Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Urgh! We've had to play catch-up with eBay again and so now there is a new version of the eBay tool released today. Sorry about the frequent updates, but hopefully things will be settled down soon.

The eBay tool has just been updated to 1.7.2.2, to catch up with a change on eBay's site that had broken searching.

The Weather tool was updated as well (to 1.7.2.1) to fix some problems with doppler radar for certain locations.

A couple of fixes streamed out today -- one for the Package Tracking tool, to fix UPS tracking problems; one with a few fixes for eBay including fixing a bug where certain columns couldn't be resized, and an elusive problem affecting only Panther users.

Wow. This Post in Sujal Shah's weblog talks about some really amazing news for him. Sujal, as you may know, is the author of some of Watson's cool contributed tools, the Football and Baseball scores ones. Well, based on these Watson plugins, he landed himself a job at ESPN.com!

A touchdown and a home run! Way to go, Sujal!

A minor update to Watson just went out the door; we're at version 1.7.2 now.

As promised, it's more or less 'Panther'-compatible. There were a few glitches in the developer release of Panther that we had to work around, and there are still a few issues remaining that weren't worth tackling right now, but it's definitely useable if you're one of the few thousand lucky Mac OS X developers with Panther already. Plus, it has one new Panther-only feature described previously.

Otherwise, this is just an update to take care of some problems. The READ ME file (the little newspaper icon next to the doctor's bag on the disk image, in case you hadn't noticed it) has the whole list, but here are a few highlights:

• eBay has been changing things on their servers over the last few days. Hopefully this catches up with them and things will start working properly all around.
• Due to the recent discovery of an incompatibility with NetBlockade (part of Internet Cleanup from Aladdin), Watson checks to see if it's installed (in kind of a fun way -- when Watson connects to the 'home base' server when it launches to check the status of tools, there's a simulated banner ad in there. If NetBlockade is installed, the 'banner' gets deleted, and Watson notices the change) and warns the user.
• After listening to user comments and playing around with the translation tool, I finally figured out a way to make it a bit easier to translate back and forth between two languages. When you change the source language to be the same as the current destination language, the destination language switches to the previously selected source language, rather than just choosing the first available language in the popup menu. For example to translate some text from Italian to English and then some other text from English to Italian, and then more text from Italian to English, I would just alternate between 'English' and 'Italian' in the Source menu, and the Destination menu will take care of itself!
• The preference to not notify the user when there is a new 'What's new' message has been extended to also turn off the announcements of new minor tool updates. Many users have expressed annoyance with Watson demands their attention when it is not the frontmost application, and I can't say I blame them.

Onward and upward!

O'Reilly had announced the 2003 Mac OS X Conference, taking place in Santa Clara, California in October. Lots of Mac dignitaries and visionaries will be speaking at the conference. I'll be there as well, talking about "The Future of Web Services."

Four months to get those slides together ... I hope that's enough time! :-)

Today, the eBay tool got update to play catch-up with the Web site.

And .. get ready for a (minor) update to the application, some time in the next few days. Nothing particularly newsworthy in this update, but for those who are lucky enough to have been seeded with Panther, this version is more or less compatible with it, and even takes advantage of one of Panther's new features.

Watson users should be aware that some incompatibilities between Watson and Aladdin System's Internet Cleanup (specifically, the NetBlockade feature) are incompatible.

If you are using Watson, you need to disable the NetBlockade feature of Internet Cleanup. (There may be a way of keeping NetBlockade active while allowing Watson to function without it, but I haven't had a chance to investigate this.)

Technical explanation (optional): NetBlockade inserts itself into your system so that any web page is passed through their filters to remove popup windows and banner ads from your web browsers. The trouble is that in many cases, Watson relies on Web pages being formatted a particular way, and the changes to the pages that NetBlockade makes can be a bit too drastic for Watson to handle.