My simple jQuery snippet works well for this – how easy would it be to turn that into Chrome and Firefox extensions?

Little project for someone?

1. Pukka support – the ability to launch an application from a bookmarklet.
2. FlashBlock support – can’t imagine browsing without it anymore.
3. PwdHash support
4. Accesskey support

Three out of four is close enough – I’ll keep composing blog posts in Firefox until accesskey support is implemented.

I’ve been with Firefox for a long time, and the 3.6 betas are a lot faster than the 3.5.x versions, but the bug with initial field focus on the Mac is really irritating. I should check if nightly builds have fixed that.

The BlackBerry App World is trying to provide a similar service for BlackBerry users, however BlackBerry developers are also able to distribute and/or sell their apps directly from their own sites and/or through other online etailers. I think this is a better model overall, but it’s far from perfect.

BerryWeather (called BeWeather in the App World) is a bloody fantastic weather application. I’ve been using it since September, and it was the first app I purchased through the App World (Sept. 9th, for $9.99).

$10 is a bit steep for a weather app – especially contrasted with the great free options for the iPhone, but it’s beautiful, works wonderfully, and I am happy to pay for good software.

About a month or two ago, right around the time I upgraded to OS 4.7, BerryWeather started getting times confused. Instead of showing the weather for the next few hours, the times were off and it was showing me nighttime weather in the morning. Very annoying.

I tried:

• reinstalling
• contacting support (even sent a screenshot, never received a reply)
• doing a reset

but nothing helped.

Then I saw that there was a 2.0 release on their web site – I had been running 1.5.x. I deleted my 1.5.x install and installed 2.0 and voila – everything was working properly again. According to the notes in 2.0, this version uses a new data source (WUnderground). It also had an upgrade price of $3.99.

Here’s where things got messy.

The 2.0 version was not available in App World (it is now). The 2.0 version was available from MobiHand, but since I hadn’t purchased from them originally I could only buy the 2.0 version at the full $9.99 price. Also, I just bought this thing less than 3 months ago, charging for an upgrade already is a bit ridiculous.

So in order to purchase the upgrade at the appropriate price, I had to wait several weeks for the App World to push out the update.

A bunch of things are frustrating here:

1. I had to buy an ugprade after 3 months because the old version stopped working properly. Paid upgrades should be to add features, not to fix problems.
2. There is no set of rules about how pricing is done – no expectations that the user can feel comfortable with.
3. I got no response from Bellshare’s support.
4. The App World didn’t have the newest version available for purchase while other etailers did.
5. I couldn’t purchase an upgrade from a different etailer (one who had the latest version).

So there you have it. Another app store, but still plenty of problems. For all it’s problems, the iTunes App Store delivers on a consistent set of expectations for its users. The App World may be a better model for developers, but it doesn’t deliver the same simple experience to end users.

I’m not entirely convinced we’re making progress in the mobile arena. There is lots of churn and activity, but I’m not sure things are getting better. Hopefully all of that churn and activity will be better channeled and directed as people learn and understand the space better.

The only complication with this is that I got the info on Monday and my free trial was expiring on Tuesday. If I bought MobileMe from Amazon on Monday, I wouldn’t receive the activation key until Tuesday at the earliest. This was a concern because I had no idea how MobileMe would handle it when I canceled my account, then tried to re-activate it without having ever had a paid account.

In the end I chose to cancel mainly out of curiosity, and ordered the MobileMe subscription from Amazon (with free 2-day delivery via Prime). It’s really annoying that they didn’t offer digital delivery of the activation key, but they didn’t so I waited until today to receive my little box with a piece of paper in it with the activation key. I was without MobileMe for a day, but that was hardly a concern as I only use it for contact sync.

When I received the MobileMe activation key on Wednesday, I went back to me.com and signed in with my old account credentials. I was allowed in, then shown a note saying I needed to activate my account. I followed the steps, clicked the “I have an activation key” button, entered the key and that was that.

I was pretty sure something in this process would break. My experience with software, especially sync, is that edge cases are not well handled. I really thought it would break.

It didn’t.

I was able to activate the old trial account, and my sync just started working again. I didn’t get dozens of duplicated contacts or have to do an “overwrite this machine on next sync” or anything. It just worked.

Nice job, Apple. I’m impressed.

I tried hard to avoid this, having tried pretty much every other solution out there, but none of them worked properly across several Macs plus a BlackBerry.

In the end I just need contact sync that works, and so far MobileMe is the only one that hasn’t failed me. My 60 day trial is almost up, and I’m going to go ahead and let it bill me and stop wasting time trying other options.

• LaunchBar – can’t imagine life without it.
• xScope – I don’t even use it that much, but when I do… so awesome.
• Pukka – I’ve been using Delicious as a central data store more of late.

These aren’t all “must-have” apps, nor are they the ones I use most (if it were, BBEdit would be at or near the top). These are apps that meet or exceed my expectations every time I use them; and never give me the “if only it would…” thoughts. I think the common thread on these is that my usage of these apps is not as deep as the functionality each app provides.

What’s on your list?

As a result, I’ve found workarounds. Rather than move to different utilities for these features, I’ve tried to simplify. I’m already hopelessly dependent on LaunchBar, so coming up with solutions that depended on LaunchBar wasn’t really a problem for me. Here’s what I ended up with.

For email templates, I have created a new directory in my personal SVN repository and created text files for each of the reply templates (you might consider Dropbox for this too). I then added an indexing rule for that directory to LaunchBar, and use the Cmd+Option+C command to copy the contents of the selected file in LaunchBar to grab the templates and do a simple paste into Mail.app. This also allows me to customize the message a little more since I manually type in the person’s name, etc. A side-effect is that I’m no longer tied to Mail.app, should a better solution present itself for email.

For shadowClipboard I simply switched to the built-in clipboard history feature in LaunchBar 5. It took a little getting used to. I really liked being able to invoke shadowClipboard then use 0-9 to paste the contents of that appropriate clipboard. With LaunchBar’s implementation I have to arrow down a lot¹, but it isn’t too bad and works reliably.

One of the benefits of dropping two utilities is less maintenance and configuration on my various machines. Anything I can do to reduce the amount of time I spend configuring computers is very welcome. Another is the benefit of having fewer processes running on these machines.

I’ve shouted the praises of LaunchBar for years (wow, back to 2003!). I can’t imagine using a Mac without it.

1. I’ve requested that they hook up 0-9 shortcuts, hopefully they will. [back]

I got a few “why” questions when I posted this yesterday, so I’ll try to answer.

Basically, all of my my complaints are rooted in the way I want to use Twitter. I like having a casual real-time relationship with Twitter, I don’t want it to be an obligation. I don’t want an “inbox”, or a backlog of tweets staring me in the face.

• Notifications of replies and direct messages – that little indicator is an obligation, I don’t like it. I prefer to choose when I look for those things. I’ve heard that a double-tap is supposed to “mark all as read”, but that didn’t seem to work for me.
• I can’t get to the bottom of my friend’s stream. Again this is a feature for most people – Tweetie 2 auto-loads the next tweets in your stream as you scroll towards the bottom. I never get to the end! Tweetie 1 would give me 20 and let me choose if I want to keep going.
• Tweetie 2 remembers my scroll location. I haven’t used it long enough to be 100% sure on this, but on several occasions I’ve launched Tweetie 2 and found myself pretty far down my friends stream instead of up at the top. That backlog of tweets is exactly what I don’t want. In contrast, Tweetie 1 always started at the top of the stream.

I realize that for most people these are great new features. Without options to turn these things off¹ Tweetie 1 fits me better. Thankfully, since Tweetie 2 is a different app, I have access to both and can choose to stick with Tweetie 1 if I want to.

1. Tweetie for Mac allows you to choose to return to your scroll position or go to the newest tweet, for example. [back]

When you do a fresh install of applications that you use frequently, you see them differently than you normally do. They have all of their default settings, not the options you have selected.

As a result of this, I ended up discovering several features that had been added to software I’ve used for a long time. If I’d migrated my preferences, I never would have seen some of these features.

All users have certain usage patterns with software, and that includes the developer who created the software. The developer will optimize certain paths through their software without thinking twice about it. If you use the software in a different way, going back to revisit the “beaten path” (and new features that may have widened that path even further) can be pretty interesting.

If you see a weird name/email address combination in Mail.app, a quit and restart of Mail.app should fix it.

I was thrilled that updates for MsgFiler, SuperDuper, Pukka and PathFinder were immediately available.

I’m also not noticing the speed increase people have been talking about, but my machine didn’t feel slow before either.

Looks like it’s a couple of hours per machine upgrade – I’ll likely proceed slowly with upgrading my other boxes.

I’m sure there will be an update to the PwdHash plugin to make it officially compatible with Firefox 3.5, but until then here are steps to use it on a Mac:

1. Upgrade to Firefox 3.5.
2. Quit Firefox if it’s currently running.
3. Locate your Firefox profile data – it should be in /Users/(your username)/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/(some characters).(your profile).
4. Find the PwdHash extension in your extensions directory – it will be named {bb8d77b0-a845-4249-a205-ef7395587b69}.
5. Open the install.rdf file inside this directory with your favorite text editor – you can confirm that you are editing the right file by looking for this string around line 18: <em:name>PwdHash</em:name>
6. Find the “max version” element and change it to read: <em:maxVersion>3.5.*</em:maxVersion>
7. Save and close the file.
8. Now move the entire {bb8d77b0-a845-4249-a205-ef7395587b69} directory out of the extensions directory, launch Firefox, then quit it again.
9. Now move the entire {bb8d77b0-a845-4249-a205-ef7395587b69} directory back into the extensions directory and launch Firefox again.
10. Confirm that PwdHash is enabled by choosing Tools > Add-ons from the main menu.

As far as I can tell, version 1.5 of the PwdHash extension works fine with Firefox 3.5 but your mileage may vary.

Congrats to the team on the great improvements!