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Registration redux Just when we thought this topic was finished, we discovered an issue with our registration code system. It turns out there was a bug in our current line of applications which could result in valid registration codes being refused by the applications if the YENCO.COM site happened to be down (as it was a bit this weekend due to a server problem at our web host). Fortunately the issue actually was duplicated in the new framework. I say fortunately because with our new checkpoints in place we were quickly able to find the bump in the road and repair it with a couple of modifications. Registration system upgrade YENCO.COM is a small shareware company with very limited resources where, not only does every registration help to ensure that our products continue to be improved, but more importantly that YENCO.COM remains in business to work on those improvements. The majority of our users are honest, decent people who understand this and have done their part to help support our efforts. To them, we say a big "Thank you". Unfortunately that majority is not 100%. Who let the bugs out? While YENCO.COM strives to make our software bug free, it never seems to fail that sooner or later one or two of these nasty critters gets into the code and causes havoc. Typically when this happens, a user is kind enough to send us feedback with a comment like: "It doesn't work". While that may be a true statement, it hardly helps in our quest to seek, locate and exterminate the bug. Some Mac OS X users in the past have also tried to be helpful by sending along a copy of the crash log that pops up when an application unexpectedly quits. Unfortunately this rarely helps us because Mac OS X is interacting more with the SuperCard foundation sitting directly on top of it rather than our code sitting on top of that foundation and so what is returned is typically very low-level cryptic data and 99.9% of the time it is something in our code rather than SuperCard that is at fault. So that is when we start playing a game of 20 Questions with the user and hope that we ask the right question that will help isolate the problem. Building the future It's official. YENCO.COM is dropping Mac OS 9 support from our applications going forward. For one thing, the percentage of active users running our applications under Mac OS 9 is growing smaller every day as more and more users make the switch to Mac OS X (see chart below). But more importantly, building on top of Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X is a bit like constructing a building on a fault line. While originally the two halves were rather level, the Mac OS 9 side has been constantly subsiding for the last 5 years and will continue to do so. The rock-solid foundation of SuperCard continues to hold up, but unfortunately the kind of applications YENCO.COM builds on top of that foundation are doing a bit of a balancing act. Recently this has become more of a problem as implementing several user requested features would simply topple the structure like a poorly played game of Jenga. So, as you can see in the graphic at the top of this page, we are moving on. "X" marks the perfect spot for our starting point with a myriad of fantastic technologies. |
July 2005: |
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