Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Watson 1.7.4 just went out the door today. Not much exciting to talk about this time; it's really just a bugfix release. Here's the full change list:

• Bug fixed: When hidden, application was revealing itself when it periodically checks for updates
• Bug fixed: Preference to re-open last used tool was conflicting with LaunchBar.
• TV Listings: Restored additional airings list; minor bugfixes.
• Amazon, Packages: Minor bugfixes.

A few Watson tool updates got streamed out today:

Phone Listings

to 1.7.3.1, caught up with web site changes that were breaking business searches in the US

TV Listings

to 1.7.3.7, this was actually a bugfix (rather than responding to a server change) that was causing strange behavior when changing your tvguide.com profile while running Watson.

Also, the third-party "iMedia" tool got a minor update today as well.

I have some links to share to various interesting sites ... Many of them courtesy of "those who cannot be named", some from my random collection of bookmarks.

• Will the next San Francisco Mayor be a Replicant?
• Defragmenting your hard drive
• The Worst Jobs in Science
• Another mind-reading site
• Acme products catalog
• Verisign has gone too far!
• Cocoa Source Code from Scotland Software

Here's an idea for Safari: Many web sites/pages now offer an RSS feed equivalent of their contents, not unlike this weblog! As RSS is getting more and more popular, it would be cool if Safari would detect the presence of an RSS feed (through the <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" ... > tag) and activate a UI element on its toolbar that the user could use to drag to their favorite news reading program .... Say, NetNewsWire.

Earlybird registration ends tomorrow (Sept 12) for O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference. I will be presenting a talk called "The Future of Web Services Applications." Other speakers that should have some great presentations include Robb Beal, Bill Bumgarner (bbum), Adam C. Engst, Andy Ihnatko, Lowell Schneider, Tim Monroe, Sal Soghoian, ... OK, you get the idea.

Users of Apple's Mail program are used to seeing pictures attached to people's email messages, but only if they are .mac users.

I noticed a tip on Mac OS X Hints that led me down a path towards installing my picture on my outgoing mail messages, even though I don't use a mac.com account.

The trick: use the terminal to specify a custom header to be attached to your outgoing mail messages. Here is mine, what I had typed into the terminal to add the preference to Mail (while it's not running):

defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"X-Image-Url" = "http://www.karelia.com/dan_watson.jpg"; }'

If you have a web site where you can put your own 64x64 image, you can make your image available to other Mac users as well!

Today, a new batch of minor updates to Watson tools, too late to make it into the recent 1.7.3 release.

• Epicurious - Fixed a bug where web pages wouldn't be opened in the background, even if the user had specified that preference
• Movies - If you specify a large city (e.g. "San Francisco, CA") in the settings drawer, you will now be notified that you need to enter a Zip code instead, so it can locate your exact neighborhood.
• Pricegrabber - Installed an updated database
• TV Listings - a few more tweaks to yesterday's unanticipated major update:
  • Searching should now work consistently better
  • Data should now be copied to iCal and EyeTV correctly
  • Removed formatting problems for certain grid items
  • Added [cc] to grid listings that specify it

Today, it looks like tvguide.com unveiled a major revamp to their Web site ... but as a result, Watson had to play catch-up again.

Alas, this change in their site affected some functionality of the Watson tool. Now, users need to establish a free account on TVGuide.com, as if they were viewing the listings through their web browser. (Of course, the listings look like $#$#$#%$#@$ with Safari, but OK on Internet Explorer. But I digress.)

Then, in the Watson TV Listings tool, just set the e-mail address you used with TVGuide.com. Functionality is restored!

(Actually, the VCR Plus code listing had to go, but now we get to see whether a show is Closed-Captioned by a [CC] in the detail window.)

Now playing on iTunes: Running to stand still by U2....

A new version of Watson came out today -- 1.7.3. Not a lot has been updated, but it should make many Watson users -- you know who you are -- very happy!

Highlights:

When the application is launched, any auto-updated tools will not require re-launching of the application.

As promised, this feature will be a real time-saver.

New preference: "Download updates to tools without asking."

In conjunction with the above feature, updates should be almost seamless.

New preference: "When Launching, automatically select the most recently used tool."

Now if you "live" in a particular tool, you can always switch right to that tool when the application launches.

[Direct Download Link]

Watson users are used to the annoyance of having to re-launch Watson when it downloads updates to its tools. You know the drill: Launch Watson. Get notified of tools to update. Wait for them to download. Quit Watson, and then launch it again.

This has generated many complaints and requests to improve things. Until now, I had thought that there wasn't a workaround -- Cocoa doesn't allow you to "unload" a plugin once it has been loaded, so you have to re-launch to get the new plugins recognized by Watson. Well, it turns out that there are ways to detect the version of a plugin without actually loading it. For the technically inclined readers, it's using CFBundle in place of NSBundle to do the checking part.

This means that a forthcoming version of Watson will not require relaunching. I think I will include a preference to allow the updates to come through without notification, so that you can avoid even being aware that an update has taken place, as long as you are on a reasonably fast connection.