Crooked Spin

A bomb dropped last week: NetNewsWire is now free. Well, free if you don’t mind giving up you’re privacy. Naturally NewsGator isn’t pushing that fact. It’s buried under all of the PR spin about making money off of their enterprise products and what is being said is being spun some more to make it sound like “free” is an entirely thing.

What you’re not told up front is that NewsGator will now be collecting information about your viewing habits, which articles you save, which you email, etc¹. NewsGator assumes that your privacy is worth only $30 to you². I place a much greater value on mine. Aggregating the data can give some very clear pictures of trends on a wide variety of topics and companies will pay very good money for it. How long until we see on Fox News or CNN “according to NewsGator the blogosphere is abuzz about…”?

Everyone rightfully complained about the Feds lessening our privacy with the PATRIOT Act, but as soon as some company offers a shiny trinket to them for free, concern for our rights as people gets thrown out the window. At least with the PATRIOT Act the chances of me being put under surveillance are low. With NewsGator, it’s guaranteed. No thanks. I’d much rather have the up-front costs on a product and not have usage data collected.

Concerns for my own privacy are one of the main reasons I choose to get a ReplayTV instead of a Tivo. I never liked the idea of Tivo tracking which shows I recorded, how many times I watched, which commercials I skipped - or just as important to marketers - which ones I didn’t skip. They gave the same argument that the data is only being used in aggregate and I didn’t go for it then for the same reason. The data isn’t sent to them in an aggregate form. They receive the individual data on each person and then aggregate it together. It doesn’t take much to keep records of individual use for when the right price is offered for that data or for some rogue employee to take off with it.

Your privacy is something you won’t have to worry about with Cyndicate. We do not, and will
not collect usage data about your viewing habits. Nothing you do gets collected by us³. You and your viewing habits remain completely anonymous not because of our policy that can be changed at any time, but because we never get any information that would allow us to infringe on your privacy. We respect our users rights.

This isn’t to say that privacy is Cyndicate’s only advantage either. It was just the focus of this article. I still believe that Cyndicate offers a superior reading experience due to its organizational features, like full persistence, folders and filters, and some of its more advance features like the automatic rating system. We also still offer full customer support which is another feature Newgator cut with their price change.

Cyndicate’s still my news aggregator of choice and I’m committed to making it an even better product then it already is. We already have a lot of great new features on the drawing board to give our customers even more value for their money.

Footnotes:

1. You can opt out (you’re opted in by default), but if you do you’ll lose some features, like synchronization, according to their FAQ.

3. Cyndicate does use Sparkle+ which allows the user to send back machine stats after opting in. It is off by default and all of the submitted data can be viewed by the user in the Update preference pane. None is usage data and none is personal.

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.

• Added an option to set the dock to show the count of either all unread, the inbox, or none.
• Added a fix for feeds that have bad text encodings
• Added support for youtube videos listed in the mrss format
• The article list will now auto scroll
• Changed the way favicons are loaded to try to prevent a lock
• Fixed deleting inactive feeds and their articles
• Fixed selection change when moving articles in the feed view
• Fixed automatic downloading
• Fixed delete filters on intel machines

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.

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.