
As you’d expect, people are really, really excited about Tiger and we’re getting a lot of questions about compatibility. So, here’s the deal: The current release of SuperDuper!, v1.5.5, is compatible with Tiger, so update if you haven’t already. There are some caveats if you’re trying to install Tiger on… |
Dave Nanian |
04/23/05 |
2 |
04/30/05 |
| Where I Attempt to Explain Why I’m Doing This. |
So, I’ve been avoiding blogging. More than that: I’ve been avoiding making eye contact with blogging. But it keeps jumping up and down, waving its arms frantically, desperately trying to get my attention, insisting that it won’t be so bad. I’m not so sure. I mean, I’ve had some sort… |
Dave Nanian |
04/22/05 |
4 |
04/26/05 |