Daniel Jalkut made a post yesterday rightfully thanking and praising the Apple employees whose sacrifice and hard work went into making Leopard a great upgrade. And while those employees certainly deserve the lion's share of the credit, let's not overlook the contributions of everyone that took the time test and provide much needed feedback to Apple during the course for Leopard development. Especially indy developers like Daniel, Gus, Tom, Chris, and so many others.

Reporting bugs, at least when done correctly, isn't just pasting a stack crawl into some report with the description "I think I was checking email or something and this happened". Good bug reports require detailed descriptions, regression testing, and often times, a test case demonstrating the problem. A little bribery may come in handy as well. Doing all this takes time and unlike the folks that fix these bugs, the reporters don't get a dime for their efforts, at least not directly.

So to everyone out there that took the time to provide your feedback to Apple during Leopard's development, thank you so much for your contributions to our beloved little operating system.

Daniel Jalkut made a post yesterday rightfully thanking and praising the Apple employees whose sacrifice and hard work went into making Leopard a great upgrade. And while those employees certainly deserve the lion's share of the credit, let's not overlook the contributions of everyone that took the time test and provide much needed feedback to Apple during the course for Leopard development.

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Posted by Casey at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know that Leopard day is upon us and I should be all a flutter about the Apple's new cat, but everyone is already getting good and sick of hearing about that I expect.

No, tonight I write to share with you my experiences with fifth grade math homework. My daughter, who just happens to be in the fifth grade, brought home some math homework last night which I checked, as I'm sometimes called to do. Now I'm pretty good at math, not great, but I think I can handle fifth grade math. That is until I ran across this question:

Your friend Tamyra is buying a good-bye card for the coach. She bought a card and then returned it, got her money back, and bought a card for $1.50 less. She ended up with $.75 change in her pocket. What was the price of the first card?

It took quite some time before I realized that I was not losing my mind and came to the correct conclusion. My wife was a bit more skeptical, and so she called several friends and relations to see if they could solve the problem. None of them could. Can you?

Have you figured it out yet?

There are three possible answers:

A - The question is nonsense.
B - The card shop has a $.75 restocking fee.
C - Somebody screwed Tamyra out of $.75 in change.

Poor Tamyra.

Next comes the happy ending.

My wife was able to talk to my daughter's teacher about the problem and found out that the answer is $2.25 according to the key. She gave my wife a bit of good natured ribbing to go along with it, asking if she was smarter than a fifth grader. That is until she read the question herself. To her credit, she didn't simply give the kids credit for that one if they got it wrong. Well, she did, but she also decided to have a discussion with the class and let them figure out what was wrong with the question and how it needed to be changed so it matched the answer in the key. During the discussion they were able to figure out that the word "less" needed to be removed from the question to make the answer correct.

technorati:
• math
• homework
• education

Posted by Casey at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Updating my software makes me so nervous.

Today I posted an update to Proxi. This release could almost be called version 2 given the user interface changes, but I'm calling it version 1.5. Here's a list of the changes:

• Changes to make Proxi a better Mac OS citizen such as:
• UI changes which fit better with established conventions especially in Leopard.
• Moved ProxiLib.framework into the application itself.
• Moved ProxiCore.bundle and skype.bundle into the application itself.
• Added Application Monitor trigger.
• Reduced startup time and memory usage.
• Added an alert to the Key Press task when selecting a "Press" style stroke.
• Added icons to trigger and task menus.
• Added "game mode" to PowerMate trigger
• PowerMate trigger icons now indicate type of trigger
• Added editing commands to trigger and task menus
• Added Duplicate function for triggers and tasks
• Skype should no longer ask permission to allow Proxi to work with it on every launch.
• Added ability to set Skype mood in Skype task
• Bubble text color now defaults to black.
• Fixed a problem where unknown components in a blueprint could cause data loss.
• Other minor changes and fixes.

If you've not heard of Proxi, I could describe it, but I've always had trouble summarizing Proxi in a few sentences. Happily Proxi is mentioned in a new book by Rick Ralston called The Designer's Apprentice: Automating Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign in Adobe Creative Suite 3. Rick provides a great description:

Proxi resembles Automator in both interface and function; however, it differs in two important respects: It includes an automated trigger system that Automator lacks, and it's geared to system and application events (while Automator is focused more on file processing). With Proxi, you build a set of tasks (like Automator's workflow) called a Blueprint and assign a trigger to it. Triggers can be time- or event-based and included filters to included or exclude conditions when the trigger fires.

You can grab version 1.5 here.

technorati:
• proxi
• griffin
• automation
• software
• mac os x

Posted by Casey at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)