Author: mike (Page 12 of 26)

Conversion Rates

June 9, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Rogue Amoeba put out this challenge for other Mac software developers to share their conversion rates. These numbers for Gaucho Software are for the month of March, which is the most recent month with an average amount of activity.

	Seasonality	Dash Monitors	XRG
Downloads:	X	3.5X	3.7X
Sales:	Y	0.3Y	N/A
Conversion Rate:	6.9%	0.5%	N/A

The conversion rate here for Seasonality is a little bit high. I checked a couple of other months and the rate was a more modest 4-5%. Looking at these numbers, it looks like the best way to increase my sales is to either get more people to try Seasonality, or to improve Dash Monitors enough to increase it’s conversion rate.

One interesting note is that even though XRG hasn’t been updated since the beginning of 2005, it is still my most downloaded product. Of course, this changes during a month with a Seasonality or Dash Monitors release. For example, so far this month with the release of version 1.3, Seasonality has been downloaded 3.5 times more often than XRG.

Seasonality 1.3

June 2, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

After 5 or so months of work Seasonality 1.3 is finally ready. Version 1.3 is a Universal Binary, and it runs much nicer on Intel Macs than 1.2 had previously. I’ve also made several code optimizations, so even if you don’t have an Intel Mac you will observe a noticeable speed increase, especially while working with the satellite image and graphs.

There are plenty of new features this time around. The biggest one is a new Weather Journal. You can create a journal entry for each day and Seasonality will automatically keep track of high/low temperatures and sunrise/sunset times for that day. Then add your own text or photos to the entry. It uses a standard NSTextView, so all the typical text editor properties are available. Thanks go out to whoever worked on NSTextView at Apple/NeXT for making it so easy. 😉

There’s also a new graph interface that’s pretty cool. I received a lot of requests to be able to show more than 2 graphs at once, so this new interface will allow users to show all 6 graphs at the same time.

Another big new feature is the new radar overlay imagery. Technically, the radar images are the same as they were before, but instead of being restricted to just showing radar imagery in the vicinity of your configured locations, now Seasonality will automatically fetch radar images for wherever you happen to be browsing in the U.S., Guam and Puerto Rico. A large piece of the code to support the new radar images is a new image overlay class I created. This will make it much easier to add additional image overlays at a later point in time, and even allow users to add their own image overlays eventually. I’m hoping to find suitable radar overlays for other parts of the world, another often-requested feature.

I’ve added a couple of tips to the General Seasonality Forum. Be sure to check them out and while you’re there, feel free to post some feedback. 🙂

St. Croix

May 25, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Katrina and I took a much-needed vacation and spent the last week down on St. Croix in the Caribbean. I have to say, this is the best time of year to vacation down there. It’s off-season, so very few tourists were around and that made the trip much more enjoyable. St. Croix doesn’t get as many tourists as the other U.S. Virgin Islands (St. Thomas and St. John) to begin with. No crowds to compete with at the beach, traffic wasn’t an issue, and overall everything was much more relaxed.

We stayed at a resort that was right on the ocean, and our room happened to be on the first floor. We were able to walk off our back patio onto the sand, and it was gorgeous. Nothing beats reading on a hammock tied to two palm trees, snorkeling was just a short walk away, and the island is small enough that nothing is too far by car. Down there they drive on the left side of the road, which took some getting used to, but after a day or two it was second nature.

I’ll post some pictures to my Flickr account in the next few days. Of course a lot of things can happen in a week, and I’m still trying to catch up. Here’s some of the more notable online events…

Logtar interviews Dan Lacher: The weekend before we left, Logtar interviewed Dan Lacher at the local MiaMUG meeting. I was on the scene to take some pictures, which can be found on my Flickr page. The Podcast itself can be found on Logtar’s blog.

Happy Apps releases WebnoteHappy 1.0: Luis de la Rosa just released his first shareware application. Back in January, Luis released WebnoteHappy Lite, the free version of the app. I mentioned it here back then and all the same things apply for the full version. I gave Luis a quote about the software, and he ended up using it on the product page so that’s pretty cool. WebnoteHappy is a really great bookmark manager, so if you’re looking for something along those lines I would suggest checking it out.

Apple released the MacBook: Not going to say much about this because it’s been on all the news sites. It’s a pretty cool notebook though for a great price. Looks great in black too…

Large Scale Weather

May 12, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

If you live in the Midwest, you are probably pretty familiar with all the rain we’ve been getting the past few days. The low pressure system that has formed is one of the largest I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s centered just over Lake Michigan, and you can see clouds extending well up into Canada all the way down the east coast to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Yesterday it bottomed out just about 40 miles West of Mt. Pleasant. We had a 983mb pressure reading, which is the lowest pressure we’ve had here since before I started writing Seasonality. 🙂 The interesting thing about this system is that it’s not really moving much at all. Typically, low pressure systems will form to the West of us, and just move on through within a day or two. This one will probably hang around for 5-6 days. It’s centered over Lake Michigan right now, is expected to move down into Illinois and Ohio over the next day or two, and then perhaps come up North again. It’s forecasted to be dropping rain on and off here through the beginning of next week.

Here’s a screenshot of the storm in Seasonality. This shot also shows one of the cool new features I’ve added in version 1.3, a full radar image overlay. The National Weather Service started offering a high resolution US map with a composite of all the radar images. Now Seasonality uses that to generate a map, so it makes long-distance viewing much nicer with respect to precipitation. I just wish this feature could extend into Canada to show the rest of this storm (US radar sites reach just north of the US-Canada border as you can see in this image), or the rest of the world for that matter. Seasonality 1.3 is coming along slower than originally expected, but it has several new features. Expect an announcement around the end of this month.

MacBook Pro Temperature Sensors

April 20, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Just as an update of my MacBook Pro situation…I picked up a 2Ghz MacBook Pro at the Apple Store in Grand Rapids yesterday. So far, this model is an order of magnitude better than my last machine. Only a single noise problem still exists, and it is so much lower in volume that I don’t think it will be an issue at all. Furthermore, physically the machine feels like it’s built better. The trackpad button feels a lot nicer, and it takes more effort to move the screen on it’s hinge, which results in a much nicer feel. I’m a happy customer. 🙂

I came across a somewhat unfortunate hint when looking at the recently posted Developer Note of the MacBook Pro machines on Apple’s site. It looks like Apple no longer controls thermal profiles from the OS, so it’s unlikely that apps like XRG or Dash Monitors will ever be able to capture temperatures or fan speeds on these models. Here’s a quote from the Developer Note:

System Management Controller The MacBook Pro uses an advanced system management controller (SMC) to manage thermal and power conditions, while keeping the acoustic noise to a minimum. The SMC is fully independent of the operating system.

Making the SMC completely independent of the OS is a very good thing. Without OS independence, thermal drivers for Windows XP, Linux, or any other OS you want to run on Intel machines would have to be written. This code can be fairly difficult to write, so really the SMC will make things much easier in that respect.

However, it would be nice if Apple provided a way to monitor what the SMC is doing…let the SMC do it’s job, but give me a way to find out how my machine is feeling.

Update: James Conolly and Cryptonome (from the source, InCrew) both mentioned SpeedIt in the comments, which made the news a few days after I wrote this post. I have yet to look into the full details of the implementation, but it looks like there might be MacBook Pro temperature monitor support in XRG afterall. While it probably wouldn’t make sense to include SpeedIt directly with XRG, if a user has SpeedIt installed, it should be fairly easy for XRG to pick up the temperatures and display them. Yet another feature to add to the next release. Thanks go out to the InCrew folks for making this possible.

28?

April 19, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Yesterday was my birthday…and now I’m 28…that means I can no longer stretch 27 to mean in my “mid-twenties.” I’m now in my late 20s, no way around that. In all seriousness though, I really don’t mind getting older. I got some pretty nifty gifts (techies always get the great gifts), and Katrina threw me a surprise dinner with a few friends last night. It was pretty cool. 🙂

Anyway, I realize I haven’t posted here in awhile, so I thought I would give an update of everything going on here. Gaucho Software is going well, I’m finishing up the second beta of Seasonality 1.3 and hope to send that out soon. Unfortunately development got put on hold for a week while I sent my MacBook Pro in for repair.

So what happened to my MacBook Pro? Well, many early buyers were experiencing buzzing sounds coming from their laptops under certain conditions. Mine never really bugged me that much, since I’m used to computers making some noise, and you could only really hear it if you were in a very quiet room. Finally though, awhile back I woke up the display to find the left third of it not being backlit. It went away after about 10 minutes, so I thought it might be a fluke. I held off on it for a day or two to see if it was a lasting problem. Ended up being a definitive problem, so I called Apple and sent it in for repair. They got it back to me within 5 business days (including shipping), which was great, but unfortunately even after swapping the MBP’s motherboard the same problems were all there. The noise was the same, and the screen wasn’t backlit correctly. I called them back, all they could tell me was to send it back in…they couldn’t send me a loaner while mine was being fixed, and they wouldn’t replace it. Going another week without my MBP wasn’t an option because I really need to finish porting my apps to Intel, plus I felt that they already had a chance to fix it, so I shouldn’t have to send it back in again because they messed up (and who knows if the second fix would even work).

I ended up calling Apple’s customer relations number, and after talking with a few different people they offered to take it back for a full refund. Not only that, I have up to 30 days to send the defective unit back to them and they are paying for shipping. This way, I can go buy a new MacBook Pro and transfer all my data to the new machine before sending the old one back. Apple really came through in this situation, and I’m stoked to get a new MBP out of it. This time, I’m going to upgrade to the 2Ghz model. One benefit is that I’ll go from 1.5Gb to 2Gb of memory, which is an upgrade I was thinking of making anyway. Another is that after installing Windows with BootCamp, the 80Gb drive was getting a bit small. The 2Ghz model comes with 100Gb drive which should improve things there. The upgraded CPU and graphics chip memory are good bonuses as well.

So I’ll be heading down to the Apple Store today to pick up my new MBP. I’m pretty excited about it, and hopefully I won’t get another lemon this time. 🙂

MacBook Pro Sound

March 2, 2006 / mike / 7 Comments

Diego commented on my last blog posting about the sound issues some users have noticed with the MacBook Pro’s. I think it’s best to post about this separately instead of in the comments, so here goes. Diego asks…

I was wondering whether you’ve noticed any problems with the right speaker? I’ve seen some comments from others where there seems to be some distortion/vibrations coming from the right speaker. Just curious. Some of these comments were on the Apple discussion forums.

Let me qualify myself before answering this question. I am a bit of an amateur audiophile…I know what good music sounds like, and I’ve listened to music on speakers costing upwards of $10k/pair. These high-end brands like B&W, Klipsch, and even a few Mirage and PSB systems sound a lot better than your average JBL or Polk setup (though JBLs pro series are excellent in large areas such as for concerts). Sony speakers aren’t even close to this league. I have an M&K home theater system here, and really enjoy kicking back and listening to some music (2 channel, not surround) with my eyes closed. However, with all this said, I’m not an audiophile in the sense that I’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars on a setup. Many audiophiles probably wouldn’t even consider me to be one.

So to answer the question, my right and left speakers do not sound uniform. This is one of the first things I tested when the MacBook Pro arrived. The right speaker doesn’t sound distorted as much as it sounds like there is a lack of bass. Chris Liscio has documented this over on his blog complete with acoustic measurements, and his observations match what I am hearing.

Oddly enough, when the balance is set in the center, the sound combines pretty well. The speakers aren’t far enough apart to give good stereo separation, so really it’s close to just being monaural. I would have never known there was a problem if others hadn’t mentioned it and I hadn’t tried adjusting the balance all the way to the right and left myself. They sound like laptop speakers. 🙂

I’m sure Apple will respond to this issue since I believe it probably effects most, if not all, the MacBook Pros that have shipped. Like Chris, I hope it is a software problem. If they don’t respond to this, then I’m not going to worry about it. 99% of the time the deficiency won’t even be noticeable.

MacBook Pro Arrived

March 2, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Well, my MacBook Pro finally came in yesterday, and it’s great so far. It has a great new computer smell to it. The speed completely blows away my old Powerbook and gives my G5 a run for it’s money. Disk accessing is noticeably slower because of the laptop 5400 rpm drive, but that’s expected. As far as processing speed is concerned, it’s comparable. You might remember from a few weeks back I posted benchmarks with compiling subversion. Well, I’ve run this benchmark on my MacBook Pro, and here’s how it compares…

MacBook Pro 1.83Ghz Core Duo, 1.5Gb of RAM: make -j8 2:11.41

Dual 2.5Ghz G5: make -j8 2:34.94 with 179% CPU usage

Athlon64 3200+: make -j8 2:58.68

This is a 15-20% speed increase over the G5 while compiling, even with a slower disk! I know computers continually get faster, but the fact that Apple’s laptops are now faster than many of the PowerMacs is pretty amazing. The only model they can’t really touch is the Quad G5… I can’t wait to see the performance of new Pro Macs on 64 bit Intel chips later this year.

I like other features of the MacBook Pro as well. The LEDs under the keyboard that light up when the room gets dark are pretty sweet. I also like being able to scroll a window by using 2 fingers on the trackpad. Both of these features were on past Powerbooks, but neither of them were on my old TiBook. The screen is very bright. I can’t see a noticeable difference in brightness between this LCD and my 20″ Cinema Display.

The computer is very quiet… I can’t hear it at all while using it in my office with other machines running, even when the disk is accessing. While in a quiet room, it does make some noise, but it’s definitely an acceptable level for meetings and conferences. I haven’t even heard the fans turn on yet, which is a huge relief from my TiBook. Whenever the TiBook’s fan turned on it sounded like a hairdryer, very loud and obnoxious. This would be fine if the fan didn’t turn on too often, but all it took was 100% CPU for about a minute to kick the fan into high gear… Not all TiBooks behaved like this (Katrina’s is much quieter), but my particular model was pushing processor speed back in the day, so it got a lot hotter. The MacBook Pro DVD drive also makes less noise while accessing a disc.

I was concerned about battery life when I ordered it, since Apple didn’t mention how long a charge would last. I am happy to find out that it will last about 2.5-3 hours with my normal usage. I usually keep the LCD brightness all the way up, and don’t turn on any power saving features. I’ve heard other users can get 3.5-4 hours when they dim the display or do other stuff to conserve battery life. I’m sure I’ll use some of these methods while at a conference all day, but generally 3 hours is about as much time as I will spend away from a power outlet.

All in all, these are great machines, and I would certainly recommend a MacBook Pro to anyone looking to buy a new Mac laptop. It will be interesting to see when 12″ and 17″ models will be transitions. My bet is at WWDC this summer.

Update: Added some pictures on Flickr…

Living in Michigan…

February 17, 2006 / mike / 5 Comments

Fact #382
If you live in Michigan and your household internet access is via a wireless link, watch out for ice storms. The ice will collect on your antenna and take your internet connection down.

Fact #383
If above-mentioned situation with ice on an antenna exists, a hairdryer is an effective tool for removing the ice.

A pretty wicked ice storm came through here yesterday and our internet connection went down yesterday afternoon. When we woke up this morning everything was covered with ice, it was quite an amazing sight. Clearing the antenna took about 20 minutes outside up on the ladder with an extension cord to plug the hairdryer into, but the ice is gone and our internet connection is back online. 🙂

Blizzard 2006

February 12, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

In case you haven’t heard, the East Coast has been getting hit pretty hard by a blizzard today. New York City has reported 22 inches of the white stuff in some areas and the snow is still coming down. Jeff Masters has a report and some photos on his blog at the Weather Underground. Flickr also has some photos tagged with Blizzard2006. To everyone out there, stay safe while this gets cleaned up.

I feel just a little short-changed here… This storm came through Michigan Thursday night/Friday morning and barely dropped 2 inches of snow here. We should have at least gotten 5-7″ out of it… 😉

Update: This blizzard just hit the record books for NYC…

“The blizzard of 2006 has dropped the most snow ever on New York City, a record 26.9 inches as of 4:10 pm at Central Park. The previous biggest snowstorm of all time was 26.4 [inches], set Dec 26-27 1947.” –Jeff Masters, link above.