Author: admin

DockShelf Released!

Today The Alchemist Guild is announcing the release of DockShelf, a file launching companion for your Mac which is for sale at www.dockshelf.com for the low price of $4.99.

Please support version 1.0 and future development by purchasing today at www.dockshelf.com. I also invite you to glance at the official development log to see all the great features planned for DockShelf in future versions.

If you have any questions, problems or feature suggestions/ideas regarding DockShelf please contact us for  a quick reply.

Thank you all!

Bug tracker trashed for simpler approach

I decided that the bug tracker system I installed is not working for our needs since it’s A) too complicated and B) doesn’t allow users to view reports without first registering.

Instead I have replaced the system with a simple page that contains a list of planned/requested features and known bugs (in the menu bar on notecardosx.com and taskcardosx.com). This way users can clearly see what features are planned and already requested for future development.

I inviate everyone to contribute submit your ideas and bugs report to help make our apps better. I appreciate the time you take to write me your ideas and often they get implemented since users know best. 🙂

Disappointing OS X Lion Performance

I was really let down when I tested NoteCard on OS X Lion to find that the general performance of all low level drawing (using Apple’s 2D graphic framework CoreGraphics) is not as fast as on Snow Leopard 10.6. After searching around on Google I found that other users are having these problems (I.E. the same app on the same Mac running slower on Lion) so I can only assume this is a bug which is hopefully being fixed.

If you ever get a chance to run NoteCard on both 10.6 and 10.7 you’ll notice on 10.7 the dragging of cards is noticeably slower, which is the main problem. The animations seems comparable at first but I have at times caught the OS getting totally bogged down and struggling to perform basic animations at anything better than 10 FPS. My feel is the OS becomes slower after being in use for long periods of time.

Personally I haven’t even “upgraded” to Lion as my primary OS yet because it damaged support for some critical programs I use daily and in general I found the performance and system usage to be too high to warrant any minor features I may have been interested in.

Surely this is the first OS in my entire history with Apple which I wasn’t quick to adopt due to bugs and back tracking of features performance.

NoteCard released today!

Today NoteCard has been released and ready for sale at www.notecardosx.com. The initial release price is set at a cheap $7.99 which may be temporary or permanent depending on the response.

As you may have noticed NoteCard is essentially a variant of TaskCard – a sticky note based task/project manager but without the task manager features. All the core features people have come to love about TaskCard are now available for simple note taking.

In addition to the basic features of TaskCard are also new features including: stacks, pages, tabbed cards and a full screen text editing environment called Reader.

What about TaskCard users who just want to take notes? I understand that some of you bought TaskCard not for the task manager but the for the sticky note system and will no doubt be upset to learn that there is now NoteCard (the app you really wanted) and it will cost more money to buy.

My apologies to you now but I don’t have an upgrade path for you at this moment. The problem is that there is currently no system in place with my billing service to offer upgrades so I’ll need to make my own system. Worse yet Apple has made it pretty impossible to contact my App Store customers so I’ll need to verify your purchases from inside the app possibly after I release a new version which has a “request upgrade” feature.

What about the note cards you said you were planning for TaskCard? My plans kind of changed on this one. I did say before I was going to add note cards to TaskCard in addition to the existing task cards and calendar cards but I changed my mind after seeing how bloated TaskCard was becoming already. I think it’s still possible I will add note cards to TaskCard but they will be a more basic version with limited features compared to NoteCard.

Please send your: feature requests, bug reports and general complaints to [email protected] so we can evaluate all of them. Thanks guys!

Warehouse retired temporarily

Since I have failed to produce any updates on Warehouse for over a year or even get it ready for the Mac App Store and OS X Lion I have decided to retire it from sales temporarily.

Frankly it’s just not selling well enough to warrant spending time developing it further even thought I think it’s a pretty good piece of software which I still use on a regular basis.

When I decide I can realistically get it ready for the Mac App Store and 10.7 (which it’s not even tested) I will let you know and post if back for sale.

I apologize to my customers but hopefully I can get Warehouse supported and back on the market again.

TaskCard snap to grid bug

It has come to my attention that snap to grid broke around version 1.6 and is causing cards to move around erratically when being dragged and possibly even offscreen which makes them appear to have disappeared.

If you have had turned on this option please turn it off in the preferences until it’s fixed in the next version. Sorry for the inconvenience!

New bug tracker system

Today I decided to install a new bug tracker on the site so concerned users have a public place to file bugs and view their status. I chose the Mantis Bug Tracker because I have used it before with the Free Pascal Compiler but I honestly it seems a little confusing and I’m not seeing there is a way for non-registered users to view bugs.

I’ll be adding some outstanding bugs to the tracker and try to find a way you can view the bugs without being logged in since I’m sure users would like to know if the problems they’re experiencing are being taken care of.

TaskCard 1.6.2 delayed on Mac App Store

Even though this a crucial bug update to fix problems in 1.6 it has been rejected on the Mac App Store after and already long review so expect more delays. The current reviewer must have been more strict because the previous versions all passed. If you need a newer version you can always contact us and we’ll send you a website version (with Sparkle auto-update) that you can use to the replace the Mac App Store version.

I said it once and I’ll say it again: don’t buy on the Mac App Store. Refunds are hard to get, updates can take weeks (even for critical bug fixes) and worst of all developers get paid 30% less which means less funds for future development.

1.6.1 TaskCard Update – Mailing list

After days of painful bug testing with a few very helpful users I was able to find the cause of a bug that was causing some Macs to crash directly after launching. I learned some very valuable lessons in remote debugging in cases when there is no crash report so hopefully  this won’t happen again!

This disaster prompted to make a mailing list for TaskCard which you can join directly from inside the app and I highly recommend all users to do so. I will be using it only for contacting you when there are serious bugs which you should be aware of or beta versions you may be interested in testing. Your email will be kept private and you’re free to unsubscribe at any time.

Besides the crashing bug there were numerous other little fixes to problems introduced into 1.6 making this a pretty important release actually. Noteworthy is also a new Carbon version of the Sparkle.framework which was causing crashing for some users on and off for a long time. I hope as of 1.6.1 we won’t be seeing any more Sparkle crashes. If you purchased from the Mac App Store you’ll have to wait a few days until it gets approved however.

In addition to fixes there is one new important (but small) feature I neglected for a long time. TaskCard now has 3 editing modes which affect the way tasks are edited. The default of return ends the editing sessions was not very natural for many users I think and non-standard compared to other apps. Please see the manual in Tasks > Editing Modes for more info.

1.6 crash after launch

A few users have reporting after upgrading from older versions TaskCard 1.6 is crashing shortly after launch. I have not been able to determine what the problem is as I can’t reproduce the problem on my Mac but I think it’s related the auto-update framework Sparkle.

If you experiencing any problems please send me an email and a crash report if you have one. I’ll be working on finding a solution and hopefully release a 1.6.1 update soon.

Thanks for your patience!