Today we released the third edition of Glenn Fleishman’s Take Control of Securing Your Mac. Yay!
Also today, I completed editing the new fourth edition of Michael Cohen’s Take Control of Pages. I’ll produce it over the weekend and ship it early next week. Yay!
Also also, I’ve started editing the new edition of Jeff Carlson’s Take Control of Apple Watch, and apart from the fact that he’s still working on a bunch of screenshots, it’s close-ish. Yay!
And Glenn is making progress on his big update to Take Control of FaceTime and Messages too, so that’s groovy.
Moving on to less-groovy things, FastSpring has been up to their shenanigans again, and I’ve been getting a lot of complaints from a lot of unhappy customers. I wrote a blog post about it this morning so I can refer people to that instead of having to copy and paste an explanation every time.
Fortunately, I’ve made tremendous progress on our Paddle integration over the past few days. This is the sort of thing I can’t afford to get even slightly wrong, so I’m really sweating the details. My tests (on a separate development site on our side, and in a sandbox on their side) have gotten to the point where everything is working as expected. I still have a list of weird/edge case scenarios to throw at it, and some little tweaks to make. Then I have to move everything over to our live site (and their live site) and flip a switch.
What I plan to do is wait until a quiet moment (probably early next week) when we don’t have a large order volume and I can devote my full attention to watching transactions as they flow. If anything goes kerflooey, switching back to FastSpring temporarily (so I can debug and fix) is literally a matter of flipping a bit. If enough time passes and enough transactions go through correctly, I’ll just leave it on; if it takes more fiddling, so be it.
I’ve also been working closely with the SmallCubed folks on debugging MailMaven as they get closer to releasing a public beta. I’m stress-testing it with like 450,000 messages from I think 11 different accounts of all types, so weird things are turning up on my Mac that they hadn’t seen before. But because of the things I’ve found, they’ve been able to fix lots of bugs, improve importing, and massively speed up performance. Oh man, I can’t wait to be done with Mail forever.
A couple of days ago we had a hail storm. Then last night the temperature here dipped well below freezing. Tomorrow, it’s supposed to be 19°C (66°F). That’s autumn in Saskatchewan for you. I still have many urgent outdoor tasks to do before the inevitable 7-month deep freeze. So much to do, so little time.
Monday is Thanksgiving here in Canada. Although I cooked the standard dinner last year, this year things have been too crazy so we’re going to Grandma’s house and taking some cranberry relish and deviled eggs. Maybe I’ll cook a dinner for American Thanksgiving. But I’m actually working on updating Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner for the first time in 11 years! It’ll be good to get that…off my plate. So to speak.
See you next week.