Delicious Library 2.0.3 Released

The big changes in this release are mostly around publishing and subscribing to friends' libraries, with some publishing methods being re-written from scratch, and every method being tweaked in some way. As well, a common issue where it would appear Delicious Library 2 is being extremely slow when in fact it was loading a friend's collection from the internet (often unbeknownst to the owner!) has been fixed, as well.

Automatic currency conversion works much better in this release, so users with collections whose values are in mixed currencies will now find that their items correctly sort by their real relative value. Delicious Library 2 is the only catalog application on any platform that automatically tracks the world's currencies.

---

Existing 2.0 customers will be automatically upgraded when they launch the app, or they can download the latest version from its usual home at http://delicious-monster.com/download.

Here are the release notes for 2.0.3 only, and the release notes for all 2.0.x releases together .

I'm pretty happy with this release — I've fixed some issues that were really ruining Delicious Library 2 for some users, and I have been feeling just awful about that. As always, if you have problems please check out our support pages.

-Wil

Wanted: Bugs. $100. Cash money.

I need my beta releases of Delicious Library 2 to be tested, for serious; otherwise I might miss things I've broken when I was fixing other things, and put out a general release that has new bugs in it in addition to the fixes. Nobody likes that.

I've never had much luck with full-time paid testers. I'd happily go this route if I thought it'd work, but, honestly, in 25 years of writing software, I've NEVER had a paid beta-tester that found half as many bugs as volunteer beta testers. It's a mind-numbingly boring job to test software, and one naturally tends to fall into patterns and test the same things over and over. It takes a variety of users, who actually _use_ the software because they want it, to discover things like, "Shelves without names can't be published to the iPhone." (This was a real bug, fixed in 2.0.3.) I would never think to create a shelf and not name it, then publish it.

There are a million issues like this.

Here's the problem: volunteer beta testers generally like beta testing because they get to play with new software before anyone else. In the point releases I'm doing now (eg, 2.0.1, 2.0.2), I'm not really adding features (well, one or two), I'm just making Delicious Library 2 more robust. That's, like, not very exciting to test.

So, I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to offer EVERYONE the possibility of making $100 by finding and reporting a regression bug in a current beta release, which I think is important enough to fix. Note that it has to be a "regression" bug, which I define as "this worked in a previous 2.x release, but doesn't work in the current beta release."

Note that I'm also ONLY offering this bounty on the current beta, not on production releases. The logic is, if you find a bug on the product AFTER I've released it, well, the horse has already left the barn — my customers are already affected by the bug. You have to find the bugs BEFORE I release them to the public.

The latest beta is always at: http://delicious-monster.com/downloads/Delicious%20Library%202%20Beta/DeliciousLibrary2.zip - I rebuild that every few days, and the build number in the about panel will go up. (Note that if the beta build number is less than the current release build number, there's nothing to test right at the moment.)

The latest release notes will always be here: http://delicious-monster.com/downloads/Delicious%20Library%202%20Beta/DeliciousLibrary2.html.

Here's the rules, to hopefully make some lawyers happy:

• Bugs should contain the word "regression" in their title in order to be found for this hunt.
  
• Bugs have to be filed by either sending mail to <bugs@delicious-monster.com> or by using the in-application bug reporter. Don't send 'em to me directly. Don't post 'em.
  
• You can report multiple bugs and get multiple prizes. However, if you report a bunch of crap, we'll start ignoring you.
  
• I have to think the bug is important enough that I fix it before I do the real release in order for you to get the bounty.
  
• If multiple people report a bug, I'll only give money to the first person who reported it. (Well, I might give money to multiple people, but I'm not promising anything.)
  
• I'll use a reasonable effort to find the earliest person who reported any particular regression bug, but I might not find your report. Use good keywords to make sure that I'll be able to look up your bug - all awards are final.
  
• I've initially set aside a $4,000 for this. Beyond that, I may increase the budget or may discontinue the bounties.
  
• If it's not legal for you to get money for this (like, your country doesn't allow it, or something), then I can't pay you.
  
• If this whole thing ends up being illegal, then I'll cancel it.
  
• I can cancel this at any time by posting in this blog. (I'll do this if I'm just not getting good reports, for example, and this turns out to be not worth the hassle.)
  

Obviously, if you want to only use stable software, stick to the latest release builds, which are always at: http://delicious-monster.com/downloads/DeliciousLibrary.dmg. If you're a current version two user, note that by default your application will auto-update itself whenever a new release build comes out, but NOT to beta versions — you have to go get the first one of those yourself, using the link above.

So, remember: Only regressions, in beta versions, from 2.0, that I fix. $100. Cash money. (Well, check, unless you insist.)

We'll see if this works, and if people like it. If not, meh, nothing lost. At least we're trying new things!

Happy hunting!
-Wil

Support Update.

As of July 15 Terry managed to get caught up with all our support mail, which was a Herculean achievement. We'd received about 35,000 e-mails in the two months since Delicious Library 2 was launched, and Terry sorted through most of them herself. (We respond to every request for help, but for bug reports we usually file them without a response.) Sure, a lot of that was spam, but a LOT of it wasn't. She got a very large bonus check on that day and we had a huge party where we rented the best restaurant in town and invited a ton of people and got kind of drunk and watched Step Up 2.

We've also opened a new forum on Get Satisfaction, which has this neat logo that you can click on to join in:

Woot! Both Terry and I are on there, and we have RSS feeds to it in our browser windows, so every day when we are on the web we see anyone who posts there. I can't promise we'll respond personally to everything, since part of the point of having a forum is to allow customers to talk to each other, but we'll try very hard to stay active on this forum (assuming it doesn't get over-run with crazy noise-posts — we aren't moderators on Get Satisfaction, so we're curious to see how the site will deal with miscreants as it expands).

We've linked to these forums on our help page as well, so if you have an issue that's not in the FAQ we've made you can look it up on the forums without having to leave that page. I think that's nifty.

Again, I apologize that we were caught so flat-footed by this deluge of e-mail, and especially apologize to those of you who wrote us and ended up waiting a month for a response. But, we're caught up now, so if you have a support problem that has NOT been responded to and it's been more than four days, please write again — we finished the whole mailbox, so either we never got your mail or your spam filters ate our response. (The mail comes from kind of a funny address, so check your spam box.) Note again that if you filed a bug we usually will NOT respond unless we need more information or have something fixed and are offering to let you test it.

Thank you, as always, for being our customer.

-Wil

Delicious Library 2 has Arrived!

We've been working on Delicious Library 2 since November of 2004, with six months out to do internationalization of Delicious Library 1.5, and four or so months to rewrite iSight scanning for internal iSights in Delicious Library 1.6 . Delicious Library 1.0 only took seven months to write, so, obviously, this one was a lot harder.

There are over a hundred new features in 2, and hundreds more bug fixes. I'm very proud of it, and very exhausted. I could blah blah blah a lot about it, but basically the entire delicious-monster.com website has been re-written to sell DL2, so please explore it.

Or why not just download it from http://www.delicious-monster.com/downloads/DeliciousLibrary2.zip — I mean, it's free to try out, and DL2 makes a copy of your Delicious Library 1 collection so you can always go back.

Note that DL2 only runs on Leopard, so I'm going to keep selling Delicious Library 1 as long as there is interest, but for $20 instead of $40. However, the free upgrade offer from DL1 to DL2 ends at midnight on May 26, 2008 (with the lowering of DL1's price), so if you later buy Leopard it'll cost $20 to go to DL2 as well. This totals to $40, which is what DL1 alone cost before May 27, so it's not really much of a change except you have to pay less up-front, which I figure nobody will complain about.

Delicious Library 1 isn't currently linked from the main site (I'm not sure where to put it) but you can get it from http://www.delicious-monster.com/downloads/DeliciousLibrary.dmg.

-Wil

Localization

A week or so ago Wil gave me a generous time budget and one simple mission: solicit localizations in as many languages as possible, no matter how underrepresented they are in our user base. I pondered the wisdom in those words for a while, then banged out a post on my indelicately-named blog.

The gist of it was this: universities and other organizations trying to preserve pre-colonial languages should help software developers localize their applications. If you're going to truly preserve a language, people must be able to live in that language, including time spent at their computers.

Unfortunately, post-colonial nations are often economically disadvantaged, and public universities are themselves frequently starved for funds. Why would you be interested in localizing an application you can't afford?

Any developer would happily exchange a copy of their application for a localization, but Wil decided to take our initiative one further.

If you are part of a reasonably-sized non-profit organization — or a reasonably-sized department within a non-profit — and you would be willing to localize Delicious Library, we will grant you a site license. When Delicious Library 2 comes out, we'll upgrade you for free.

I hope that will provide a very real monetary answer to the question of "what's in it for me?" Localizers will also have their names listed on the credits panel within Delicious Library 2.

There's also a larger, less tangible benefit. Assuming this crazy plan works and people start adding localizations to Delicious Library, other developers are going to notice. Delicious Library is frequently held up, by Apple and others, as an example of best practices in the industry. If you want developers to start localizing their applications in your language, localizing Delicious Library is a great first step.

So, OK, great, but what if you don't have a lot of time, or access to a Mac? No problem; we've developed special localization routines as part of our Golden%Braeburn project to eliminate the need for any special tools. All you do is translate lists of strings. There are about 30 lists, but most of them have just a few items.

Please drop us a line if you're interested.

Unscheduled Store and E-mail downtime.

Starting Thursday, January 31, two of our host machine lost internet access. The DSL people are working on this, but I am told it may take from five to seven(!) days.

Our website is up but our store is down, so you cannot buy Delicious Library until the DSL is restored. We also are not able to read or answer support mail right now, but we're hoping to come up with an early workaround for getting to the support mail, so we can at least keep our existing customers happy.

I apologize for this outage, and any inconvenience it causes. Believe me, I am literally sick about this.

Chief Monster,
-Wil Shipley

Thank You for Complaining.

I wrote a semi-famous web comic creator recently, after reading his strip for years. I'd written him a couple years ago, telling him I liked the strip, but, I said in this latest message, I felt his strip had lost its heart recently, and I told him specifically what it was that I thought caused the change.

I ended with this:

I'm sorry to just write to you and complain -- I know you put a huge amount of effort into the strip, and obviously I read it every day, and enjoy it. I've written you before as an unadulterated fan, so now I feel like maybe it's ok to write you as a freelance critic.

As always, I recognize you are a famous cartoonist and I am not, so I expect my comments to be placed in an appropriate context.

His replay was scathing, asking why I'd bothered to write him, since I was clearly not going to change the strip, and thus must be intending only to hurt him, and told me my account with him was "heavily overdrawn." (?) He invited me to post on his fan forums so that his supporters could tear me a new one, which I declined to do.

--

I thought about this interaction with regards to my own business. I must honestly say that, yes, when people write me to tell me I have disappointed them, there is a part of me that gets all ruffled up. And if a customer is rude on top of that, it's often very tough to bite my tongue and just politely say, "I am so sorry you aren't satisfied, please let me refund your money."

But I do so. Not because I am a saint, or because you are the Customer -- I do so because I realize that when you take the time to complain to me, you are paying me an incredible compliment. I believe you have better things to do with your time than try to make me feel bad. You are complaining because you want to like my software, but something got in your way. And you're trying to help me get rid of that thing. Trying to make my product better, so you can give me money.

When you think of it that way, it's a hell of a nice thing you are doing. Go you!

Of course, sometimes my honest answer has to be: I'm sorry, the software I'm writing isn't really intended to do everything, and what you're asking for is outside of my focus. Or, sometimes I have to say: I'm sorry, you are really the only person who has asked for this, and my gut feeling is that it's not a feature that'd be popular, and there are only two programmers here -- and, who knows, after MacWorld maybe Mike Lee will be on the iPhone team with all my other ex-employees and there will only be one. (Joke!)

But you should know that the top five new features in Delicious Library 2, the REALLY BIG features, the ones that won us the ONLY Apple Design Award EVER given to a beta piece of software (have I mentioned that before?) -- those were your ideas. They are literally our top five requests from you. We collate each piece of mail we receive and keep running scores.

I thank you for that. And I thank you for every complaint you send us. Some we can just solve by explaining something that wasn't clear -- and we learn to make that clearer in the future. Some we can patch in a future release. Some we can't fix, and we'll give you your money back. But, no matter what, in the end we have more happy customers AND fewer unhappy ones, and that's the basis of our business.

It's not just that I get an altruistic thrill out of making people happy: it's that satisfied customers have made both of my software companies very successful. It's always been our theory that the only advertising we really NEED is happy customers, and over the past 17 years of business, I think we've proven that theory.

So thank you for complaining. And -- as much as Mike (and now Terry, our new support gal) will hate me for it -- please keep it up. Please send us your feedback. We'll try very hard to make you happy.

That's our job, and we work for you.

-Wil