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Macworld 2010: David Chartier talks 1Password
You never know who's going to turn up at the TUAW booth; could be a former blogger coming to say hello, could be a representative of the company that makes a much-loved Mac & iPhone utility... but the odds of both of those things happening at the same exact time? That can only mean one thing: our old friend David Chartier in the hot seat to tell us about all the 1Password news.
10.5.6 update still a work in progress
Although they speculated that Mac OS X 10.5.6 (not to be confused with 10.6, "Snow Leopard") could arrive by November 21, there is still work to be done on the release, according to Ars Technica's David Chartier. Apple is asking reviewers of this latest build, 9G52, to test MobileMe's automatic syncing on "networks with medium-to-high latency or constrained bandwidth." Apple might be trying to improve MobileMe syncing; anecdotal evidence suggests that for many, syncing is still not up to snuff. Second, Apple wants users of non-Latin languages like Hangul, Kototeri, Traditional Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic to use Mail, in order to test its support of non-Latin character sets. Even so, 9G52 fixes over 100 issues. Full notes on the build are available in the second part of this story. There's no word on when the update will be released, but we'll likely have to be patient for a little while longer. Like my mom always said when baking, "it'll be ready when it's finished."
Xtorrent and Inquisitor officially out of beta
When it comes to 'lickable' interface design, there's no question that indie Mac developer David Watanabe is a top practitioner. His latest projects, the BitTorrent client Xtorrent (discussed here in beta form) and Safari search extender Inquisitor v3 are both debuting as full-fledged, bye-bye-beta products today. Inquisitor is free, and Xtorrent's Pro mode will set you back $20; the unregistered version has a download speed throttle among other limitations.Xtorrent's journey through the beta process has resulted in some criticisms leveled: for the use of open-source code from the Transmission project that may cause problems with some torrent trackers, and for Mr. Watanabe's sometimes brusque approach to customer service. While I can't speak to the tracker issues (in general, if one torrent client doesn't work for you, try another), we have an example of good end-user experience handling with Xtorrent and a point raised by our own David Chartier about the rather harsh phrasing of the license entry dialog (over here on this Flickr thread, of all places). The developer responded to the criticism not only with a rephrased dialog (requiring a new build) but also with a license code recovery page on the Xtorrent website. Well played, sir.
