Crooked Spin

I started using E-Junkie for my shopping cart at the beginning of August when Cyndicate was released. For the most part it has been a pretty good experience. I think my customers get a better buying experience and I get some new nice features for little cost.

Set-up was super easy for me since I was already accepting IPN notifications from PayPal on purchases. E-Junkie send out the sales info in the same format. All that it took was a slight modification to the check for valid transaction method. This also ends up being really convenient if you add other payment processors. They translate the notifications from google checkout or whoever into the same IPN like notifications. So you only have to support one system for use with multiple processors.

Another feature I really like about E-Junkie is that you can use it with PayPal Pro. Turning on the option lets you take credit cards without you’re customers having to see PayPal. Some people still have an aversion to PayPal over their early years and this can help easy their anxiety. When a customer pays with a credit card, they’re taken to a secure page with a form for all of the info. Everything is then taken care of for you. You don’t have to worry about setting up the certificate, the form, or the communication with PayPal. Once the card clears, you’re server is pinged just like any other transaction.

Pros:

• Easy to switch over to.
• Global and per item coupons
• I like the lightbox style cart on my pages. It helps hide that I’m using an external service.
• PayPal Pro option
• Easy integration with other payment processors like Google Checkout.
• User never sees PayPal for credit card transaction, only if they choose to pay with PayPal.
• Can easily do an affiliates program.
• Cheap, only $5/month for less then 10 skus.
• Can handle taxes and VAT collection, you’re responsible for submission

Cons:

• The credit card info entry form is on their site with PayPal Pro. The URL might scare some people.
• The credit card info entry form isn’t customizable. Point one wouldn’t be as bad if you could customize the page to look like your site. They claim that it’s coming, but I haven’t seen anything on it yet.
• Coupon support could be a little more robust. I wanted an option to lock codes to either specific emails (crossgrade offers) or to a domain (offer to people with apple.com email addresses). They say it isn’t possible due to not having the email address until check out and that they can’t ask for it earlier due to Google Checkout’s terms of service.
• They don’t send back some registration info, like the user’s address, in the registration post for downloaded items. They only send them if it’s a good that’s being shipped, even if the user enters the info in the form. Not a huge deal, but it would be nice to see where paid users are located for things like localization.
• The sales logs could be a bit more robust. I’m not sure exactly what I want here, but it feels like something is missing. They’re on about the same level as PayPal’s history which I’ve never been a huge fan of either.

Overall, it’s well worth the $5/month that it costs for the service. I might consider going with something like the Potion Store sometime in the future to have more control. But for now, the easy set-up and configuration of E-Junkie wins out.

Update: One more Pro to add. Customer service has been quick to respond and helpful when emailing them. Today was a good example. I ran into an issue that appeared to be a fairly decent bug. I thought there was a loss of sales data when a sku was deleted. The Cyndicate-EagleFiler bundle no longer showed up in my sales logs. I emailed emailed support and heard back from Robin heard back from Robin an hour or two later saying that it was fixed. Fortunately, it appears that it was simply a display error and not a loss of data. The issue was handles right away and all of the bundle sales showed up when I checked the log later in the night.

Full disclosure: The above ejunkie links are affiliates links. If you follow these links and sign up with e-junkie I will get a commission. The commissions aren’t huge, but a few of them would cover my monthly cost. Free e-junkie would be even better then $5/month e-junkie. =)

Nice, a quick look plugin for zips. Now we just need one for disk images.

Best. Political. Ad. Ever.

Henry Storyv:

The reason you have multiple spaces is to be able to clearly separate your work. So I could have one desktop for Mail and other communication related activities, one for programming, one for blogging, and one for other tasks such as giving a presentation.

(via John Gruber)

Henry outlines his use-case and the problems with Spaces and it. I’ve been following the same basic pattern and have been running into the same issues. It gets frustrating at times when you get thrown into another space for apparently no good reason. The Finder is my biggest headache. I’ll have a finder window open, switch back to Xcode, and then hit the Finder’s dock item to pull the window back to the front. Sometimes it works, but usually I get thrown into some other space that has a finder window open. I’m assuming it has something to do with the open order of the windows. It should give priority to open windows in your current space, if none are open, then fall back to the current behavior.

The other thing that I ran into last week that would be a nice change is space switching with an app in full screen mode. This might be a Keynote issue, but either way, it’s an Apple product. What I wanted to set up last week when I gave my CocoaHeads presentation was to keep the slides running full screen in one space, set up each of the demos in their own space, and then control-arrow to the correct one when the demo slide came up. Neither the control-arrow keys worked (they still switched slides) nor the show all spaces hot key. So I ended up having to drop out of full screen mode and then go to the correct space. Not a huge deal, but it would have been a little slicker to not show the ugly navigator screen in Keynote.

The Mysteries of iCal, Revealed! (Via Jens Ayton.):

One of the minor yet shiny new features of Mac OS X 10.5 is that iCal’s dock icon now shows the correct date even when iCal is not running. Some assumed this to be hard-coded functionality in the dock, but a few brave souls – well, one, being me – decided to find out.

Very interesting. Jens shows how cause the dock to update it’s without the app running like iCal does in 10.5. The functionality probably isn’t completely safe to count on since it uses a private class, but it could be a cool add-on to some apps. I haven’t thought of a good use for it yet in either of my apps. Maybe we’ll come up with something cool.

The November Phoenix Cocoaheads meeting is tomorrow night at 7. This months topic is Cocoa Bindings and I’m going to be giving the presentation. So if you want to see me stumble through a talk, stop on by. =)

Location:
Target Training International
16020 N 77th St
Scottsdale AZ 85260
United States

Drew McCormack has up what looks to be a great tutorial on the new NSOperation and NSOperationQueue classes for threading in Cocoa. The classes promise to simplify threading and make it easier to implement well behaved, multi-threaded apps.

You gotta love the utility companies for being so nice and giving helpful warnings. Today I awoke to a flyer on my door from APS (the electric company here) with a notice that they’re upgrading some equipment and the we can expect to have a quick power outage of about 5 minutes. They advise that we should have computers and other equipment turned off for when it happens. Very nice of them and it’s good advice.

Only one huge problem. It’s scheduled to happen on either Tuesday or Wednesday any where between 8 am and 5 pm. Great. Thanks for narrowing the window down to only 18 hours. It makes it really easy to have everything off for the 5 minute outage. I’d be really pissed if I didn’t have all of my equipment on larger size UPS units. Might be time to get a the house on a back-up generator.