Jacob Thurman

A little while ago I launched a new product called “ScreenSketcher,” which was a tool for creating enlightened user interface mockups.

As of today, the ScreenSketcher product has been sold to Coding Robots. You can find their ScreenSketcher product page at http://www.screensketcher.com.

Coding Robots is already doing some great things with the product. They’ve fixed some bugs, enhanced the design elements and improved the usability of the program. I’m excited to see what they do going forward with what I started!

Castalia 2009.3 is now available. The big deal here is Delphi 2010
support, but I’ve also added a few more “smart keys” that are available
in every edition:

* Smart Parenthesis: Highlight some text and press the ‘(’ key, and the
text will be surrounded with parenthesis.

* Smart Brackets: Highlight some text and press the ‘[’ key, and the
text will be surrounded with brackets.

* Smart Braces: Highlight some text and press the ‘{’ key, and the text
will be surrounded with braces.

As always, customers with current subscriptions can get it from the
customer service site at http://subscribe.twodesk.com.  Everyone else
can try a free trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia/download.html.

More information about Castalia is available at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia

–Jacob

Castalia 2009.2.1 is now available. This update fixes a critical defect where switching desktop presets or running a project could cause the IDE to crash.

Users with a current subscription can get it at http://subscribe.twodesk.com, everyone else can try it free for 30 days at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia/download.html.

This one has taken a long time to figure out, and special thanks to a couple of dedicated customers who did some extra testing and helped me narrow it down.

I’m very excited to announce the latest version of Castalia, the ultimate tool for Delphi developers.

The major focus of Castalia 2009.2 has been improving the parser and adding support for many language features that have been added to Delphi in recent years. I’m very happy to say that the Castalia Delphi parser is now fully up-to-date.

In addition, Castalia 2009.2 includes the following improvements over the previous version:

* Fixed: “Index Out of Bounds” error during some context switches
* Fixed: Some Castalia features not available after line 30768 in the code editor
* Fixed: Access violation when firing a code template with an empty scope

Castalia users with a current maintenance subscription can download version 2009.2 today at http://subscribe.twodesk.com.

Everyone else can grab the free trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia.

Last Friday (June 12), I went out for an afternoon bike ride, and when I got home, the monitors connected to my main work computer were dark. I wiggled the mouse to bring them back to life, but they did not revive. The computer had crashed.

While such a thing had never happened with this particular computer before, we’ve all seen random system crashes, and I didn’t think anything of it. I had saved all my files before going out the door, after all.  I pushed the power button on the computer case to shut off the machine and reboot it…

…And nothing happened. The case LEDs were still on, keyboard LEDs still glowing. The machine had all the appearances of being alive, but was dead. I tried again. Held the power button down for 15 (it should turn off after 10), 20, 30 seconds. No response. It wouldn’t turn off.

Hmm. This is strange.

I flipped the rocker switch on the power supply and the machine shut off instantly. After a short wait, I flipped it back on and pressed the power button.

Nothing happened.

Again, I pressed and held the power button. No case LEDs, no keyboard lights, no fans spinning up, nothing. Great.

I love the small town where we live, but one of its downsides is that there’s no decent place to buy computer parts in a pinch. Thankfully, there’s a big internet electronics warehouse store that’s located such that when we order things with the cheapest UPS ground shipping, we almost always get them the next day. But, it being late Friday afternoon, I knew anything I ordered wouldn’t actually ship until Monday, so I wouldn’t get it until Tuesday. Oh well, at least I still have the laptop to keep me on top of things.

I ordered a new power supply, since it was obviously fried, and it arrived tuesday afternoon, just as expected. Tuesday evening, I sat down with the ailing computer and swapped out power supplies. I got it all plugged in and put together, and hit the power button.

Nothing, again.

Dangit! As most of you surely know, when you have a computer that’s just dead, the culprit is almost always either the motherboard or the power supply. In this case, I had good reason to believe the power supply was the problem. Apparently it wasn’t (or at least it wasn’t the ONLY problem). Now I need to order a new motherboard.

Again, it’s after shipping time, so anything I order will ship Wednesday and arrive Thursday. Fine. I ordered a new motherboard, and went back to work on the laptop (which, by the way, is a Mac, and doesn’t have all the Delphi versions on it that I need to work on Castalia). The new motherboard arrived Thursday afternoon, and went easily into the computer case

Cross fingers. Say a prayer. Do a rain dance. Push the power button.

It booted right up. No other hardware damage, no data loss.

The rest of Thursday was spend installing new drivers for the new chipset and audio all that stuff that comes with a new motherboard, and Friday I was finally back in action. A full week without my main computer was quite a bit of lost work, and put me behind schedule, but I’m catching up quickly.

One thing I had planned to do towards the end of the week was release Castalia 2009.2. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but final testing is looking good, and I think it’s close. Watch for it this week, as long as there are no more major hardware failures (and misdiagnoses).

The moral of the story: While I didn’t lose any data, it made me take a good look at my backup strategies. While the source code that keeps my business running was always backed up in two different places, other things (like iPhone app sales records) were not. If there had been a hard drive problem, some important things could have been lost.

So please take this opportunity to review your backup strategy and make sure that everything important is backed up and will survive a hardware failure or worse (Question: what would happen if your house burned down while you weren’t home? Would you still have your precious data intact?). We work way too hard on creating our digital lives to have them vanish at the whim of a few faulty bits of silicon. Be careful!

If you run a website, be it a blog, informational site, or something else, this is for you.  If not, feel free to skip.

The last few weeks I’ve been head-down with a partner starting a new business: The Wingspan Advertising Network. Wingspan is a new genre-specific advertising network that helps put brands together with people who are interested in their products.  Today, we’re beginning signups for beta testing, and we’re beta testing with a Delphi advertising network.

In a nutshell, we want you to sign up with us and host advertisements that we’ll provide.

And we want to pay you to do it.

Here’s how it works (directly from the wingspan website):

Each month, a portion of the advertising fees paid by advertisers is placed in “the pot.” At the end of the month, we review the number of impressions (views) and clickthroughs generated by your website, and determine what percentage of all the impressions and clickthroughs for your network is represented by you. You then receive a proportionate part of the pot.

For example, if the pot for your network this month is $5000, and you generate 10% of the impressions and clickthroughs for the month, you will receive 10% of $5000, or $500. Both ad impressions and clickthroughs are counted, so as long as people are looking at your website, you are sure to generate revenue through Wingspan.

Wingspan is currently invitation-only, but if you’re a webmaster who’s running a website about Delphi (the programming language), then you’re invited.

To sign up, head over to http://adserver.wingspanadnet.com/signup/invitation?invite=1 and follow the directions.

There is more information at http://www.wingspanadnet.com.

The spam problem has officially gotten out of control.

We all know that there are programs out there that mine email addresses from the web.  We also know that when you get spam, the “reply-to” address is never valid – it’s just someone else’s address being “spoofed” in the mail headers.

Well, this morning the public TwoDesk contact address became someone’s spoof, and now we’re getting thousands of “Message Undeliverable” and other such messages.  This is called “Backscatter,” and it’s VERY annoying.  We’re going to see if it subsides in a day or two, and if it doesn’t, we’ll have to turn that address off and come up with a “cleaner” way of dealing with public contacts.

In the meantime, we’re just trying to stay on top of it and create some rules to get rid of the majority of the backscatter messages.  Of course, it’s possible that a rule may catch something you send us, so if you send us an email and don’t get a response within 24 hours, assume you got caught in the backscatter and try again.

I’d also be interested in people’s suggestions on how to deal with backscatter, or spam in general.

I’m excited to announce Castalia 2008.1, the first of Castalia update of 2008.

Here’s what’s new:

New features

* QuickBar – Fast access to tools that help you maintain your code.
* Syntax error correction – Castalia can correct common syntax errors with a single button click
* Bookmark stack swap – swap the current cursor position with the next bookmark in the bookmark stack

Enhanced Features

* Templates now expand class and method names in whitespace.
* Better handling of read-only files in refactoring
* New default code template: begine
* Text search toolbar now has option to integrate into code editor, instead of being a floating window.

Fixed Bugs

* Using arrow keys with selected text sometimes causes selection to be lost
* Keyword ‘in’ not properly formatted when refactoring
* ‘Extract Method’ refactoring unavailable when the selection begins with a comment
* Extract Method (and others) – an extra space is inserted between ) and then, i.e. “if (1 = 1) then” becomes “if (1 = 1) then”

Other

* Improved “plumbing” for better interaction with OpenToolsAPI

Customers with current subscriptions can download Castalia 2008.1 from the subscriber website at http://subscribe.twodesk.com. If your subscription has expired, you can still renew it at http://subscribe.twodesk.com.

If you haven’t tried Castalia lately, now is a great time to try it. Download a free trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia.

A newsgroup post in borland.public.delphi.non-technical pointed to an interesting computerworld article: The 8 secrets that make Apple No. 1. I’ve long thought that Apple offers something to learn for every technology business out there, from the biggest corporate monster to a part-time one-man operation.

My favorite “secret” was number 4: The product is the product

“The bigger companies get, the less energy they seem to spend on creating great products. Instead, whenever the CEOs of most computer and consumer electronics companies speak in public, they blather on about alliances, services, improvements in the sales channel and other things buyers don’t care about. Apple CEO Steve Jobs talks about the actual products above all.

“One of the weird things about buying a cell phone is carriers are clearly more interested in selling you plans, options and reliability. The physical handsets seem to be an afterthought. But consumers are crying out for better handsets, and the carriers don’t seem to notice. Apple does notice.”

This perfectly described my cell phone carrier. The service has been great. The coverage is good, the plans are good. But the handset selection is abysmal. Is it that hard for a cellular provider to offer me the handset I want (which their competitors are offering) on their network that they’re convinced is the most reliable in the world?

Anyway…

It’s interesting to contemplate what this means for TwoDesk – are we focusing on creating great products? Are we focusing on creating a great experience for those who use our products? I think we’re doing alright, especially with the new subscription business model that forces us to emphasize continual improvement. I don’t think we’ve perfected it though, and we could do better.

Secret number 3 was The experience is the product

When Castalia 5 came out a year ago, this was the major emphasis… what did it feel like to use Castalia? One thing that didn’t feel good was the flickering in the editor. So I spent months – literally – figuring out what was going on deep under the hood in Delphi, and then completely rewrote the entire Castalia graphics engine. It was the biggest rewrite since Castalia 2. The result was amazing, and Castalia 5 has been our best seller ever. I think that’s partially because of the great new features we added, but I think it’s mostly because those barriers of “it just feels bad” were finally removed.

That said, I still think there’s room for improvement, and I’m excited about what we’ve got in the pipe for the future to make the experience – and the product -better.

I’m excited to announce today some important changes here at TwoDesk Software Company.  Our mission has always been to make your work easier and more enjoyable, and these changes will go a long way towards accomplishing that.

To start out, I’d like to describe the problem that we want to solve:

Our flagship product, Castalia, is all about bleeding-edge IDE technology.  For example, Castalia was the first to add real, significant refactoring capabilities to the Delphi IDE, Castalia was the first to add live syntax checking to Delphi, and Castalia was the first to add inline variable declaration to Delphi, among many other “firsts” and “bests.”

Of course, being in that “bleeding-edge” business, things move fast.  We have new ideas all the time; there are new things we want to give you, new tools we want to put in your hands.

But, we can’t just put every new feature we create into the product as soon as it’s done.  If we did that, then there would never be any reason for you to upgrade to a new version, and we’d go out of business.  That’s bad for us AND bad for you.

So, we have to sit on these new features, sometimes for more than a year, until the time is right for a new major version release.

…Or do we?

Effective today, we are eliminating the concept of a “new version” from the TwoDesk product line.  Instead, we aim to release an update about every quarter, which will include not only bugfixes and minor enhancements, but major new features as well!  New ideas will go right into the product and into your hands, without us sitting on them forever before you actually see them.

This is very exciting to me, because I won’t have to wait for a year or more to get my work to you, and get your feedback on it, and then make it even better.

This also means that we are moving to a subscription-based business for our products.

Let me make one thing very clear up front: Your license to use one of our products will NEVER expire.

Subscriptions give you access to continued updates (via the customer service website at http://subscribe.twodesk.com).  If you decide not to renew your subscription, your license does not expire – you can keep using the software as long as you like, you just won’t get the quarterly updates.

Nitty-gritty details:

Customers who bought Castalia 5 have been given a one-year subscription from their original date of purchase.

Customers who bought Castalia 3 or 4, but did not purchase Castalia 5, have been given retroactive subscriptions that expired on Jan 1, 2007.

You can check your expiration date at http://subscribe.twodesk.com, using the same password that you used on the old customer service site (which was at http://my.twodesk.com).

We are very excited about this change in our business, and the motivation it will provide us to get great new features out to you sooner, rather than later.