Sharp-eyed visitors will notice that we recently updated this website. We changed some fonts (I especially like the Proxima Nova navigation links), improved some graphics, and added a couple new features. The site should load more quickly and look better, especially on Retina displays. The biggest new feature is that you can now retrieve your Fetch serial number by entering your email address. You should receive the email response with your order history within minutes. If you’ve changed addresses since you bought Fetch, you can still have us look up your license by hand.

When we added support for Gatekeeper in Fetch 5.7.1 last month, we caused Fetch to break on Mac OS X 10.5. Others ran into related compatibility problems; Daniel Jalkut and Ken Case proposed a solution. We chose a different approach from theirs.

In 2005, Apple introduced Bonjour (then called Rendezvous), a new means of discovering services available on a computer network. Useful for a wide range of problems, from discovering a nearby printer to connecting to your company file server, Bonjour rapidly gained acceptance in the computer industry.

The specification for Bonjour enables discovery of file servers (such as FTP servers and SFTP servers), but does not provide any way for the server to inform other computers what type of security it uses. As a Fetch user, you might therefore be put in the annoying position of knowing that there is an FTP server on your local network, but have no idea what security setting to use to connect to it.

In response to our users’ requests, and in accordance with the specification for DNS Service Discovery Fetch 5.7 recognizes the keys auth and prot in the TXT record for an FTP server, with the following meanings:

• auth=MECH — connect to the FTP server using security mechanism MECH. Security mechanisms understood by Fetch 5.7 and later are GSSAPI and TLS.
• prot=LEVEL — in addition to connecting to the server securely, enable data security level LEVEL. Allowable security levels depend on the chosen security mechanism and the server implementation; Fetch supports security levels C and P for TLS and C, S, E, and P for GSSAPI.

The announcement of the iPad, and the recognition by some (e.g. Steven Frank, Frasier Spiers and Dan Moren) that this represents a new era of computing, gives me a powerful sensation of déjà vu.

I read a lot of articles online, and sometimes the ads and navigation links make it difficult to concentrate on the text of article, much less on the ideas that the text is trying to communicate. The folks at arc90 have come to the rescue with Readability, a JavaScript bookmarklet that reformats the current web page as a clean page of text:

The default behavior of Subversion when tunneled over SSH works well for simple cases. I encountered some more complex situations which required digging into advanced SSH features, and built some simple tools that make our Subversion life easier.

Upgrading an application can be an annoying process. In the best case, you click an Upgrade button and go on with your work; in the worst case, you spend hours in frustration trying to make the new version work. For some applications — such as Fetch — the upgrade experience is made simpler by code signing, a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard technology.

Since the day Snow Leopard came out, much has been said about creator codes, preferred applications, and Universal Type Identifiers. Regardless of whether you favor the Leopard behavior — in which a Mac OS 9-style creator code trumps a file‘s extension — or the Snow Leopard behavior — in which a Mac OS 9-style creator code is completely ignored — you, as a developer, may run into a case when you need to make sure that a particular file will open with a particular app when the user double-clicks it in the Finder.

I started with the idea that we could redesign our website in 6 months. It took over two years.

No longer were we asking ourselves who we were or what shade of blue we liked; now we had to write code.