Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Baen Free Library iPhone eBook Repository Updated!

Since STE has released v 1.4 of the iPhone EBook reader, I have finally had to update the repository to support 1.4. The major change? It now places books in ~/Media/EBooks instead of /var/root/Media/EBooks. This is because Books.app only looks in ~/ now!

I took the opportunity and added some additional features:

  1. Cover Art! The books now display their cover art in the main title list.
  2. Chapter Sorting! The Books.app team removed a hack they had specifically put in for Baen, it was causing performance problems. I have renamed the html files to avoid the problem.

Well, I thought it was more features than that when I started.

If you already have the book installed, it should upgrade through Installer.app. I have tested a couple of books, so I'm reasonably confident it will work.

Also, since webscriptions has a habit of updating the .zip files every week or so, I now scan their site every hour to ensure that the source plist is up to date.

Again, if you run into any problems, file a bug report over at the google code project

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Truth in Advertising

If you say "Usually ships in 48 hours", it means that I should expect to see it ship in two business days. It also means that if I leave five business days, I should have the item in my little hands by the time I need it.

I'll understand if you are going to miss that deadline. Let me know, and give me the option of canceling my order. Leaving me guessing about the status of my order is frustrating and ultimately (as we'll see in a second) bad for business.

I won't be shopping at Gameplanet Store NZ again. I have placed two orders with them, the first one took an extraordinary amount of time to arrive, missing the party that I wanted it for.

I ordered a second game (mostly due to a $10 discount from the first order), and again it didn't ship inside of the 48 hour window. So, you have to ask, "What does 'Usually' mean to them?" To me, it means at least 95% of the time. How ever, two failures in two orders means it sure isn't 95% to them.

GPStore - Avoid, they're the "flying pig" of NZ software retailers.