Take note, Core Data programmers, something stupid is afoot, and it’s even documented.

If you pass object URIs around like candy within your program for things like drag-and-drop or token fields or any other representation of your objects and then have to get the object back, use objectRegisteredForID instead of objectWithID.

When you use objectWithID you should note that it will never return nil to you on failure. It will create an invalid object and leave it astray in your managed object context preventing your users from saving their document unless you track it down and delete it. What they get instead is the following in the console.log:Read more

Instead of dumping people into either a web forum or Trac, there’s now a middle ground. I’ve installed the Project module for Drupal and have it working quite well now.

Notae’s project page allows you to file support requests, enhancement requests, and bugs as needed. The support page has been updated to show this as the primary means of obtaining official support for the product.

The web forum has been demoted to user-based support and something I’ll get around to reading every few days. :) But, really, I envision the forum as users talking to users about using the product rather than support.Read more

I’m calling it. I’m tired of preparing. No new bugs filed in two weeks and all the old ones deferred or fixed. The only thing left was the help book and while I got a start on it, my brain is fried.

It’s here, it’s done. Come and get it. It’s a free upgrade to you 1.x users and it should come down the auto-update pipe on your next launch. You’ll be prompted to convert your documents, so save the new one with a new name somewhere and use it from there. Otherwise, you’re golden.

You’ll notice a redesigned Notae product page, too. I want to thank the guys on the MacSB list and IRC channel for their ideas and help with that. I appreciate it a lot.

Oh, and if you haven’t bought a license, it just went up to $29. Tough. Well, okay, not so tough. Until 1/31/07 you can use the coupon LAUNCHSPECIAL at checkout to get 50% off (the old price). It’s a transition, so I’m being nice. :)

Update: Also, I’ve modified the volume license. If you get a second copy, the price drops to $20 each. It drops pretty fast and as you get to the point where you’re outfitting an office or lab it’ll hit rock-bottom at $10/seat in bulk.Read more

I could dance around this in so many ways but it wouldn’t be honest. Notae 2.0 is worth more than $15.

After thinking about it for a while, I think it needs to be priced in its class. That said, I want to reward those that have supported the program as far so while the price is going up, the serial numbers will not change and your version 1.x numbers will work for 2.0.

Why bother, one might ask? When you look at a car that everyone’s going crazy over and it’s priced at $12K, what’s your first thought? “Piece of crap. You gotta wonder how they’re making ‘em so cheap.” Yet, if you look at a car priced at $18K or $22K, then you give it some credit and start to actually look at it. People do the same with software. While I’m happy selling it at $15, the market is selling things with an average price of $35/40. If you look at them (especially Mori and Yojimbo) and compare to Notae 2.0 you’ll see that there’s little difference. Each of us has some give-and-take, but the core is the same. Why are they worth more? They’re not, really, and that’s one of the many reasons I made Notae: I wasn’t going to pay $39 for something I could write myself (in hindsight, this past year of my life might have been worth more than $39).Read more

The third beta expired today, I know. I’m going to have something out later today. Check back in a few hours or tomorrow morning.

If you need to use it right now just set your clock back for a moment, open Notae, and then fix the clock.

Until the 25th, Notae and a whole lot of other software is 20% off over at Mac Santa.

And yes, the developers are getting paid on this one. ;)

Just to clear up some confusion for many of the folks emailing me: the beta really is an open beta. The registration is just to file bugs. Now, of course, I’d love to have everyone filing bugs on 2.0, but it’s not strictly required. Just hit the development site and download a copy to start playing with it. That copy will expire on December 15th.

Also, if you’re testing, it would be very good to subscribe to the beta mailing list as well. It’s linked off the main development page.

Dragging and dropping a Core Data object between documents is a little bit of hell. The reason for this is that they aren’t NSCoding compliant and there’s no easy way to do it because initWithCoder: doesn’t let you set the managed object context to whatever the current one is. So the solution for copying, and thus for drag and drop, has been to gather a list of properties for the object and then send that over in the drag and then decode that on the other end.

Well, I found a rather quick way of doing this, and one that’s really quite easy and keeps maintenance of the data types to copy and set completely in the model (always good). Implement a method on your model object called dictionaryRepresentation and return an NSDictionary with property list types for all your data. Ensure that the keys used in the dictionary correspond to the KVC properties of your model object. To recreate the object at the other end, insert an object of the proper type into the MOC and then use the really freaking handy NSObject method setValuesForKeysWithDictionary: and pass it that dictionary. It will then iterate over it using your KVC methods and add everything back in.Read more

A question for those that care about such things.

When you have autosave turned on, do you expect that closing the document will automatically save it without prompting?

Pro: You’ve already committed to having your data saved without your requesting it.

Con: While a document is open, there’s always undo. Once you’ve closed it, you’re stuck with what you’ve got.

Caveat: I’d rather not have to add a preference to change this behavior. It should “just work.”

Thoughts?

So far, I have the following done:

New FeaturesRead more

• Supports multiple note types, including rich text, PDF (read-only), and Web Archive (read-only).
• Imports Web Archive, URLs, and HTML files on-disk as web notes.
• Imports PDF files on-disk as PDF notes.
• Exports to iPod as textual notes, even to multiple iPods at once.
• Full-screen editing mode.
• Tags browser makes it much easier to find notes without searching.
• Note header makes editing tags and renaming much easier.
• New option to do nothing at startup.
• Table area supports the Home/End/Delete keys as one would expect.

• Complete Unified appearance. Pinstripes are dead.