Maxprog @ Blogger

Maxprog just turned 16 years old last monday. Believe me or not, it has been a quite pleasant journey. That's very likely because I do what I always wanted. I am a self-taught vocational software developer, I started programming when I was around twelve. In my place computers were like UFOs so no one could help you or even understand you. I have always been fascinated by algoritms (and spinning things), I started very early and never stopped however, being fascinated by something and creating a company are two different things that require very different skill sets. Indeed, in order to be successful creating a company you have to learn about business, you have to create real products, market them, handle payments and after-sales support. Later you may need to hire people, outsource stuff, learn basic accounting etc. Finally you have to fight against your competitors, maintain a good visibility on the internet and take the right decisions in order to continue in business. Most peopl...

Maxprog has released new versions of all its products. Those versions work on macOS 10.9 and higher and MS Windows 7 and higher. If you need a version for a previous operating system you can download it here . You will find below the release note of each product: MaxBulk Mailer 8.6.2 MaxBulk Mailer is a bulk mailer software and an e-mailmerge tool for Macintosh and Windows that allows anyone to send out customized offers, press releases, price lists or any kind of text or HTML message to a list of subscribers, friends or customers. What's new in this release: - Custom attachments support. - The attachment panel has been fully redesigned and simplified. - The preview panel now displays the attachment list. - It is now possible to drag-reorder recipient in the list and save the new order. - Sorting by column now enables the save button so user can save the list once sorted. - The preference custom header panel has been redesigned and now allows the activation/deactivation of he...

You have heard that sentence often for sure but did you know that there are people that blindly believe in this idea? Actually this sentence is about respect and politeness, nothing more and nothing else. And yes, by default, a customer deserves respect, no doubt about that but what if a customer doesn't respect you, do you really have to maintain that respect? In my pinion, there is a limit nobody should cross. I have been working doing support uninterruptedly for 27 years, mostly by phone and by email. I have been doing support worldwide in English, French and Spanish. After all those years I can affirm the following: - The very large majority of my customers are great and really respectful. - The very large majority of my customers are really patient with me. - The very large majority of my customers are helpful when reporting issues. I would say that 99.9% of maxprog customers are nice people. But what about that remainder 0.1%, those un-respectful, impatient and unhelpful p...

The iCash manual starts with the following: "The first step in getting your finances under control is keeping records!", I wrote that sentence a long time ago, actually before entering 16 years of data into iCash! Now I am the happy owner of information, 3 lustrums of data at my fingertips. All about my economy, incomes, expense habits, loan and mortgages repayments, etc. I believe January is the Personal Finance month. It is the time for budgetting. It is when you see what you did the previous year and what your goals are for the next one. It is also when you look at your spendings, especially the fixed ones. Since you entered everything in iCash you can easily find out what your money was used for, how much you really earned and what's left. Do you remember the formula: Wealth (what's left) = Incomes - Expenses ? Well, if W (Wealth) is low you have two solutions, you either increase I (Incomes) or decrease E (Expenses). Not everybody can increase its incomes but a...

The iCash development was projected in the late eighties but actually began in the early nineties. The very first version was released by the end of 1991. At the time, it was built to run on Microsoft Windows 3.1 and IBM OS/2. It was coded using the Pascal language. The development of the application continued up to the release of version 2.0 on May 1995. The application wasn't known as iCash but as 'Peggy Première'. Peggy because of the Muppet Show character and the analogy with a piggy bank. And 'Première' refers to the shooting of the first scene of a movie (it means 'First' in french). Peggy Première was supposed to be the best Personal Finance software at that time. Well at least in Spain, where I was leaving. The software was only available in Spanish, not even in french my mother tongue nor English. There were no international sales projected. I spent a decade selling Peggy Première, sending 3'5 floppy disks by mail with cash on delivery as t...

Regularly I get asked about the maxprog store , specially about how to buy without creating an account. By default we use the Paypal checkout system in order to process cards. There is a wrong assumption that Paypal requires the buyer to open an account in order to make a payment. That's not true at all! Opening a Paypal account is completely optional however, in my opinion, it is better to get a Paypal account and use it as often as posible. Paypal is accepted almost everywhere on the internet and it is much better and secure to share your card data with only one processor, pure logic don't you think? The internet is a quite hostil place where gangs of angry delinquents will do everything to steal others money. The less you share your data the best! As I wrote above, Paypal handles our store checkout by default. This is because we trust Paypal, it is actually the payment processor service we have been using successfully for years to sell and to get paid for our products world...

Last week I talked about the Apple Stores and not only what I think about them but what they really are, everything but stores selling computers. Today was the last straw! Apple has made there new iMac Pro available for orders thru the internet with prices starting at $6’000 and up to $15’000 for full equipped configs. Uh? Really? Sorry all but I am flipping out. What can that be possible? An iMac for $5’500! Wow, I hope you will become an Apple VIP member with such a price. I have been using Macs for 3 decades, they have always been somewhat pricy, but I believe it's gone beyond the limits, Apple is completely out of control. Oh yes, maybe the processor and the graphic card are expensive, in such case I would expect a very different type of computer, something modular, not a all-in-one computer like the iMac. In case of a failure of the screen or the graphic card you need to rush to an Apple Service and pray they will attend you right away. My nearest Apple Service i...

Marc Zeedar 2006 interview for the xDev Magazine Tell us a little about your background. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? Despite my name sounds English I was born and grew up in France. Actually my great grandfather was american so my parents decided to name me after him. Perhaps it was premonitory as nowadays most of my customers are american. I left France when I finished studying electronic engineering and moved to Spain where I reside since then. How did you get interested in computers and programming? My first contact with programming was when I was 12. A math teacher were giving free programming classes at lunch time. I enrolled and later found out I was the youngest of the classroom. We were Using Texas Instruments calculators, the TI-30 if I remember well. That was in 1979/1980. Later I purchased a Casio calculator and made a lot more programming. A few years later I went to Phoenix for holidays. I saw a ZX-81 for the first time. Once back home I bought one a...

A few days ago I went to an Apple Store. I spent quite a lot of time without the opportunity to do so but you know what? I got out in less that a minute. Apple Stores are no longer computer stores, they mostly sell phones, luxury watches and iPads. I only saw a couple of notebooks and 3 desktop computers on a solitary table far away from the entrance. I found out Apple has no interest in computers anymore, well, I actually checked it out. Remember, Apple removed the word 'Computer' from its name. Since Apple has no real interest in computers anymore I just wonder why they don't license their system so anybody with a PC could run macOS. Apple computers are expensive PCs after all, closed expensive boxes to say the true. It is really demotivating to see how Apple is dedicating 100% of its resources to things that has nothing to do with its primary business. Believe me I love iPhones, they are great but despite they carry a processor, they are not Laptops nor desktop comput...

As you may know MaxBulk Mailer is one of the products we develop and market. It is a Bulk Email Software (and emailmerge tool actually) for both Macintosh and Windows that allows anyone to send out customized offers, press releases, price lists or any kind of text or HTML message to a list of subscribers, friends or customers. Basically you can create, manage and send your own powerful, personalized marketing message to small to medium lists. The good thing is that MaxBulk Mailer is a software tool that you purchase once, no need to pay on a per-email basis to submission services. You know that Email Marketing is spreading around the whole world because of its high effectiveness, speed and low cost. If you want to introduce and sell your product or service, the best way is to use e-mail to contact your targeted customer. We created MaxBulk Mailer with that in mind. Email Marketing Email marketing is indeed one of the bes...

Did you know that if you never update your operating system, the last version of your favorite applications, one day, will no longer be supported? Do you realize that this situation will become an uncomfortable impasse soon or later? and the more outdated you are the worse? Let's have a look. The computer industry is in constant motion and evolution. As the time goes on, we usually purchase new hardware, we very likely update our operating system to enjoy all the new features and we try to get all our software up-to-date. But sometimes it is not that easy, mainly because a new operating system or a new hardware can conflict with a version of a software you use a lot, a software that is vital to you or your company. Indeed if that specific version does something or supports something new versions don't you will have to stick with what you have. Same if you're a satisfied pragmatic user that doesn't feel the need for speed new unneeded stuff or simply if your hardware is...

All of a sudden, right after updating your system to macOS High Sierra you probably found out that all the recipient lists throughout the software were no longer sorted alphabetically. Well, I believe we were the first to find out and it took more than two weeks to actually receive the first complaints from MaxBulk Mailer users. We even received screenshots like this: High Sierra file sorting issue So what happened? We believe it all has to do with the new APFS hard disk format that comes with the macOS 10.13 High Sierra operating system. It is a format exclusivelly used on SSD drives for now, maybe that explains why we received so few complaints. That new APFS format no longer returns folder item lists automatically sorted alphabetically but somehow shuffled or maybe ordered by date, not sure. Anyway, as said above, we suffered the problem before anyone else and we fixed it right away. To fix the problem the file list has to be sorted by code. That means we have to process that list...

Today I came across an old document I created on June 2004 probably from some text I found on the internet or maybe from an old NUG post, to say the true I am not sure where it comes from. Anyway, the thing is that the document in question is some kind of variable naming conventions now I realize I fully adopted after reading it. This is what it recommends when naming things you are declaring in your code depending on their nature. For you to understand better, it is a list of heading characters you have to start names with. This is the list: Local Variables: "a" Global Variables: "g" Constants: "k" Input Parameters: "in" Output Parameters: "out" Input/Output Parameters: 'io" Properites of Classes: "m" Events: "ev" Methods/Functions: descriptive name Modules: DB_Module, System_Module Methods/Functions in those modules: "DB_" Properties in that module: "mDB_" Constants in that module: ...

It has been a long time since we last updated the software we have available for sale in the Apple App Store. People may wonder why the versions we have there are more than a year and an half old. There is an explanation for that, Apple rules. Indeed, when you post a new application or an update to the App Store, Apple performs an in-depth review of your submission. If you pass all filters and match all Apple guidelines, your application will be available for sale, otherwise you will get it rejected and you will receive some kind of cryptic message about some weird issues that make your application unsuitable for the platform. Hopefully I am quite used of those error messages and I always manage to get the submitted application finally approved. The reason why we stopped updating comes from Apple new requirements, especially Entitlements and Sandboxing. Apple says: "Application sandboxing restricts an application’s access to only system resources, including the file system, for wh...

After about a decade without a single issue, the iCash Currency Manager updating system has stopped working . Indeed, if you open the currency window and click on the 'Update now' button or you have activated the iCash 'Document > Update Currency rates' at startup preference, you will get the currency list filled with zeroes. So, what happened? Actually iCash was fetching currency rates from Yahoo! services. It seems like Yahoo! has discontinued the (private, mostly-undocumented) Yahoo Finance API that many developers have been using for their currency data. All responses seem to be returning "violation of the Yahoo Terms" error. I suppose there's a chance they may switch it back on, but they don't officially support that API anywhere as far as I can tell. You can see by yourself clicking on the link below: http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=USDEUR=X&f=sl1d1t1ba&e=.csv Instead of receiving the USD to EUR rate as usual now we g...

During the last decade we have been witnessing the smartphone revolution. Mobile phones have become multi-purpose tools, they can do much more than handling calls. At the very beginning we were all filling our new toy with all kind of stuff and it was really funny. Smartphones are great and you can do lots of things with them. Actually there are tons of apps that can take advantage of the portability of such type of device. Some of those apps are the result of its success and would not have existed otherwise but I believe not everything can or should be ported to smartphones. Indeed, smartphones are not notebooks nor real portable computers. They are something else. Actually, since they are phones and they are supposed to be carried virtually everywhere there owners go, they include a small screen and they don’t have a real keyboard. As a result mobile devices may be harder to use with given applications, even with the biggest screen available. Even tablet computers like the iPad ...

Did you know you can fetch sequential contents from the web with Web Dumper? Sequences of documents, pictures or directories like '/01/pict1.jp', '/01/pict2.jp', '/01/pict3.jp',..., '/02/pict1.jp'. This is called Incremental downloads. Read more here: https://www.maxprog.com/site/blog/post.php?id=278

Sometimes people ask me why all those beautiful and colorful Maxprog software icons have suddenly been replaced with black and white icons: Actually I already posted a note about that a few months ago. It has to do with HiDPI (retina) support . Indeed as part of our commitment with our users we decided to give support to HiDPI displays. To do that, and among other things, we had to redesign all our icons since they were not ready for HiDPI at all. HiDPI needs two different sizes per icon, for example the toolbar now needs 64x64 icons in addition to the usual 32x32. We only had the low resolution ones so we had to look for a solution. All our icons were made by profesional designers, one after the other in the last two decades. At the beginning the idea was to find similar icons and we actually did so. However the result was quite unsatisfactory because it really seems color icons are something of the past, especially in the main toolbar. Lets have a quick look at Apple Safari, iTunes, ...

Regularly I am being asked about subscriptions, how do they work, how long a user can use the software once he has purchased one, how it can be extended, etc. Well, we do not sell subscriptions at all, none of our software need a subscription to operate. Actually what we sell are Update Plans . This is a whole different thing. Let me explain. When you purchase a software from us, what you actually purchase is a user license . You purchase the right to use the software we have created. You download a copy of the version available at that moment from our site, register that copy with the activation code (aka serial number) you have received by email and start using the software. You automatically get support and access to new versions during a full year. Your license never expires! You can continue to use the version you purchased forever. Your activation code will always work for the version you purchased and for all the updates released during the 12 months period from the date of pur...

If you have contacted us to get a refund thru our refund page we usually process your request in a few hours. If you have contacted any of our card processors directly either to get a refund or to open a claim we will accept your request as fast as we can. In either cases as soon as the refund has been initiated you have to wait for the process to clear. It can take from a few minutes to a week for the fund to be back to your bank account. Why is PayPal so slow to refund? When you pay us it is never instant, paypal credits us for you and then starts the process of uploading your funds from your funding source. If we refund before that payment has completed then you have to wait till it clears through to paypal then the refund is credited to you. If the refund is done at a later date and the payment has processed then we can only refund via an echeque or funds in our paypal balance, if its the former then it takes up to a week to process through to paypal and then they credit you. This...