Category: software

DropBox

I finally decided to switch from Windows Live Sync (aka FolderShare) to DropBox. I’ve got it installed on my desktop, Dell laptop, MacBook, and Acer netbook now, and I’ve moved everything from FolderShare to DropBox.

The main problem with FolderShare is that it doesn’t actually store any of your stuff, it just enables you to sync a folder between shared computers. So, to sync two computers, for instance, you need to have them both turned on and connected to the internet at the same time. For me, this has been leading to occasional problems, where I wind up with two versions of the same file, or I need to turn on my desktop computer to get the latest version of a file down to my laptop, for instance.

DropBox stores your stuff in the cloud, so it shouldn’t be a problem to get a shared file from one computer to another without needing them both on at the same time. We’ll see how it works in practice, but so far, so good.

iPad password management apps

I spent some time over the last couple of days reviewing password managers for the iPad, so I figure I might as well write up my notes here, in case they might be of use to anyone else. (I should mention that I gave up on iKeepass, which I mentioned a couple of posts back.)

I limited myself to applications that had an iPad app (as opposed to just an iPhone app) and a Mac app that could synchronize with its iPad counterpart.

  • DataVault is a $10 universal app. It has a Mac desktop version that also sells for $10. (There are also Windows and BlackBerry versions.)
  • SplashID has a $10 iPad app and a $20 Mac desktop version.
  • MSecure is the cheapest app I looked at. It’s only $3 for a universal iPad/iPhone app. There’s a desktop version available for Windows or Mac for $15.
  • Password Wallet is a $5 universal app, so it’s another cheap one. The Mac desktop version is $20 (but you get a 25% discount when you buy the iPad app, so it’s really $15.)
  • 1Password is a pretty well-known app. It’s $7 for an iPad-only version or $15 for a universal version. The Mac desktop app is fairly expensive, at $40. (I actually own an older version of the desktop app from an old MacHeist bundle, so I could upgrade for $25.)

I would probably have gone with 1Password, except that recent reviews in the app store seem to be pretty mixed, so I just wasn’t sure it would work well. All the others seemed to be pretty decent, and any of them would likely have worked ok.

In the end, I decided to go with DataVault. I liked the look of it, and the reviews were pretty good. I’ve got it all set up now, on my Mac and iPad, and it’s working OK. It’s not great, but it’s good enough to manage a handful of passwords. I’m not going to use it to replace KeePass; rather, I’m just going to keep a subset of my passwords in there, just stuff I think I’ll need on the iPad.

The Mac desktop client has a few shortcomings. The program window, strangely, can be resized horizontally, but not vertically. And it doesn’t save its size and position, so it always launches in a mode where it’s taking up most of the screen. Also, it’s not very keyboard-centric. I couldn’t find a keyboard shortcut to delete an entry, for instance.

The iPad app also has a few annoyances. For instance, all the fields are set up so that the first character will be capitalized by default on entry. That’s fine for a first or last name, but not really useful for a user name or password. There are other minor annoyances related to item entry, such that I don’t think I’ll be doing much entry on the iPad itself. (That’s fine, though; I plan to do most of the entry on the Mac side.)

The synchronization process is pretty simple. You just launch the desktop app and make a selection from the menu to put it in server mode. Then you launch the iPad app and hit the sync button. This should bring up a list of devices on your wifi network, including your Mac, which you can then select. The sync process just takes a few seconds. By default, you’ll have to verify deletions (on the desktop side). (The verification can be turned off.)

I think if I could do this all over again, I’d give SplashID a try. DataVault definitely isn’t quite good enough to replace KeePass and KeePassX for me. But it’s good enough to keep track of a handful of passwords that I may need on my iPad.

Take Command v.11


TC 11 2010-04-06
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

I’ve been using products from JP Software for years, since back in the days of DOS. Their original product, 4DOS, was a replacement for command.com, the old MS-DOS command shell. Their current product, Take Command, is basically a replacement for CMD.EXE, with a bunch of enhancements and random bells & whistles. I hadn’t upgraded in about three years, so I went ahead and did that today. It’s a very nice program, with the enhanced command line embedded in a file browser. Maybe I’ll post some more details when I get a chance to play with it some more. I’m conflicted on whether or not I should invest too much time in learning the new stuff in TC. From a career standpoint, I should probably concentrate on PowerShell. But honestly, I know I can get stuff done faster and easier with TC.
Oh, and I took the screen shot shown here with Jing, which I haven’t used in quite a while. Since the last time I used it, it seems that they’ve added the ability to upload your screen shots to Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. Nice.

Notes 8.5 FP 1 and a weird shortcut key

Notes 8.5 fix pack 1 is out. I’ve downloaded it and applied it to a few machines. It does seem to fix a few random problems with the initial 8.5 release.

I haven’t applied Domino FP1 to our server yet though. I need to wait for the weekend to do that. I haven’t had a lot of problems with 8.5, overall. I’ve had a few issues with SMSDOM crashing occasionally. I’m on the most recent version; I upgraded SMSDOM right before I upgraded Domino itself. I’m not sure if I should blame this problem on IBM or Symantec. I also upgraded Backup Exec on the Domino server recently. That seems to be working OK, though the Backup Exec Domino agent isn’t yet certified to work on 8.5. The Backup Exec upgrade was a pretty big jump, since we’d been running version 10. There isn’t a way to directly upgrade from 10 to 12.5, so I just uninstalled 10 and did a fresh install of 12.5, then re-created my daily backup job.

As I side note, I discovered a weird shortcut today. Hold down Ctrl+Alt while you’re going into your inbox, and you’ll load the “non-java” version, basically the same thing you get if you run Notes in basic mode. I picked this up from a forum post written by Mary Beth Raven. I’m not sure how useful this is to anybody, but for some reason, I think it’s kind of cool.

revised AutoHotKey script

A couple of weeks back, I posted a semi-useful AutoHotKey script, just a little script to paste text from the clipboard, but stripped of formatting. Well, I did some searching, and of course, I’m not the only person to have come up with this basic script. This guy posted a similar script, a couple of years ago. The one thing I learned from his script, which I somehow didn’t think of myself, is that, rather than sending the clipboard contents using “SendInput”, it’s better to put the text back on the clipboard, then send ctrl-V. The reason this works better is that, in most applications, a paste is an atomic operation that’s easily undoable, whereas using SendInput appears to the application as though you just manually typed out the contents of the clipboard.
I also decided to disable the macro in Excel, since I have an existing macro in Excel that’s mapped to ctrl-shift-V, and I don’t want to override that. So, bottom line, the macro now looks like this:

#IfWinNotActive Microsoft Excel 
^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "s+$","")
clipboard := %myStr%
Send ^V

Still nothing terribly amazing, but very useful, and something I was living without for longer that I should have.

useful AutoHotKey script

I’ve been using AutoHotKey for a while now. I’ve got a few macros programmed into it that are pretty much wired into my brain at this point. There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to write for the last year or so, and just never got around to it. Well, I was in the middle of something on Friday, and I just decided that I needed to stop what I was doing, and just figure out how to write this macro. It turned out to be a lot simpler than I though it was going to be! Now I feel kind of stupid for putting it off for so long.

Basically, I wanted a macro that would do a “Paste Special / Text Only”. Mostly, I needed this in Lotus Notes, but there are other apps where it could come in handy. Long ago, I’d taken care of this in Word with a simple one-line VBA macro. But, I never really knew how to do this in Notes. The reason I need this, is that I’m often pasting text from Word, or a web page, or some other app, into Notes. The text goes to the clipboard as formatted text, and if I just do a straight paste into Notes, all the formatting info gets pulled in, and it’s usually not a good match for the default e-mail formatting in Notes. So, I’d settled on just selecting Edit, then Paste Special, then Text from the menus. But that’s a lot more work than pressing Ctrl-V.

Before yesterday, I’d never looked at the AHK docs closely enough to realize how simple this was. The contents of the clipboard, in plain text format (that’s the key there!) are available in a system variable called “clipboard”. So, all I really needed to do is call SendInput on that. Duh. Just to get fancy, I also decided that I wanted to trim trailing whitespace from the clipboard contents. So, here’s a simple macro that trims trailing whitespace from the contents of the clipboard, and sends it out:

^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "s+$","")
SendInput %myStr%

I just have that mapped to Ctrl-Shift-V, so I can paste text anywhere, without formatting, no problem. And, yes, I could have written this in one line, but I broke it up so it would be easier to see what I was doing.

The point of this story, I guess, is that AutoHotKey is a wonderful thing, and that some things are simpler than you think they are, if you just sit down and spend a few minutes reading the docs.

Chandler and Lotus Notes

I had a few spare minutes today, so I installed Chandler on my PC at work. No major problems with the install, or with creating an account on Chandler Hub. I played around with it a bit, and so far, I like it. It’s reasonably fast to load and use. Since it’s a cross-platform app written in Python, I was concerned that it would be slow, and maybe have some user interface quirks. Not that a cross-platform Python app can’t be fast and have a good UI, but a lot of the time, that’s not the case.

The e-mail integration, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, is a little weird. Chandler uses IMAP to create three folders in your mail file, Chandler Events, Chandler Messages, and Chandler Starred. When you drop messages in these folders, they appear in Chandler. That part seemed to work OK with my Lotus Notes mailbox.

Chandler can also send e-mail. That, I thought, would be straightforward. It’s just attaching to an SMTP server. I have plenty of apps that use my Domino server to send SMTP mail, so I didn’t expect any difficulty there. I didn’t have any problems just connecting to the server. However, I’ve found that the e-mails sent from Chandler don’t render correctly in Notes. A bunch of XML, which is probably supposed to be hidden, shows up in the message. I did some testing, and the e-mails from Chandler look fine in GMail, and in Apple’s Mail.app. They look like a mess in Notes though. Oh, and I tried Notes 7, 8, and 8.5 clients, and it’s the same either way. I did find, though, that the e-mails in Notes look fine when I’m accessing my mailbox from my iPod or BlackBerry.

When things go wrong with e-mail rendering in Notes, it can be hard to figure out where things went wrong. First, the Domino server may screw something up before it gets to your mail file. If it’s not that, then it might be something related to your mail file template, or to the Notes client software. Since this problem occurs in Notes 7, 8, and 8.5, I’m guessing it’s not a simple client quirk. It could be something in my mail file template. That’s still on version 7, and I can’t really change that without upgrading my Domino server.

So, bottom line, if I can’t get the outgoing e-mail to look OK in Notes, Chandler is going to be mostly useless for me. If I can get that working, then it’s promising.

Oh, and one other interesting thing about Chandler. There’s a book called “Dreaming in Code” about the initial development process on Chandler. This book is frequently compared to Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, which is a great book about the development of a minicomputer back in the 70’s. Chandler’s development process, apparently, was a bit rocky. At the time the book was written, the program had been in development for several years, and hadn’t produced a workable 1.0 release yet. I think that the author’s original intention was to document the development of a revolutionary open source app that would really be a killer app that would compete with Outlook and maybe Lotus Notes. In the end, he wound up with a book documenting a lot of things that could go wrong with a development project, which is maybe an even more interesting book than he would have gotten if the project had gone well. (I haven’t actually read this book yet, so I’m generalizing from the reviews I’ve read. I do want to pick up the book and read it at some point.)

Jira

I picked up Jira and Confluence this week, during Atlassian’s “Stimulus Package” sale — $5 each! A while back, I’d looked at Jira, and several other bug-tracking/project-tracking applications, but I never got around to evaluating any of them. I’ve had a vague sort of a plan to implement Trac eventually, after first converting from CVS to Subversion (which was also a vague kind of plan with no particular timeline on it). I don’t think I could have ever talked my boss into paying $1200 for Jira, which is their cheapest commercial license. The $5 version only covers 5 users, but that’s fine, since I only have two programmers working for me right now anyway.

It looks like Jira can work with either CVS or Subversion. I’m still planning on converting to SVN before I install Jira though. Of course, since we’re a (mostly) Microsoft shop, I should probably look into TFS, but I think that might a bit too expensive for me.

It’s a bit of a balancing act, in a small shop, trying to figure out how much time and money to spend on infrastructure (for lack of a better word) — project tracking, version control, formal testing, and so on. I can’t spend too much time on it, but if I don’t do it at all, things start to fall apart…

FrontPocket review

I just installed FrontPocket on my iPod Touch. I stumbled across this program yesterday while I was working on my MobileMe issue. FrontPocket is an application that gives you (almost) full access to your Backpack account on your Touch (or iPhone). This is something I’ve really been looking for since I got the iPod Touch. I was hoping somebody would get around to coding something like this, and now someone has!

The program uses the Backpack API to access the info in your Backpack account, and pull it down to the iPod over the air. It caches the info locally, so you can still have access to it when you’re not connected to WiFi. I just did some testing, and it doesn’t look like the program automatically sucks down your whole Backpack account; it seems like you only have offline access to stuff that you’ve previously viewed online, and only the version you’ve most recently viewed, not necessarily the current version on the web. And it seems like you can’t add new notes or edit existing ones offline.

While online, you can add notes, edit notes, add journal entries, and add reminders, so you can do pretty much anything you’d want to do. The program does not, though, render Textile or HTML, so you’re just viewing the text of your notes. And URL links are not active links, so you can’t click on them and have them open in Safari or anything like that. (And, of course, the iPod Touch still has no copy & paste functionality, so you can’t just copy & paste an URL out of FrontPocket and into Safari.) Oh, and it doesn’t render photos that you’ve stored in Backpack either.

So, overall, there are a number of limitations to this app that I really wish they could find a way to fix. Some of them are likely related to limitations in the Backpack API. Others could be fixed, though they might be non-trivial. The app’s only on version 1.1, so maybe we’ll see some new stuff added in the next iteration. (I wonder if there’s an open source Textile rendering engine out there somewhere that they could convert for use on the iPod/iPhone and just drop into the app?)

The thing I’d most like to see is a full sync option, where my entire Backpack site would get pulled down to the device. I’d even be OK with having to press a button in the app to initiate the sync, though it would be cool if it could be done automatically in the background.

The app does have calendar functionality, by the way, but I don’t use Backpack calendar, so I can’t say much about that works. I haven’t seen any indication that it integrates with the standard device calendar app, though I wouldn’t expect it to; Apple probably hasn’t made it easy for third-party apps to update the built-in ones.

syncing

I’ve been using MobileMe to sync contact & calendar data between my MacBook and my iPod Touch for a while now. It works pretty well. Today, I decided to go one more step, and set up MobileMe on my Vista desktop machine to sync with Outlook. The contacts were no problem; they synced up fine the first time through, and I then went through them and weeded out a few duplicates.

The calendar was a little trickier. I have three calendars in MobileMe: Home, Work, and Birthdays. The birthday calendar is populated automatically via MenuCalendarClock, a shareware program that just pulls birthdays from the Mac address book and puts them into iCal. These calendars all now show as separate calendars in Outlook. I had to basically push them down to Outlook, rather than doing a straight merge, though, to get them to show up.

There’s a default calendar in Outlook called “Calendar” that has now synced up the MobileMe (and hence my Mac and iPod). I never used the calendar in Outlook before, so this is just an empty calendar. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to delete it in Outlook, or to tell the MobileMe control panel not to sync it up. Not a huge deal, but a little annoyance.

And repeating events seem to be treated a little differently in Outlook vs. iCal. After I pulled stuff into Outlook, then synced back to MobileMe, then synced my Mac, every repeating event on my calendars showed as changed. I’m hoping this is a one-time thing, and I’m not going to have to push & pull every repeating event at every sync.

I’m also a little worried that, when I go to http://www.me.com/calendar/ to check my calendar online, I just see “Loading Events”, and nothing ever comes up. I think when something this has happened in the past, it would generally clear itself up overnight. Here’s hoping. Looking around online, though, this may have something to do with the way Outlook messed with the repeating events. I may have to do some work to straighten this out.

My reason for setting up Outlook with MobileMe, by the way, is because I’m thinking about replacing my old Motorola cell phone with a BlackBerry in the not-too-distant future. If I do that, I’m going to want to do full contact & calendar sync with the BlackBerry, and it seems like the easiest way to do that might be through Outlook. It seems like it’s possible to sync a BlackBerry directly with a Mac, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to set up my PC with all my data either way.