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I was bored yesterday, and decided to pass the time by browsing some web server logs. After finding nothing of interest on guardian’s logs (apart from all the 404 errors from previously hosted people who don’t know how to update links), I moved on to my (mt) logs. Now, I’ve written about my (mt) account before, but this time I have something important to note. And that is that:

Wallsaver has been downloaded over 260,000 times.

Wow. I haven’t even had 260,000 hits to visits of my sites. Combined. Had I decided to charge money for Wallsaver (which seems like it would have been a good idea; I was thinking $1.99), I’d have $520,000! (Okay, I know I wouldn’t have that much. 1 download isn’t the same as 1 user. Some where around 50% of the downloads are people updating to the newest version. Even the estimated $50,000 is still a LOT of money.)

Who knows, I just might release Wallsaver 3.0 as shareware @ $1.99. I can think of quite a few uses of $50,000.

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After weeks of pixel-by-pixel tweaking in Photoshop, perfecting CSS in Smultron, and refreshing browsers (Safari, IE, and Firefox), I’m pleased to announce the launch of the new Wallsaver 2.0 website at www.wallsaverapp.com.

This new website is a much needed update to the text-and-random-image based version currently hosted on the NWW Network website (which will have its own update soon). There’s plenty of AJAXy goodness and rounded corners for everyone. Everything was custom designed from the ground up, and is (mostly) standards compliant and looks great in pretty much any browser.

There are some issues with the way Internet Explorer 6.0 and lower handles transparent PNGs and CSS padding, so in order to preserve the viewing experience the entire site is disabled to users browsing via IE. The images below show the warning message and just how bad IE6 is with standards compliance.

Read the rest of this entry »

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While working on a new design for NWW Network, I decided it was time to dedicate a domain to Wallsaver. I’m planning on releasing Wallsaver v2 alongside the release of NWW Network v10.

In the meantime, a (quite salivating, if you ask me) teaser image (just a full screen version of the one above) has been set up at Wallsaver’s new website www.wallsaverapp.com.

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Wallsaver has been featured in Mac100%, a Japanese-language Mac magazine. I was contacted a short while ago by a Mac100% editor asking for permission to feature Wallsaver in a “software DVD” attached to the Spring issue of their magazine. Since any publicity for Wallsaver is good publicity, I granted the editor permission, and in return was sent a copy of the magazine.

Here’s the blurb, hopefully somebody can translate it for me. (Here’s to hoping it was a good review.)

While googling Wallsaver, I found that Apple’s downloads site lists Wallsaver as a “staff pick” (about half way down on this page) and is the 7th most popular download on this page.

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I made a bit of a mistake while writing Wallsaver 2.0.

Most people (unless they add third party screen savers) don’t have anything inside the “/Library/Screen Savers” or “~/Library/Screen Savers” folders. Because of a bug in the code (details below), a lot of people were given the following error:

Can’t make every file of «class ects» of alias "Macintosh HD:Library:Screen Savers:" into type «class alst». (-1700)

In the program, there’s a bit of code that adds all the screen savers in a folder to a list. The code will run if the folder is empty or even if the folder doesn’t exist.

The bad code:
set UserScreenSavers to (files of entire contents of UserScreenSaversPath) as alias list

The fix, as you can see, is quite simple. Simply throw the offending code into a try statement. If any part fails (i.e., the folder is empty or doesn’t exist), set the list to null.

The better code:

try
set UserScreenSavers to (files of entire contents of UserScreenSaversPath) as alias list

end try


Why didn’t I put in the try block from the beginning? On both of the computers I use to test software (yes, I do test my software), all three of the directories Wallsaver searches in for screen savers exist and have files in them. There was just no opportunity for the list population to fail.

Thank you to all the users of Wallsaver who quickly downloaded (some within 2 hours of the release) v2.0 and reported the bug. Your efforts helped in the v2.1 update being released as quickly as it did.

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