Pukka

Yesterday I stumbled across a month old blog post advocating a hack to the excellent Twitterrific application, a client for the free Twitter service. The hack (Update: supposedly, but the point remains) removes the rather unobtrusive ads that the software developers introduced as a way to offset free use of the application. If you didn't want to see them, you could just register the application and they go away. The app didn't start out having them, but after it took off in popularity, the authors (you know, the people who put their time into the application's development and support) decided that this was a better model.

I should take a moment to point out here that as a whole, advertising in general strikes me in a negative light, but I didn't mind the ads in Twitterrific as it was great software and a fair tradeoff for my fifteen bucks.

Anyway, this hack and its associated "arguments" interested me particularly because my application Pukka is also a lightweight client for a free online service, so I left a comment. My initial argument was:

Just like a web browser, RSS reader, email client, FTP program, Aperture, iChat, blog editor… man, the nerve of those people trying to charge for a tool for receiving and delivering content created by others!

Also, I’m a Twitterrific user and I like the ads. Eventually I may pay for the app, but for now, they’re alright.

Try writing a program for which you charge little or nothing, getting a couple thousand users, then see what you do.

Since then, the discussion has gotten rather heated, as well as ludicrous in some cases, as acknowledgement and support of both software piracy and website attacking has been discussed. Seth Dillingham, whom I first got to know (at least virtually) last summer when I supported his bike ride for charity, posted a response and a challenge to users of Twitterrific: put your money where your mouth is. So I took him up and I registered Twitterrific. Money well spent!

If for no other reason (and there are plenty of other reasons), software piracy hurts developers from the support angle. Many users running an app means more support, particularly when a chunk of them are running a cracked version that could develop unforeseen problems. Users report stability issues on the popular software sites or, in the case of larger companies, call the support lines and demand resolution to their issues. I think John Gruber said it best when he wrote about the jailbroken iPhone phenomenon:

The mindset manifests in many forms, but what it boils down to is this: a sense of entitlement that users should be able to do unsupported things and yet still be supported. That it makes no sense to expect support after taking unsupported actions is why I’ve found it baffling.

Phooey. Get your copy of Twitterrific right here. And support software developers if you enjoy their products, but don't feel that you have the right to rip them off if you don't like how they do things. In fact, grab Apple's free development tools and write your own and let's see how it stands up.

Update: Craig at Iconfactory, the author of Twitterrific, weighs in with his take on the whole matter.

Just a note that Pukka 1.6.6 final is out! Grab it here. For more details on the changes involved, see the last post. This release should iron out any remaining crash problems that users have been seeing on Leopard.

I've been hard at work trying to tackle some lingering Leopard stability issues with Pukka and believe that I have a solution. I'm releasing this fix as a prerelease (i.e. not advertised in the auto-update mechanism and not posted to the download sites -- please do not post it for me!) since the problems don't affect everyone and I'd like to have some feedback from those who are affected before making this version live.

Cut to the chase: download the prerelease version 1.6.6-pre2 for Tiger or Leopard. If you have any questions or concerns with this build, please contact me here.

(You may note that I'm using the same link for both OS versions -- I'm just trying to get some rudimentary usage stats by separating out the download URLs ;-)

If you're interested in some more technical info, read on.

It seems that Leopard has some lingering crash issues when using NSURLConnection, particularly when behind a proxy and/or using HTTPS and/or using authentication. Of particular concern are the last two conditions, as all Pukka traffic through del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, and most alternative sites is over HTTPS with authentication. I have rarely been able to reproduce these crashes myself (which is the main reason I did not catch them in prerelease versions of Leopard), but I have received crash logs from issues with severity ranging from occasional problems to repeated crashing, including crashing on launch. Needless to say, this has been very frustrating.

Any other Cocoa programmers who use NSURLConnection will note that it is pretty much the way to do asynchronous downloads to memory (i.e. not to a file as NSURLDownload does) while easily working with requirements such as the ability to cancel, authentication, transparent proxy support, and cache management. I've been in a bit of a bind for a workaround, but after some discussions with (extremely helpful!) fellow Mac developers such as Daniel Jalkut, Jon Wight, and Fraser Speirs, I've settled on the solution of using CURLHandle routines in a dynamically loaded bundle when on Leopard for the time being, linking them against a Leopard-targeted CURLHandle framework to bypass cross-development issues with the framework. This required a fair amount of re-architecting since CURLHandle is not intended to be a drop-in replacement for NSURLConnection (in fact, it's a subclass of the Tiger-deprecated NSURLHandle class). It's a stable and reliable fix for Leopard until this bug is resolved, if not super-ideal for me as a developer. But them's the breaks!

For the reference of the Cocoa developers reading this, you can check out some bookmarks I've gathered (and will continue to gather) about issues with NSURLConnection over the years here and I've reported the Apple Radar bug and it resolves to the original at rdar://problem/5575834.

Update: I just released 1.6.6-pre2 to fix an issue that a couple people have noticed with double encoding of text when posting. The links have been updated above.

I've just released Pukka 1.6.5 with a slew (or, as the changelog refers to it, a metric slew) of performance updates, bug fixes, and usability improvements. You can read on for (much) more detail or just head over and get Pukka now.

The bulk of the changes deal with Spotlight performance and strain on and responding to capacity issues with the del.icio.us (or other service) API. Hopefully this should make Pukka perform faster, be more responsive, and be a better network citizen.

Here are the changes in depth:

• Removed a check on the local Spotlight cache that would run 30 seconds after launch and could cause unresponsiveness in the application. The Spotlight caching mechanism has been updated to perform in a more incremental fashion to avoid the need for this.
• Pukka now waits at least five minutes between API requests of all bookmarks, preferring requests of the latest 15 bookmarks in the meantime, to ease strain on the API and to avoid getting throttled.
• Added CFBundleShortVersionString to app bundle, which will make Pukka's version number show up in Finder's Version column.
• Upgraded Spotlight metadata format to store bookmark data in folders organized by username instead of one big folder. This improves performance during local cache updating.
• Resolved a Core Data issue that may have caused a delay between when bookmarks were cached and when they appeared in the application.
• Changed the interval used to check for bookmark updates online from one minute to three minutes. Although this was a very slight hit on the API, it was reduced in the interest of scaling back a bit because we can.
• A Growl notification is now shown when the bookmark cache on disk is updated. This occurs whether all bookmarks were re-parsed or just the latest 15, and for each account.
• The successful post Growl notification was updated to include the page title and the account posted to.
• A specific error message is shown if a post fails due to API capacity issues or throttling, as opposed to a general error when posting (network, internal server error, etc.)
• Any kind of posting error shows a panel with a "critical" alert style to indicate that data was not saved and may be lost if the application is quit.
• Fixed two small memory leaks related to tag sorting in the bookmark menus.
• On first run, a modal panel is shown as the bookmarks are cached for the first time. When this panel was hidden, the animation would continue. For cleanliness, this has been stopped.
• Trivial about box updates: Two issues were tweaked with the icon animations. The randomness of the selected animation was made better and a PNG representation of the app icon is passed to the animation instead of the .icns file directly. Lessons learned from Ironcoder ;-)
• The HTTP timeout for sending posts was reduced from the default of 60 seconds to 10 seconds to avoid making the app unusable for up to a full minute in the event that the link can't be posted.
• A bug was fixed in the debugging console which prevented it from always scrolling all the way to the bottom on appending new content.
• During posting problems, we now report exactly the message that was received from the API to the debugging console.

That's it! Enjoy and please contact me with any problems or questions.

I've just posted another maintenance release of Pukka that squashes a few more Leopard bugs. Besides fixing a couple occasional hangs and crashes, it is now more robust in how it handles issues with the del.icio.us API, particularly if you are setting up Pukka for the first time and there are network or capacity issues with del.icio.us, but also for seasoned users under the same conditions. I've also fixed a couple of very small issues under the hood. You can go grab Pukka now or upgrade right in the application.

I've found that it can be very tricky to write an application that takes its primary value from an online service that can occasionally have reliability issues. When I set out to write Pukka, it was primarily as a del.icio.us client, not as a bookmark manager on the desktop, and I plan on keeping it that way. So when the conditions are less than ideal, it's very important to inform the user as to what's happening and what to do next, doubly so if they are running the application for the first time and can't use all of the functionality right away as a result. I think I've done better with this in 1.6.4 and am better keeping it in mind going forward in order to provide the best possible user experience.

Also, the transition to Leopard has been an important education for me about major operating system upgrades from a developer point of view. I camped out in line for Panther, Tiger, and Leopard at Apple Stores and have assisted many people in upgrading their computers and networks, but I've never bridged an OS transition with an active desktop software product. Although I've had access to Leopard since 2006, as a small shop there is a big difference between my testing and my user base upgrading and putting Pukka through its paces. It's definitely been an education and I'm doubly appreciative for a patient and loyal user base. Thanks, everyone!

Now that Leopard shows Dictionary results in Spotlight, I recently discovered that every Mac now may show Pukka as a Spotlight search result! As you can imagine, I have a lot of things on my Mac related to Pukka, from source code to images to emails to iChats, but the fact that everyone's dictionary, and by extension, Spotlight, now has its namesake word gave me the idea to revisit just where the name came from.

Nearly two years ago, a then-coworker gave me the idea for Pukka and, since I had been waiting for the right opportunity to create a Mac app, I had a prototype going within a week. When it came time to give the app a name, I came up empty, but then my wife suggested the name Pukka after a word that British chef Jamie Oliver used all the time on his shows and that we took to mean "delicious" or "tasty". As you can imagine, this was a nice fit -- a unique word, short but memorable, with a cool, somewhat hidden meaning that mirrored del.icio.us, the service with which it interacted.

I didn't realize until some time later that the word had more of a meaning of "excellent" than good in the culinary sense, so maybe I would have backed off a little on the horn-tootin' had I realized that ;-)

Anyway, now, a couple years later, who would have guessed that my Pukka would be the number one Google result or that many people would come to depend on it? It's a been a fun couple years and I still have big plans in store for Pukka (and some other apps), so stay tuned!

I've just released Pukka 1.6.3, which fixes several issues on Tiger and Leopard, including a hang and a potential crash.

As usual, you can update right in Pukka itself by choosing Pukka -> Check For Updates... while the application is running, or you can download Pukka from its page.

Enjoy!

I've been alerted by a number of users that there seem to be some odd issues with Bonjour support in Pukka on Leopard, particularly a slow startup time and/or a delay after launch. I'm working on this issue, but in the meantime, you can work around these issues by disabling Bonjour in Pukka's preferences.

Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for an update!

I've just released Pukka 1.6.2, which provides full compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard", due out today at 6pm Eastern. I've also corrected a small bug with the File -> Close menu item so that it works as expected when the preferences or about windows are in front. As always, you can get Pukka on its product page.

On the topic of Leopard, as many developers ^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5} have noted, despite having prerelease versions of Leopard over the past year or so, we do not actually get the final version as it ships tonight until we either go out and buy it ourselves or wait for our developer copy (in a few weeks?) So, to the best of my knowledge, Pukka will work with the Leopard release, but in the event that something unforeseen crops up, I will rectify it this weekend.

Now go get Pukka!

I said in my last post that I was behind and it shows in the number of things that I have to talk about regarding Pukka!

First up, my patch to the open source Vienna newsreader has made it into the stable version, which you can read about here. This helps with getting highlighted text out of Vienna and easily into your Pukka post.

Next, Seth Dillingham has reported on this blog that he has exceeded his fundraising goal for the Pan-Mass Challenge. I was able to donate some copies of Pukka to his effort and I'm glad to see that he reached (and exceeded) his goal!

Third, a few notes about social bookmarking in general and del.icio.us in particular. I have been testing out the preview of the next version of del.icio.us and will be keeping up on any changes that come about as a result of that. I also noticed a great video, which then ended up on the del.icio.us blog, about how to explain social bookmarking to people who are unfamiliar with it -- so check it out if you just don't get why you'd use Pukka.

Next, thanks to a post by Workshop friend Red Sweater Software, I was alerted to an app that recently added integration with Pukka. As of version 1.2.1, EagleFiler can capture post information from Pukka for better archival if you so choose. Neat!

I've also been keeping tabs on Apple's Leopard OS and to my knowledge, Pukka is doing fine on the latest build -- but please report if you find differently! I'm very excited for the Big Cat to arrive and very much looking forward to using some of its features full time next month!

And lastly, on a general business note, I wanted to report that I've been investigating how to better make Code Sorcery Workshop more green and sustainable and a better environmental citizen. I ran across a post by friend-of-the-Workshop Daniel Morrison about his efforts. Like his business, I too have minimal office needs. I also am able to take advantage of working remotely as well as DC's excellent public transportation in order to round out nearly a year now of essentially no driving for work. However, I do fly to conferences (though not many!), so that can always be reduced. I was also happy to learn last month that my webhost of eight years, pair Networks, has gone carbon neutral and is making other efforts to remain sustainable. This is a good trend! You can read more about pair's efforts here.

Whew! I think that's all for now. As I said, vacation is over and I'm back to working hard after playing hard. On a personal note, if you'd like to check out pictures from my 3,500 mile trip across the American Southwest, you can find them here. Enjoy!