JungleDisk 3.0 Ups and Downs

Updated on 2/6/2010 at 1:36AM EST

JungleDisk has long been my favorite front-end to Amazon S3, and the combination has been my choice for cloud storage (backups, etc.). When I bought in, the application was $25, and you got a version for Mac OS X, Windows (even x64), and Linux, all for that low price. You even got future upgrades for life. In addition, they offered a great incremental backup service for $1 a month as an add-on for S3, which could potentially save you tens of dollars a month or more if you upload large files which change frequently, by only uploading the bits that have changed. The app is great, though, the user interface (UI) is bland at best.

Version 3.0 was just released, and I had hopes that the UI dreariness was going to be addressed. Sadly, all we got were fancier icons in the toolbar. The program is also in need of some additional backup features, like more powerful filtering. These, too, were missing. But more than that, they actually made the UI worse.

First, they changed their website and identity (logo) to match their new owner, Rackspace, which doesn't look too shabby on the site itself. But in trying to create some consistency in the application, they actually made it harder to use. The desktop icon looks really out of place; nothing like a mounted drive. I'd much prefer the stock generic drive icon it had previously. But what would be *really* cool is if they used a drive icon that had vines growing all over it - something "lickable" like the icon used by Panic's Coda application. Instead, we have this pseudo Rackspace/Windows logo, that doesn't seem to be or represent anything "JungleDisk". Very odd. So the first thing I do is "Get Info" on the drive, and paste in a new icon. 

The desktop icon may leave you with the extra chore of swapping it out with a copy/paste, but the real issue is the icon in the menu bar. They again chose to mirror their new corporate icon, which ends up looking like a gray tornado. Yep, stop rubbing your eyes. That's the Tasmanian Devil in my menu bar, and apparently he's pissed and spinning like hell. See the photo below.

Besides the spinning Australian marsupial, what's the problem? Well, the previous icon would flash a noticeable color indicating activity. This one flashes a color so dark and close to the gray used by the icon itself, that you'd need a colorimeter to know that something was going on. Do you notice the color difference in the icon below? If you do, you should be an optometrist.

I guess that I'm basically begging JungleDisk to either revert the icons, or create better ones. This is just insane.

The rest of the UI is clunky, at best, as it has always been. For example, buttons are too close to other objects, like output boxes, callout text is touching the controls they describe, the configuration menu item box is too narrow and cannot be widened, and consequently, you get scrollbar hell. The list goes on and on.

But I have to say, that like the wall flower in high school, face full of braces, skin breakouts, and too much hairspray, if you can get past the superficial stuff, what really counts is pure gold, and you'll want to spend the rest of your life with her, I mean, it. The program itself works extremely well, and there's a server edition too. And for old-tymers like me, the free upgrades and $1 monthly fee has remained in place, at least for the time being. For the newbies, it's a flat $2 per month which includes the program and the incremental upload feature. I'd go for it at that price any day. I recommend you do the same.

But bug them to fix their UI. It's killing me!

HTML Entity Quick Reference for Greek Characters

Updated on 11/19/2009 at 2:29PM EST

The following table gives the character entity reference, decimal character reference, and hexadecimal character reference for symbols and Greek letters, as well as the rendering of each in your browser. Glyphs of the characters are available at the Unicode Consortium.

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EPSON Artisan 810 a Bi-Function, not Multi-Function, Device

Updated on 1/31/2010 at 12:49AM EST

I was in a local OfficeMax, looking at an EPSON Artisan 810 all-in-one (Print, Scan. FAX, Copy), which came in a box covered with text and imagery detailing all of the amazing features it has. To my delight, I discovered that it supported OS X, albeit, they note that "some features like sharing memory cards over a network may not be supported". You'd think that would imply that tertiary (or specialty) functions may not work. But, surely, the basic 4 functions would, right?

It would have been nice if the employees had any kind of a clue with regard to the products they sell. But they don't. So I checked some support forums and the EPSON driver download page (on my phone), and sure enough, they even have Snow Leopard drivers. So I buy the printer and take it home.

I should have suspected something may be amiss when the installer asked me to enter my administrator password, but the dialog requesting the credentials kept losing focus, making it difficult to type in my password. Yikes.

I managed to get through the 30-part install (well, it felt like 30 separate, chained installers). The installer vanished, and I had no printer in my "Print and FAX" Preference Pane. Nice. So, I add a printer manually, and it did see the EPSON as a Bonjour device. One down!

So I jump over to try the scanner, and I get a troubleshooter. After scrounging around the web, I found some advice from a user who discovered that you have to go into the Utilities folder and run an EPSON scanner utility to find and configure the device. ugh. Once I did that, it seemed to work. Two down!

Now, on to the FAX. The preference pane did not see a FAX device anywhere, and the EPSON printer itself has no FAX capabilities. So back to the web. After an hour of searching, nada, and no one even complaining about this apparent "missing" feature. So I hit the manual, and notice that FAXing from a computer is only supported in Windows.

At this point, I'm not even going to try to get the "Copy" function working.

OFFICEMAX Knowledgeable Sales Staff: FAIL
EPSON Customer Support: FAIL
EPSON Product: FAIL
EPSON Integrity: FAIL

So, in summary, for Mac users, this is a bi-function, not a multi-function, device. It prints and scans. They should put this on the box so people know what they're getting (or in this case, not getting). It's a real shame. I went with EPSON because Hewlett Packard did something similar with a computer I bought. The machine was billed as a multimedia and entertainment computer, yet, it couldn't play a game that was 5 years old. Do any of these companies have their metaphoric poop together?

And don't get me started on Lexmark.

How to Read a Binary File Over HTTP and Write to Disk Using ASP.NET and C#

Updated on 11/18/2009 at 5:34PM EST

Have you ever had the need to grab a binary file from a remote server over HTTP, and save it to your server, using ASP.NET? It may not sound like a common request, or even a difficult one. But there are a few tricks to accomplishing your goal. One challenge I encountered was that using a BinaryReader required some buffering code. A blind call to read the stream would often only return a portion of the file.

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Source Control for Visual Studio, Under $50

Updated on 9/28/2009 at 11:42AM EST

Keeping previous versions of files, and merging changes from multiple developers, has long been an important part of the development cycle. But developers using Microsoft Visual Studio who wish to use source control for their projects have been relegated to the only game in town, Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS).

What is source/version control?

For those of you who aren't familiar with source control, suffice it to say that it's a software addition to your development environment that allows you to check your code in and out, for use in a multi-developer environment. In addition, this software allows the developer to "roll back" files to any checked-in point in history, and to merge changes from multiple developers in the same file. This last benefit serves even the individual developer.

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Automator Workflow to Delete All Hidden .svn Folders For OS X 10.5

Updated on 9/28/2009 at 11:58AM EST

Anyone who has ever used Subversion knows that it can be a chore to clean up a folder that you wish to remove from source control. For example, you want to transfer a web site over to the web server, but don't want all the hidden .svn folders to be copied as well. On the Macintosh, it's even more of a pain because Apple's attempt to make the computer easier to use, has rendered it near impossible to manage hidden files.

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Project Halide Goes Open Source!

Updated on 9/28/2009 at 12:01PM EST

One of my pet projects has just been made an open source project.

The project is named "Halide", and it's a set of ASP.NET 2.0 classes, written in C#, that are designed to make creating web applications easier, and to make the resulting sites more secure, and more feature-rich, as well as make all your projects more consistent.

To accomplish all this, the classes provide a set of high-level functionality. For example, you can send e-mail using a single line of code. You can read in a row from a database using a single line of code, and then use the resulting data object to run a stored procedure with parameters, and the data object already knows what parameters the procedure requires, and sends them automatically.

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Find the First and Last Day of a Date Range Using C# and ASP.NET

Updated on 9/28/2009 at 11:43AM EST

Here's a simple method for determining the first and last day of an arbitrary time period. For example, have you ever needed to get the first and last date of "last quarter", or "next month"? This method returns a simple structure with those dates. Simply pass the method a date in time, like today, and the date type you'd like to retrieve.

For example, if you want the first date and last date for next quarter, you'd make a DateTime variable and assign it today's date plus 3 months (to create a date that occurs some time in the next quarter), and then pass that along with DateRangeOptions.Quarter to the method. The method will return a structure with the first and last date of that quarter.

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Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Vista, Dodge Darts

Updated on 3/25/2007 at 9:28PM EST

Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 for Macintosh is bloated beyond belief. Now, I understand that it's a universal binary, and has code within it to run on Intel and PowerPC Macs natively, but even split in half it's too big. So how big is it?

For those of you who don't know what Acrobat is, let me briefly explain. Adobe Acrobat is an application (and an architecture) that allows users to create portable documents that can be read, marked up, and printed on a variety of platforms (including Windows, Macintosh, and even Linux). It bundles up the document and all of its dependencies, including fonts, and creates a single file which is easily accessed by others.

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The Missing FTP Client in Visual Studio 2005

Updated on 9/28/2009 at 12:02PM EST

For those of us who use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, suffering is a part of life, well, that is, unless you use the workflow that Microsoft shoves down your throat.

Let me briefly explain. Microsoft wants web developers to host their development sites on their development box, using the hobbled version of IIS that ships with Windows, and then when the project (or work day) is done, do a single copy up to the server.

But there are plenty of times this is impractical. For example, though this workflow is relatively convenient, it requires additional setup. There are plenty of times that I would like to work on the files locally, but transfer them to a remote development site for testing and preview. The problem is that the FTP support in Visual Studio 2005 is woefully inadequate, especially considering the size of the company that produces the product, and the maturity of the product itself.

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