Shirt Pocket Watch

Our “production” iMac hit the Shirt Pocket loading dock (aka my front step) yesterday, and I’ve been busily working on updates to netTunes and launchTunes while Bruce works on completing the next update to SuperDuper!, which looks like it will be Universal as well.†

It’s been nice to get back to Xcode after some time off (my design/marketing/documentation/support/etc duties keep me away from it more than I’d like), and it didn’t take more than a few hours to do the netTunes conversion—it’s up and running as I type, and works great.

The big challenge with netTunes was the screen “scraping”—the code has some byte-order dependencies because of pixels, and I wasn’t looking forward to re-writing the “inner loop” to handle all the various cases with Thousands and Millions of colors using both MMX and Altivec. Blegh.

Fortunately, there was an elegant solution. Since the Intel Mac is Tiger-only, I was able to make use of some the new Accelerate framework APIs to eliminate byte order dependencies and—at least under Tiger—about two pages of nasty code. Since the Intel Macs can’t run Panther, I didn’t have to change the already-working parts. The result? Both the Intel and PPC versions benefit, at least under 10.4.

It’s always a good feeling when you can delete code and leave the hardware-specific optimization up to the guys who live and breathe vector processing units, let me tell you.

Anyway, we’re working hard to get the Universal binaries out the door. Obviously, it’s important to do extensive testing using real, production hardware—and we’re doing just that.

† - Updated for the exclamation point haters. You know who you are.

You can boot off USB drives on Intel-based Macs. This opens the world of USB 2.0-only drives to Macs users as bootable backup devices. That sound? It’s David Nanian drooling.

from Tales from the Red Shed & Jonathan Rentzsch

Egad, was I that loud? >wipes chin<

Looks like the fine folks at Bare Bones Software have released Yojimbo, an great new take on the organizer-cum-database that many have tried, and failed, to do well…

The Yojimbo team has done a great job, addressing many of the classic missteps directly, with:

• A good first cut at a smart “Quick Input” panel that analyzes what’s on the clipboard and pre-fills as much as possible
• Rapid, global search capabilities that make it easy to locate things—including Spotlight support
• A useful set of built-in datatypes
• Easy “sub” organization using groups and tags
• Full support for “archived” web pages, PDFs and the like
• Item-by-item encryption
• And, best of all, transparent, multi-machine synchronization through SyncServices and .mac

They’ve leveraged the great new features of Tiger like CoreData, SyncServices and—hey!—it’s even a Cocoa app!

The price is a very reasonable $39 for a single user on any number of (automatically synchronized) computers, with family pack and educational pricing, too.

To top it off, there’s a free, 30-day demo. There’s no excuse not to check it out—go to it!

Although I haven’t yet seen the full review, some UK Macworld readers have written in to tell me that there’s a full page review of SuperDuper in the latest issue. 4.5 stars, and this great quote:

There are just three groups of people who should be using this excellent utility. Lunatic frontiersmen with a penchant for early beta software, paranoid data hoarders who think that the next crash is just a restart away, and everybody else.

from Richard Dyce’s review in Macworld UK‘s February 2006 issue. Thanks, Richard & Macworld UK!

Hey, cool! It looks like SuperDuper! received a Gold MaxFixIt Toolbox Award this year!

A good backup strategy should be the base of any troubleshooting plan. This versatile disk copying program can make a straight copy, or “clone”—useful when you want to move all your data from one machine to another, or do a simple backup. The real power, however, lies in its ability “checkpoint” your system, preserving your computer’s critical applications and files while you run on a working, bootable copy.

Thanks, MacFixIt!

It’s hard to believe another year is gone, but belief has nothing to do with it. A few hours and *poof*—goodbye, 2005.

It’s been a big year for Shirt Pocket, with a number of product releases, none bigger than v2.0 of SuperDuper!—something Bruce and I had been working on since the year before. And our customers seem to love it, which is gratifying indeed.

We were honored to receive another Eddy, this year for SuperDuper! 1.5—our second in a row, after 2004’s Eddy for netTunes. Incredibly cool to get that kind of recognition.

On a more personal level, I started blogging this year, about 5 years late to the party, but at least I’m here and enjoying it.

Zabeth is deep into her third year of Veterinary School, and transitioning to clinical studies early in 2006, which might mean I need to call her “Dr.” soon.

And Ketzl is still with us: happy, healthy (apart from the progressing DM), and the source of much joy and sadness.

No doubt next year will bring more changes, more releases, more joy, more sorrow.

Thanks to all of you for your support, encouragement, criticism and for spreading the word about Shirt Pocket and our products. Without you, the year would have been a lesser one: I’m sure I’ll be talking to more of you on the forums, through the support lines, and on the blog.

I’m looking forward to it. A toast: to the end of 2005, and to you!

I know it’s more of a Thanksgiving kind of post, but the best gift we got this year—even though most of it happened before Christmas—was another year with Ketzl.

A year ago, we were well post-DM-diagnosis. Ketzl had already lost the use of one leg, and was weakening on the other. We’d started her Physical Therapy, and she was doing her water treadmill, and a few months later, as she lost use of the other leg, we got her a dog wheelchair.

The time since has been challenging but rewarding. Ketzl has done well, and while the progression to her inevitable demise continues—as it does for all of us—she’s done better than we ever expected. Working with her is time consuming, exhausting but very rewarding.

And while we don’t know how much more time we’ll have together, or whether she’ll get to her 9th birthday in March, we’re thankful for this past year… an unexpected, and priceless, gift.

Thanks, Ketzl.

Let’s talk, for a moment, about acquiring music.

As you might guess from netTunes, I’m a bit of a music fanatic. I’ve bought a lot of music in my day, and expect to buy a lot more. But, I rarely listen to “music radio”, and rely on friends, happenstance, and sometimes NPR to point me to new stuff.

But it’s not always easy to tell from brief exposure whether a new album is worth buying. Sometimes you need ten, fifteen, twenty plays to decide whether it’s something to add to the “owned” pile. 30 second snippets just won’t do it.

Now, sure, I could follow The Path of the Torrent, but I really don’t like doing that, regardless of whether or not I agree with the RIAA and their positions. And I hate shelling out $15 for something that I end up never playing.

So, what to do?

What I do is pretty simple: I use Rhapsody. Yes, it costs me $10 a month, and is extremely tied to the computer. (And I do want to own the music I love, and do whatever I want with it, especially with regard to device shifting.) But that doesn’t matter, because I use it to sample things. If I find it’s music I want to keep, I buy the CD and pop it into the library. And, if not, it saved me more than the cost of the CD, and the storage for the physical media, too. So I’m finding more music I like, and buying less music I don’t.

And now they’ve got a version for the Mac that—while not full featured—works well for exactly this purpose. You might want to check it out—I’m glad I did.

Egad, could it be another post about the Sony Media Center? I believe so!

I ran into a rather unusual problem with the VGX-XL1’s changer that I wanted to document here, in case someone else hits it in the future.

What I noticed was that, after playing a movie or DVD or… well… pretty much anything, the VGX-XL1B changer would stop working properly. It’d load up discs, but the discs themselves would be unreadable. The only way to fix the problem was to power cycle the changer: even a reboot wouldn’t work.

After days (literally) of off-and-on attempts to figure the problem out, I finally determined the cause.

Basically, in the Power Management settings for the computer, there’s an option that spins down unused drives after a set period of time. I had set this to 15 minutes to save wear and tear on the internal hard disk during times of light or no use.

Turns out that the changer must get some kind of ACPI notification after 15 minutes or so, and powers something down that it never powers back up again. Setting the disk spin-down to “Never” resolved the problem.

Considering that it’s not a hard disk, and that it still responded to load commands, it’s pretty clear that there’s some weird bug going on here. But, if you hit it, the fix is easy enough.

Ah, Windows.

I’m getting some questions about what Media Center I’ve got, so I thought I’d put up a post about it, as well as some information that I hope will be of interest.

My first MCE was an HP z555. This MCE is styled more like stereo equipment than a PCs, with a front panel transport controls and a semi-useful FL display.

The z555 has two cable tuners as well as a single HDTV tuner, various back-panel connections including Toslink and Coax for SPDIF, DVI and Component outputs (as well as S-Video and Composite), pretty much everything you’d expect. It comes with a single, easily accessed, 250GB drive, and a decent software bundle.

A few downsides: it’s not really expandable, there are no free slots (or normal boards to replace), and one drive is limiting. And one huge problem, though: it’s chuck full of fans, and they’re loud. In a media room, that doesn’t work—I tried to live with it for a few months, and it drove me nuts, so, I started looking for something else.

What I found was the Sony VGX-XL1 Media Center, which comes with a 200 disc changer, which is now available for $1799, with a $150 rebate to bring the price down to $1649… a great deal!

It’s also designed more like a piece of AV equipment. While it doesn’t have the transport controls or the display, it’s whisper quiet, and can take 3 SATA drives, which can be set up with RAID. The changer is well integrated, and quite useful. The slot-loaded DVD is elegant and easily loaded. It’s much more attractive than the HP. It’s got a built-in HDMI output, and sets up easily at high resolutions.

And, again, it’s quiet. Very quiet. Major kudos to Sony for that.

It has some downsides: they clearly intended it to be a DVD unit, since it ships with one cable/antenna tuner, and that’s pretty much it. Fortunately, there’s an open slot, and it’s easy to drop in an HDTV tuner (and the existing tuner looks like it can be replaced easily, too). The interior of the machine is very nicely laid out, only one screw type is used throughout, the drives all drop into a nice carrier, the bracing is nicely stamped, memory slots are right there in the open. Nicely done.

Of course, there’s one boneheaded thing. For some reason, Sony decided that the output from DVDs (etc) wouldn’t go directly out as SPDIF. Instead, while it’ll communicate with a receiver as SPDIF, it always goes out as Dolby Digital encoded AC3, even if the source is DTS, because you output analog to the sound card which then re-encodes.

Maybe there’s a logical reason for it, having to do with the HDMI spec or something, but it smells like Sony’s obsession with keeping first generation digital information from exiting their box. As such, it’s awfully frustrating.

Apart from that (and some complaints about the keyboard), though, it’s a really nice unit.