PDFKit is borked

I love that Apple has lots of frameworks for me to use in my apps and gives me things for free such as PDF viewing and manipulation. This is with PDFKit. The problem with PDFKit is that it isn't very tolerant of PDFs created from various other applications. I reported a bug with this back in the 10.4 era and it got fixed; I simply added a keyword to a PDF using Preview and it crashed (this is the same thing I do in ReceiptWallet). Now, I was pointed to another PDF that has the same behavior. The steps to reproduce this are quite simple:

1. Download the IRS W-9 form
2. Open it in Preview (on 10.5.2)
3. Choose Tools->Inspector
4. Click on the keywords tab
5. Click the + button
6. Add a keyword
7. Do a Save As and give it a name
8. Watch Preview crash

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000000dce481a4
Crashed Thread:  0

Am I out of touch with my users?

I received 2 pieces of email today about the new ReceiptWallet 2.0 beta basically saying that they wanted their receipts and documents in one window since ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet were now one. When they were separate applications, receipts and documents had to be in separate windows as they were separate programs. With the combined program, that is basically still the case. Furthermore, with multiple libraries users can now separate out information more, like for multiple years, multiple companies, multiple projects, etc. If everything was in one window, this wouldn't be possible. Am I missing the point of these users? It has me very confused and almost questioning the major decisions I've made about the products (making them handle multiple libraries and combining them). However, most of the feedback I've received has been quite positive; one user even bought a second copy that he didn't need just because he liked the new version so much.I take what my users say to heart and spend a lot of time thinking about what to implement and how to implement. I don't just discard feedback; I always think about it and wonder how many other users are thinking the same thing. Unfortunately most users don't contact me, so I have no idea what they think of what I've done.

The OS war continues

Yesterday I was talking to 2 people that had completely different views on operating systems. The first person had just switched to a Mac and bought his wife one as well. He was extremely pleased and said that Vista actually caused him to switch as it was slow and then he had to upgrade his hardware to run it. He also thought that he'd need to run VMWare to run his old Windows apps, but found he only uses it for some media files (probably those with DRM) that don't play on the Mac. On the flip side, the other guy was completely anti-Mac because he said it confused him and he didn't like how iTunes arranged his music. Fair enough to not like iTunes as iTunes is designed for most users that don't care where iTunes actually puts the music; he is the exception.

I always say that you should use the tool that gets the job done; if you want to use Windows, that's your choice, but don't ask me for help. People have also said, buy a computer that the person you know who knows most about computers uses so that you can ask them questions. With that kind of thinking, please buy Windows so you don't ask me questions :-).

I think that most people that sit down with a Mac for awhile and get used to it, will find that it works well and may be less confusing than Windows. With all the software that ships with Macs, it makes it a no-brainer for many people.

The OS war will never end; however, these days with Intel based machines, it is much easier to convince people to move to the Mac.

Caught cheating

No, I didn't cheat in school, I cheated in failing to fix a ReceiptWallet feature. When I was working on ReceiptWallet to move it to document based, I didn't fix the AppleScript support. When ReceiptWallet was a single window application, the scripting support was global; with document based, the scripting had to be specific to a library. As anyone that has written AppleScript support, it is a royal pain in the you know what. I was hoping that no one would notice this, but even before the end of the ReceiptWallet beta, I had someone send me email about it. Damn, I guess I had to fix it.

So, I spent the last 2 days fixing the AppleScript support so that people can bulk load receipts and documents in ReceiptWallet. I'm quite pleased with it, but it was much harder to implement than I'd expect.