Eye candy feature added to ReceiptWallet!

In order to add some "bling" to ReceiptWallet, I used Apple's CovertFlow example code to create a CoverFlow like view in ReceiptWallet. At this point, I'm not sure how useful it is, but it sure looks cool!

It's in the latest beta of ReceiptWallet (and DocumentWallet), so go ahead and grab it and let me know what think!

Relented on beta warnings

Well, my attempt to keep people from shooting themselves in the foot when upgrading to the beta version of ReceiptWallet has back fired. I've had few people download it (partly because of mistakes I made) and others have had problems reading the text. So, I've relented and now allow automatic updates. However, the first time a new beta version is run, the user is presented with a warning that hopefully makes things clear.

I'll see how this pans out in terms of people trying the beta.

Time Machine saved me again!

I'm quite religious about my backups, but luckily haven't had to use them except for a whole hard drive failure several years back. However, today, QuickBooks 2007 for the Mac ate my data file and required me to use Time Machine again. I lost 1 invoice and 1 payment which I just entered, so restoring wasn't bad. This is twice in 1 week that I've had to use Time Machine. I'm glad it is there, but am a bit nervous that I've had such bad luck this week.

Furthermore, QuickBooks has some problems with Cocoa bindings as demonstrated by an error in the console log:

2/2/08 7:03:18 PM QuickBooks 2007[36756] An instance 0x17820a30 of class QBCompanyFileDoc is being deallocated while key value observers are still registered with it. Observation info is being leaked, and may even become mistakenly attached to some other object. Set a breakpoint on NSKVODeallocateBreak to stop here in the debugger. Here's the current observation info:
(
Context: 0x148b42a0, Property: 0x179987a0>
)

I ran into this the other day with ReceiptWallet, but using my binding debug object, I was able to solve it. I guess Leopard got more strict on things like this and is now logging errors. Will Intuit fix this and make QuickBooks more stable? There was recently reported a huge data loss issue with the product which I didn't think affected me. I hope this isn't another data loss issue. Of course, I can't reproduce it (nor would I want to), so reporting it to Intuit is probably useless.

Do I ask for too much?

For my latest beta version of ReceiptWallet, I've specifically disabled the auto update mechanism by putting in a bogus link in the Sparkle feed for the actual update. Instead, in the text of the dialog, I tell people that clicking the Install Update button will fail, to read the text, and then have the real link in the text. I've done this on purpose as the new beta has some major changes and I really, really want people to back up their data before installing. If they can't install the update, then their data can't get hosed. This seems to be working. So far I've had 3 reports that people couldn't install the update. This means that they didn't read the text and just hit "Install Update". Furthermore, whatever text I put in the dialog, no matter how large, it won't be read. I even made the text real large as shown below. Even in the smallest window size, I think the large text would get people's attention and then maybe they'd scroll down.

Hmmm. Is there any use in putting text in the update dialog if people just hit Install Update? Maybe not. It's cool that I can put whatever I want in the dialog, but maybe all I need (for normal updates) is "See our website for information about this update."

Should I abandon my over zealousness for caution and just let people install the update without reading? If I do, there could be data loss. If I don't, the chances of people testing will decrease.