Software

posted 02/23/08 by Rick Webb

The Barbarian Group makes software for any of four reasons:
  1. First, because we thought of something we could do that would be really awesome and cool, and it just so transpired that we actually knew how to build the awesome thing, we actually had the time to do it, so we went ahead and built said awesome thing.
  2. Second, because we wanted to learn how to do something that we didn’t know how to do before, and figured we’d try to get something out of it. This happens far, far more often than one might glean from this website, because most of the time we try to do this, we do not, in fact, produce a useful piece of software along the way. We do generally manage to learn something, though, so that’s nice.
  3. Third, because we thought it might be of use to our clients in the future, and we are prototyping it for R&D or demo’s sake. We are endeavoring to further explore how technology and interactive marketing might mix. We have a whole philosophy about it. We’ll tell you about it some day. If we were better at marketing ourselves, we would list this as number one on this list because, in fact, it’s the driving reason behind all of this. At least that’s what we tell our accountant.
  4. And, lastly, we perhaps came up with a nifty little app during the course of our lives doing design, technology and marketing work and figured we’d share it with the community. No point re-inventing the wheel and whatnot.

You’ll notice that none of these four reasons is directly related to “making lots of money.” We should probably fix that. We’ll add that to the “to do” list.

Here are some recent posts from our employees about Software:

Plainview 1.0.151

Last night we released a new version of Plainview. The biggest changes in this version are the addition of a custom user agent string, to help some web apps which use questionable detection methods, some new keyboard shortcuts in response to user feedback, and a few new features for kiosk mode.
Kiosk mode is a way to easily lock users into Plainview, making it a good choice for kiosks where you want to show web (or flash) content, but don’t want the user to have full access to the system. When you enter kiosk mode, you’re asked for an administrator password and then you’re locked in. No menus, no cmd-tab, no bookmarks or location panels, nothing except where the currently loaded site will take you. To this we’ve added a few new bells and whistles. In the preferences, you can now set some options to hide the mouse, and have the app automatically load in kiosk mode.

Pages Feedback

Pages Feedback

iTunes Feedback

itunes feedback

Searching for Safari, a Kick in the Eye

Soon after the release of Plainview, we starting hearing about issues viewing pages that employ browser sniffing to look for compatible browsers, sites like abc.com where Safari is allowed, but Plainview is blocked. There was even suspicion that we were using an custom user-agent string which was causing trouble. Well, we weren’t, but we are now. Turns out that the sites mentioned, and many others it seems, are looking for “Safari” in the user-agent string, and WebKit does not identify itself as Safari out-of-the-box so these sites would believe Plainview to be incompatible. This is bad mojo. Apple recommends looking for “AppleWebKit” not “Safari” to ensure compatibility with WebKit powered browsers, and even offers some code to help out.
However, I hardly expect abc.com and their ilk to switch detect scripts overnight. So the next build of Plainview will include a tweaked user-agent string to identify itself as “Plainview (like Safari)” which seems to fix the issues with abc.com and hopefully others as well.

Plainview Update

Hey all -
Just a quick note to let you know we updated Plainview to fix a few of the bugs you found. You can check for updates, or it should update when you next run the browser.
Also, we didn’t mention this before, but Plainview does have a locked kiosk mode for kiosks. Type Command-/ and enter your password to enter it! We updated the Faq on this one.
Thanks for the comments. We’ll fix things as we find them. Still checking in on the Oracle bug that was reported.

Plainview is here!

489 Days.
That’s how long it was from the day we first posted in beard about a windowless fullscreen browser that we should make. How many times had we done presentations where we just wanted to show our work in a browser – screw powerpoint – but couldn’t do it because it would look lame with all that browser chrome? How many pointless Powerpoint presentations have we made of Quicktime movies of our sites, just so we could show them in full screen and look slick?
Well no more! Today we give you Plainview – our full-screen web browser for the Mac, complete with presentation mode, so you can compile a list of a bunch of websites, and show them one by one, all full screen, all without ruining your flow.
The second product from Barbarian Software, it’s free. Because we know other web geeks out there have had this problem too. Because we wanted to futz around with Cocoa in advance of the iPhone. Because web shops shouldn’t have to learn Powerpoint.
Download Plainview today, at Barbarian Software.
Woo!

A Renewed Call for OS-Level Version Migration

Friend of the Barbarians and CMO of the forthcoming Hello Health, Jay Parkinson, MD wrote a post the other day about Adobe submitting the DNG Raw file format to the ISO for a standard in Raw file storage.
I’m a rabid archiver, and this reminded me of an idea I had a year or two ago: a call for OS-level version migration. Much like time machine does OS level backups, there could be a background process that migrates old files to newer file formats via a set of adaptors. The gist, from my old LJ post:
But nonetheless, applications die, and despite our best efforts we’re gonna have files saved in .graffle or .keynote or .chat docs. What we really need is an OS level version migration system, similar to Time Machine, but which migrates documents, according to a user’s settings, to newer versions of the same documents. Of course it saves the original, Time Machine style, for posterity’s and provenence’s sake, but basically at any time a new version of some app comes out, the service would migrate them – maybe once a month, or whatever you set it to.

This really shouldn’t be that hard – iView and DeBabelizer have a myriad of converter information saved in them to open documents – it would be relatively trivial to develop a set of converters that migrate your applications according to your preferences. I would love to see this, more than anything, as a future feature of an OS. Just make it automatically work. The vast majority of people out there really don’t care that they are losing some original metadata when they migrate their files from MS Word 95 to MS Word X, and if you did care, or were an archivist, you could set your settings appropriately. And the system could, of course, migrate over the important metadata – date created and modied, original application version, etc.
You can read the whole old post here. I believe in this so whole heartedly. I’d love to see apple pull it off within Time Machine, which I have become addicted to.

Blogo 1.1 Beta

Whether you blog by sheer zeal, peer pressure, or obligation, you might wanna check out some new blogging software that my friend at Brainjuice is working on. It’s in beta right now, so they’re looking for as many testers as possible.