The amazing thing is how small the mechanical parts are, and how many there are in there. This camera probably costs no more than £200, yet there are minuscule parts and an amazing level of tiny details, all of which has to work reliably, without any maintenance, for a possible lifespan of several years.

The details of the lens assembly are particularly clever with multiple layers and motors which move the different parts. The coils which are printed onto the circuit board and form part of the movement mechanism is clever feature.

I’m amazed

It seems to be something of a representative for the state of the non-digital photography market, which looks pretty much dead except for a few limited areas.

In recent years they seem to have sold off much of the research and development and focused on the hyper-competitive desktop inkjet printer market instead.
(Although the reasons for this decision still remain a mystery to me)

I remember having a kodak camera with kodak film, that got photos printed on kodak photo paper, but I guess people a bit younger than me might never have even seen a roll of film, nor for that matter a kodak camera.

It’s sad to see this happen to such an iconic company and I hope that things don’t turn out badly for the employees.

It’s got a useful mix of tools for Mac web development and its an excellent bargain even if you’re only looking for one or two items in the bundle. HTMLValidator is our contribution to the bundle which costs just 39.99

The bundle contains 10 apps for a single low price of just $39.99
If you’re doing web design, there’s probably something here for you
(unless you already own all the apps, in which case, it also makes a great gift)

The bundle includes:

• Get Backup Pro
• skEdit
• Better Link Tester
• Simon (Bronze – 15 active tests)
• Logo Design Studio Pro
• Stor
• Interarchy
• Whoosh
• MacFreelance
• HTMLValidator

The offer is running until December 28th, so you will have to be quick, or you might miss out!

This problem may happen if you return YES from validateMenuItem in a NSDocument subclass for menu items that you don’t actually control. (If you just return YES as a default for example)

If instead you return

[super validateMenuItem:item]

You should get the correct “Revert to Last Saved Version” menu item

I ran into this when I was doing testing on 10.7 and although documentation clearly states that you must call the super method in validateMenuItem: , it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what was causing the problem.

Hope this helps if you have the same problem.

Edit: This may have been fixed in OS X

However this last week I saw something really surprising; Runesoft has released a patch to bring Intel compatibility to the game and it now works on Lion

I’m really impressed with this, thank you Runesoft!

What it should ideally do is to automatically update using Sparkle or similar. I don’t want it to check constantly in the background, simply check and update when I click the “check Now” button.

Failing that, it should clearly state whether the current installation is up-to-date or not.
I don’t want to have to compare version numbers on a page that lists 8 different product version numbers. The software knows which variant it is, its own version number and a web service can be provided to display the latest numbers. It’s trivial to download the latest version number and test to see if it is the same as the installed version, then provide a direct download link if it isn’t.

In fairness some progress has been made in flash installing, at least they now include a standard pkg installer and progress is being made on providing release notes. But much more progress (or the demise of Flash) is still clearly needed.

Personally I’ve been annoyed with products where I paid money and a new release appears two weeks later which requires a paid upgrade. On the other hand, SQLEditor 2.0 will be a considerable upgrade from SQLEditor 1.0 (the first paid version), so I do think some additional fee is justified to fund development efforts.

But obviously I don’t want people who haven’t bought yet to have doubts as to whether they will be required to pay for the upgrade.

The stated policy is that anyone who bought SQLEditor within 12 months of a paid upgrade being released gets a free upgrade.

However given that the release date for the new version hasn’t been decided yet, I’ve decided to improve the arrangements for version 2.0:

Customers who bought SQLEditor 1.x after August 1st 2010 will get a free upgrade to SQLEditor 2.0.

This means that if you buy SQLEditor today you get 1.7.8 and when 2.0 is released you would get an upgrade to it free of charge.

The change initially is significant, and there were new ways of doing things and certain other things that had to be rethought altogether. But now, I’m starting to choose to use Xcode 4 when I have the choice, so I think I’ve got used to it

I recently released some new project files for Tesseract OCR cocoa, and they are built with Xcode 4 now. The simplification in the build system and the linking of the frameworks is a vast improvement. Workspaces are a gift to this type of multi-project build.

The only issue I have is that it doesn’t support 10.5 or PPC, so SQLEditor is stuck on Xcode 3 for a while longer.

Things seem to be going well. SQLEditor appears to work correctly.

There is one identified issue which means that you cannot register the app for all users of a machine. Each user must register the app separately in their own account. (This is due to the /Library/Preferences directory now only being writable by root).

This doesn’t affect Macs which are already registered. Administrators can also manually set the preference keys in the
/Library/Prefererences/com.malcolmhardie.sqleditor.cocoa.plist
file to register for all users.

This problem will probably fixed by making the registration process separate and running it with higher permissions.

HTMLValidator still needs some more work and isn’t currently compatible. A revised version is in the works and should be available soon.

TesseractOCR seems to be working fine (and if you haven’t seen them, please check out the xcode 4 source release, it’s a big improvement)