All Cynical Peak Software is 20% off today (December 23th) and 10% for the rest of the month due to MacSanta visiting all the good mac users. Now’s you’re chance to get the best deal we’ve ever offered on Cyndicate and Scorecard. Use the code MACSANTA07 for today’s deal and MACSANTA07TEN for remainder of the month. Be sure to check out the other MacSanta deals too. There’s a lot of great software in his bag.
Cyndicate 1.1 is now available for download from either Cyncial Peak’s website or running Cyndicate’s updater. As with all our point releases, this is a free update for all Cyndicate users. This release is mainly bug fixes with a few nice little features added in like the ability to set what count the dock show, auto-scrolling of the article list when you reach the top or bottom, and video attachments to YouTube’s feeds are now embedded in the article pane.
Developers, keep an eye out for Changes. I saw a demo of it last night and I think most of you are going to want it. It’s really cool.
The printer setup utility in Leopard can be a bit frustrating to use. I have a headache right now from it. I’m a low volume printer. Generally I only print out reference material when I’m working on something new that I’m unfamiliar with. Because of that, I hadn’t bothered to set up my printer yet since doing the clean install for Leopard. I needed to print something today, so I finally got around to trying it out.
The problem I had was that the OS would not find the correct drivers for my printer. I use an HP Laserjet 1012 that’s shared via bonjour through an airport express. The add printer function in the printer preference pane would find it with no problems, but it would not list drivers for it in either the auto-discover or select driver.
I went around with it for a bit when finally I decided to move the printer and plug it directly into the machine. It was instantly set-up and ready to go then. Everything worked great. I then hooked everything back up through the airport express. Trying to add the printer now resulted in the correct driver being found automatically for it. So it appears that the driver discovery doesn’t correctly work with a bonjour printer, at least over an express, until the OS has first seen the printer with a direct connection.
On the plus side, I like the new printer pane in Leopard and configuration was great with with the USB connection that most users will use. Everything was automatically set-up and ready go as soon as I plugged in the printer. It was a really good user experience for that type of connection. Hopefully the bonjour set-up will eventually be that smooth.
From the beta list of a new Windows product:
If some of you haven’t noticed, there is a problem with the installer configuration for the Beta 2 installer which makes it NOT completely remove/replace/uninstall the old version. Due to this bug in the installer configuration, you MUST do a manual uninstall from the Add/Remove applications panel before installing the second beta.The use of installers and uninstallers for normal apps on Windows is appalling. Microsoft really should have given up the practice when they designed Windows 95 or at least for Windows 2000/XP. The drag and drop of bundles on Mac OS X is so much easier and convenient that it’s not funny. Installers simply add another level of complexity and give another place where something can go wrong. KISS.