Design Space

Joe had ideas, lots of ideas, and quickly presented us with twenty (!). I thought they were all amazing in one way or another, and most of them were virtually ready to use. But we had to choose just one, to represent who we are. At this point, the task of redesigning an ugly website, which turned into the task of choosing a new company logo, seemed to turn into something more basic. We were asking ourselves the big questions: Who are we? What makes us who we are? Who do we want to be? We fumbled for labels and adjectives.

Two of the adjectives we settled on were “simple” and “clean”; they are two qualities we strive to achieve with our software, and important qualities for a good logo. “Memorable” was another; Fetch’s running dog cursor is not just there to entertain the user, it also makes the experience of using Fetch a little different, and a bit easier to remember. (We also “self-identified,” in therapy parlance, as “picky.”; more about that later.) And we recognized the importance of another label: we are the-company-that-makes-Fetch. Our choice of logo had to deal with the fact that people know us as the company that makes that program named for a game dogs play, and that has a dog icon, and plenty of doggy imagery and wordplay in its advertising, tradeshow giveaways and t-shirts.

Goldilocks and the Three Logos

With those criteria in mind we narrowed Joe’s menagerie of logo ideas to three: the dot, the jumping dog, and the dogtag. The dot was my initial favorite: its simplicity and cleverness was the sort of thing that had attracted us to Joe’s designs in the first place. The floating bright orange dot was as primitive and simple as shapes get, while challenging the viewer to see it as a thrown ball being chased by a tail-wagging pooch.

But I feared that the dot was too subtle — how many people would ever make the dot→ball→dog connection? I think it’s neat that the Amazon logo has an arrow from the A to the Z (they sell everything from A to Z, get it?), but I've yet to run into anyone else who even noticed. There is such a thing as being too cryptic. The FedEx logo works whether or not you know the secret, but I worried that the dot would not strike many people as meaning “Fetch Softworks.”

The dog, on the other hand, was too blunt. It tied us too closely to dog imagery. If we decided that the world really needed another Twitter client, we’d have to call it something like Birddog. I feared a future where we had a litter’s worth of different dog logos, none of them strong, representing different dog products.

The dog tag was just right. The basic oval shape was simple and clear, and recognizable even shrunken down to favicon size . The design worked in monochrome as well as color. It connected with our existing canine identity, but in an understated way, and without competing with our existing dog logo. The company name, in handcrafted type, left no doubt as to what company was being represented. It worked whether you realized it was a metal dog tag or not.

Now we had a company logo, and could return to our original goal: redesigning the website.

Next up, Part 5: Sunny in Philadelphia.

Logo sketches are Copyright © 2007 Joe Finocharrio Design.

That was Then…

Since Fetch 4, Fetch's Edit feature has let you open a file in an external editor, and have your changes be automatically uploaded back to the server. But it only worked with a select set of text editors that support the external editor protocol and GraphicConverter for image files. If all you wanted to do was edit your text files in one of the supported text editors, this worked well. But from the feedback we received, we knew that users wanted to edit with a wider range of applications, such as Dreamweaver for HTML files, and to edit other kinds of files, such as Microsoft Word documents.

…This is Now

Fetch 5.5's improved Edit command can do just that — now you can edit any kind of file on a server, using any application that supports opening and saving that file type. Just select a file in the Fetch file list, click the Edit button in the toolbar, and Fetch will download the file and open it in the appropriate application for that kind of file. Whenever you save, Fetch will notice and upload the revised file back to the server.

Choosing the Right Application

How does Fetch decide which application to use? It normally picks the default application for that kind of file, as specified by the Mac OS X Finder. But if you'd rather edit with another application, that's not a problem. Select a file, hold down the Option key, and click the Edit button. Fetch will ask you to choose another editor from a list of applications on your Mac that claim to support editing that kind of file. If you the application you want isn't in the list, you can choose it using the Other menu item. If you want to change the editor permanently, click the Remember this editor choice checkbox.

Or, if you prefer, you can also Control-click on a file and use the Edit With menu in the contextual menu to choose a different editor for this time only.

Want to edit images with Photoshop? HTML files with Dreamweaver? Spreadsheets with Excel? Fetch 5.5 will let you do that.

But What About TextEdit?

We're sorry to say there is one situation where a common Mac application isn't invited to the editor party… but it's for a good reason. We're often asked, “How can I make Fetch edit my webpage (HTML) files with TextEdit?” Our answer is, “You really don't want to do that.” Why would we say that? HTML file are text files… TextEdit is a free text editor that comes with Mac OS X… what's the problem?

TextEdit understands basic HTML, and when you open an HTML file in TextEdit, instead of showing you HTML code, it shows you formatted text. It's trying to offer you What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) HTML editing. But unfortunately, there's a lot of HTML that TextEdit doesn't understand. And when you save your HTML file after editing it, TextEdit just throws away all the parts it didn't understand, usually resulting in data loss and a webpage that doesn't look or work the way you expect it to.

And that's why Fetch doesn't offer TextEdit as a choice for editing HTML files. (It's fine for files that really are just plain text, and Fetch offers TextEdit as an editor for them.) Instead, if you're looking for a good, free text editor, we recommend TextWrangler from our friends at Bare Bones Software.

Every Editor is a Winner

But otherwise, if an application supports editing a file, it will work with the Fetch Edit command. Regardless of which application you use — happy editing!

In Need of a Logo

Just as we were finally ready to dive into the website redesign, all progress had come to a halt. The site was to represent our company, and for that it needed a company logo. Since 2001 our logo had been a 3D rendering of the Fetch dog. It was, and is, a great logo — cute, colorful, easily identified. The problem was that it wasn’t just a company logo, it was also the icon and logo for the Fetch product.

Our identity as a company and Fetch’s identity were tied together like conjoined twins, and separating them without losing the brand recognition we had built up promised to be a tricky operation. But, unless we wanted to forever remain a single-product company, it was an operation we had to attempt. And, since our new company website needed a company logo, the new logo had to come first. We set out in search of a logo designer.

Finding a Logo Designer

Just as we had been keeping our eyes open for web designs we liked, my colleagues and I started to stare at magazine ads and delivery trucks, trying to figure out what we liked in a logo. Naturally we liked the iconic simplicity of a number of classic graphic logos, such as the Target bullseye , the Nike Swoosh and the Apple, um, apple . I was also struck by less famous examples, such as the clicked cloud of fellow Mac indie developer Clickable Bliss. I also admired the typographical cleverness of the logo, with its secret symbol.

I started reading the Brand New blog, which compares brand logos with their new (and sometimes not at all improved) replacements. Our break came when my Googling turned up a blog post titled “The world’s best logo designers?” Most of the designers listed — geniuses like Paul Rand (IBM ) and Saul Bass (AT&T ) — were, sadly, no longer with us. But the post also mentioned Joe Finocharrio, who is alive and well in New York City.

Joe Finocchario

Paging through his online portfolio, I was immediately attracted to the simplicity and strength of Joe’s logos. I especially liked the ones that included some sort of typographical trickery, like his classic mark for Northwest Airlines, with its implied “W” (which literally points northwest) and the missing stroke of his logo. He has a knack for saying a lot with very little.

But would he want to work for us? After all, one of his recent projects had been the redesign of the logo. Cisco has 67,000 employees and $40 billion in annual revenue. Fetch Softworks had 3 full time employees, and, well, somewhat less than $40 billion in annual revenue. I called him, again feeling a bit presumptuous in even asking, and again found myself talking with a Fetch user who was interested in working with us.

Next, Part 4: Goldilocks.

Finding a Web Designer

Having finally committed to redesigning our website, we started looking for a web designer. We tried to notice when we saw a site we liked. We paged through designs at CSS Zen Garden, looking for examples that struck a chord. At CommandShift3, the “Hot or Not” of websites, I noticed the newly redesigned home page for Happy Cog, a design firm with offices in New York and Philadelphia. The design wasn’t something that would work for us, but I was struck by how well and creatively it suited its purpose.

It wasn’t the first we’d heard of Happy Cog; John Gruber had written that “Happy Cog is one of, if not the, best web design agencies in the world.” Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software has blogged about his company’s experience having Happy Cog redesign their site. Happy Cog’s founder Jeffrey Zeldman had literally written the book on standards-based web design. Plus they had a sense of humor; the page footer on the Happy Cog site informs you that “XHTML and CSS keep us crispy in milk.”

I sent Happy Cog a project planner with some nervousness; it felt a bit like petitioning web design royalty. But Jeffrey Zeldman got right back to me, and we hit it off. The Happy Cog gang turned out to be Fetch users and fans, and they were psyched to give us a site that would live up to our product.

Next, A Step Back

The next step in redesigning the website was to tell HappyCog all about our existing company and brand identity, around which everything else would be built. In the project planner I explained what we do, the feelings I wanted the new site to inspire, and the adjectives I thought best described the Fetch Softworks brand. But a brand needs more than words — it needs an image, a picture, a logo.

And only then did I realize: we didn’t have one.

Next, Part 3: Logos On The Brain

For twenty years we've tuned and tweaked its code to handle new situations, and users regularly tell us that Fetch has worked when other alternatives didn’t. Nonetheless, from time to time we have received a particular and troubling sort of user report.

The Quarry

The user would be uploading a big file, or a bunch of files, and somewhere in the process the upload would stall, or fail with an error. It didn’t happen every time, or always in the same place, and my colleagues and I could never reproduce it ourselves. Most users would never see this issue — out of the hundreds of thousands of Fetch users we were only getting two or three reports a month. But we knew that for every user who took the time to contact us there were probably several more who didn’t.

Reliable Unreliability

I was itching to go after this problem; writing some code to make a user’s life a little better is the best part about being a programmer. But first I needed to get a good look at it. If I couldn’t reproduce the problem, my attempted solutions would be shots in the dark, and I’d never be sure that I’d actually fixed it. I needed a reliable way to make Fetch behave unreliably.

10,000 Files To Fetch On A Wall

We never saw this problem with the server we used for much of our Fetch testing, which (like our website) is hosted at Pair Networks. For the first time I cursed Pair’s excellent reliability. Our support staff started asking users who reported these problems where they were hosting their sites, and I bought accounts from each company. We are now the proud owners of accounts at some of the worst hosting providers around. Since the problem didn’t happen all the time, or even most of the time, I wrote scripts to upload 10,000 files to each of our many test accounts, one after another, hoping that the problem would appear (preferably before the Comcast bandwidth police appeared at my door).

Hosting From Hell

After some false alarms I finally hit the jackpot — a hosting service that randomly but reliably failed every time I tried our standard 10,000 file upload. I tried uploading with other FTP clients, and they all failed as well. The best part was that it failed in completely unpredictable ways: sometimes during a transfer, sometimes setting up the transfer, sometimes getting a file list, sometimes deleting files. I never knew how it would break, but I knew that if I tried to upload 10,000 files it was sure to fail in some way. It was a hosting service you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, and I was thrilled to find it.

Step by step I refined Fetch’s error handling to keep it going in the face of the demonic server’s errors. Several times I was sure that I’d fixed the last remaining issue, only to have another appear. Our QA engineer, Doug Grinbergs, and I varied our test routine, uploading lots of small files, lots of empty folders and very deep hierarchies of 100,000 folders.

Sigmas

At last I had a Fetch version that would reliably upload 10,000 files to all of our test servers, including the cursed one. In fact I ran tests until I saw one million straight uploads to that server without an error. Big businesses like Motorola and GE talk about reducing the rate of defects to under 3.4 in a million (they call it Six Sigmas™). When those million uploads were done I felt that we’d earned our sigmas.

But all this work was based on a hypothesis, that the solution to uploading problems with our cursed test server was also the solution to the more elusive problems seen by some of our users. We started sending a pre-release Fetch version to every user who reported a similar sounding problem, and asking them to try it. At first we found a few more issues, which we were able to address. And then ... nothing but positive feedback. We’ve now been distributing these special versions for over a year. In all that time we’ve yet to come across a user whose random upload problems weren’t solved by the new code.

Today we’re releasing Fetch 5.5, and we’ll find out if we can keep that streak going with many, many more users. I can’t wait.

There were many times along the way when I thought to myself, “When this website is finally done I should blog about this.” Indeed, blogging more regularly about what we are doing at Fetch Softworks is a goal of ours, and the redesigned site has this new company blog for just that purpose.

The resulting post turned out to be quite long, so I’ve broken it into seven parts:

• Part 1: My Original Sin
• Part 2: In Search Of A Web Designer
• Part 3: Logos On The Brain
• Part 4: Goldilocks
• Part 5: Sunny In Philadelphia
• Part 6: Ball In Our Court
• Part 7: So Who Are We Anyway?

My Original Sin

We have known for quite a while that our website was due for a major redesign. I am a programmer, not a designer, and I’d hastily put the original site together on a flight to San Francisco to launch Fetch Softworks at Macworld Expo 2001. It was created in a trial copy of Adobe GoLive, with grey template graphics thrown together in Photoshop Elements. The website had grown and been tweaked over the years, but it still bore the mark of my original sins against good graphic design.

The problems with the old site did not end with its ugliness. Its message board, an obsolete version of UBB, did not look like the rest of the site (actually that might have been a good thing...). The message board had problems with popular browsers (such as, umm, Safari...), and was vulnerable to spam. The HTML throughout the site was a machine-generated, table-based tag soup, without a hint of modern, standard-based XHTML/CSS.

This was all embarassing, especially since the primary audience for Fetch is web designers, the people who would be most attuned to (if not offended by) the shortcomings of our site. It was like trying to sell woodworking tools to discerning craftsmen over a store counter that had been carved with a chainsaw.

And aside from our embarrassment, the site was not serving its visitors. It had a lot of useful information, but it was hard to know what was there, or to find what you were looking for.

Next up, Part 2: In Search of a Web Designer. Please click on your web browser’s RSS icon to subscribe and I’ll be right back!

You can also now use Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's Quick Look technology to view many more kinds of remote files without leaving Fetch. Fetch's industry-leading file transfer engine has been upgraded to upload websites and other large collections of files with unprecedented reliability, completing users' vital tasks under conditions where other programs will stall or fail.

John Casey, head photographer at Casey Imaging and Fetch 5.5 beta tester, reports that “Our files must meet deadlines! The files can be big, and we can do without the frustration of FTP software stalling after three-quarters have been uploaded. Only Fetch allows us to be sure the files will get there each time, every time, on time.”

Fetch Softworks is simultaneously launching a completely new website at http://fetchsoftworks.com. Created in collaboration with the acclaimed designers of Happy Cog Philadelphia and Joe Finocchiaro Design, the new site delivers easy navigation for an abundance of information and support options, along with a new company blog. Not to be left behind, the Fetch dog mascot has joined Twitter, posting helpful tips and answering questions at http://twitter.com/fetchftp.

Fetch 5.5 is a Universal binary, compatible with Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, including Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and can be downloaded from http://fetchsoftworks.com.

Fetch 5.5 is free to try for 15 days, and a single-user license is $29. Upgrades are free for customers who purchased Fetch after January 28, 2009; otherwise, upgrades are $10. Free licenses and upgrades are available for educational and charitable use.

At the same time we're reducing the price for upgrading to Fetch 5 from Fetch 4 to $10 (it was $15). So if you are still running Fetch 4, it's a great time to move up to Fetch 5!

Fetch 5.3.1 requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and is a free update for users of Fetch 5 or later.

You can download Fetch 5.3.1 from the Fetch download page, or by choosing Check for Update… from the Fetch menu in an earlier version.

This is not a decision we took lightly, but we decided it would be better to concentrate our resources on serving our users through web and email support. Please use these options if you need help with a problem or improving your experience with Fetch, and we will assist you.