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June 20, 2007
Interesting perspective on open source
My good friend (from the internets!) Graham has made a post about his experiences with users of open source software.
I can't say my experiences have been any different, but I do think there is a 4th motivational factor. I would have put the following:
4) The developer wants the functionality, but doesn't want to/doesn't have the time to code it all as required.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 09:27 PM | Comments (1)
June 12, 2007
News site headaches, or MacUpdate sucks sometimes.
So for Perian 1.0 we're working on some screen casts. The guy who was working on the screen casts needed a build of Perian that had the 1.0 version number on it so he could show it with the right number. We set that up for him off of some really skank beta.
Today I got notified by multiple people about Perian 1.0 being out. This was certainly news to me. We had this problem on Adium before, someone would be overzealous and contact the update sites, and then they'd post a link to a beta, and we'd have to get them to pull it.
So I notified MacUpdate. I then found that VersionTracker also had posted it, I notified them as well.
Here's the response from VersionTracker:
Sorry, got an automated email about it's release and I assumed it was from the dev. Sorry for any trouble it caused.-Kurt
I considered that pretty nice.
Here's what I got from MacUpdate:
Chris, We post software that is released to the public. That is our policy, as we clearly state on our bylaws page. i can understand your frustration, but the simple fix is to simply not make releases public if you don't want them public.-Joel Mueller
www.macupdate.com
The problem is, this software wasn't public. The URL was posted nowhere publicly available with the exception of an index that's not publicly available unless you type it by accident. I.E. it's not linked anywhere.
It's not about the fact that it's posted though, it's about the tone that Joel took here. He's been like this for a while, and it's frustrating. He makes advertising money off of people posting updates to their software on his website, and he treats people very, well, rudely.
I'd boycot MacUpdate, but that'd be pointless. Users post updates and if they don't he goes and finds them, or at least that's my impression of it. It's just frustrating.
The worst part is that it would take 2 seconds to verify the download by going to, get this, http://perian.org/.
This is the first time I've had versiontracker post something that wasn't released, and this is not the first time MacUpdate has done it.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 12:42 PM | Comments (7)
June 07, 2007
MacTech top 25
So I was in the MacTech top 25 most influential mac technical people list this year as an honoree. Neat I suppose.
For those who are unfamiliar with me, I work on Family, Adium, Growl and Perian.
Definitely check all of those out, I really enjoy working on them all. Perian is currently in a beta period, and Growl will start with a 1.1 beta shortly. I'll explain why Growl went from .7.x to 1.1 in another post.
I haven't posted a lot about myself in a while, so I'll also do that in some more posts.
Anyhow, welcome new people, subscribe to my blog with your rss reader of choice, I don't post very often on purpose so it won't be a huge amount of stuff to digest.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)