the finger-keyboard synapse - December 2005 Archives

December 2005

The pendulum (10:05) - One of eWeek's "Transitions 2006" articles is IM Threats: The Dark Side of Innovation. They are spot-on that 2005 has become the year of the IM exploit, and the question is whether things will get better or worse in 2006. Even though the attacks are getting smarter and more sophisticated, there has not yet been an apocalypse on any of the major IM networks, so the good guys must be doing something right. Here's a short excerpt: I'm really surprised...

Announcing the BitWise DocuWiki (16:30) - The first major update to the BitWise web site since the new design unveiled in May will be the conversion of the documentation into a wiki. While this may initially sound very ho-hum, this is actually a very exciting change! The benefits of the new DocuWiki will be: Expanded documentation will cover many more elements of BitWise The straightjacket presentation in use in the current documentation will be removed Many links will make it very easy to rapidly explore BitWise...

Give the gift of BitWise this holiday season (10:15) - The best things in life really are free! Sorry, I couldn't resist. :) Merry Christmas everyone!...

4% of 600 is 24 (10:01) - Since the end of the year seems to inspire reflection on years gone by, I thought it would be interesting to back and look at the changes to BitWise since 1.0, especially in light of our recent version leap to 1.7. I pulled up the changelog, scrolled to the bottom, and my jaw hit the floor. Since 1.0, there have been almost 600 new features, improvements, tweaks or bug fixes made to BitWise. Just for fun, I went through and...

BlowSearch Messenger just plains blows away (09:34) - I'm not one that delights in other peoples' failures nor am I usually one to pour salt in the wound, but after my series of posts from February about BlowSearch Messenger, this is more about closure than anything else. I don't know what made me think about it again, but I decided to go see what was new with BlowSearch Messenger. What I learned was that BlowSearch (not just the messenger) has pretty much fallen apart. Not unsurprisingly, Joe Holcomb's... | 2 Comments

BitWise 1.7 released (15:32) - Hooray for version leaps! BitWise 1.7 was released today, with only a few minor tweaks since the Beta release last week. Thanks to all of the testers for another great testing cycle. Download here. Something interesting that I've noticed in relation to the version leap: I am seeing many download sites that I don't personally update have been listing BitWise 1.0.7 Beta X for the recent betas. While it's not that big of a deal, it makes me wonder whether...

I choose the sarcastic away message sub-culture (17:16) - I'm convinced that there is an entire sub-culture in IM away messages. As some of you know, I very much enjoy psychology and sociology, so I find the social (or is it non-social?) element of away messages quite intriguing. One of my favorite "categories" of away messages are the sarcastic, scathing social commentary kind. I recently had the pleasure of making a new acquitance that has transferred from the real world into the virtual, and I have to say that... | 2 Comments

It won't be called crazy now that IBM is doing it (10:37) - When we first began offering BitWise Professional almost two and a half years ago, we thought long and hard about how to price it. We finally settled on the model that we still have today: a monthly service fee based on the number of active users. Every once in a while, someone will tell us that our pricing model is terrible, or that no one would ever possibly want to use BitWise because of it (which is not true at... | 1 Comments

Something old, something new this holiday season (16:52) - BitWise 1.7 Beta 3 was released today, tweaking a few things before the official 1.7 release. There's one new feature that's definitely worth the upgrade: message number synchronization. The message numbers in your conversation windows will now be synchronized so that you can easily refer to messages by number. The 1.7 release is planned for December 19th. You can download the beta here. The beta is obviously what's new: so what's old? Just in time for the holidays, our BitWise...

The smiley falling out of favor? (13:52) - I never thought I'd see this, but the January 2006 issue of MacWorld has a tip for disabling iChat's Smilies. What's so surprising is not that they printed such a tip, but that it's no longer a obscure option buried deep in some plist file in the iChat application bundle. Using iChat on OS X 10.4.3, there is a Hide Smilies menu right from the View menu. After years and years of more and more smilies, what's causing the sudden...

Ad bots give way to virus bots on AIM (22:41) - On November 16th, I lamented AOL's recent addition of AIM bots to their service. It appears that these bots have paved the way to even worse bots: bots that use social engineering to help spreads viruses sent through malicious links. No longer will a compromised system just send you links that download viruses, now they can respond to you, including assuring you that the link that they just sent is not a virus. If you're interested, here's the full story... | 1 Comments

Features area of BitWise site updated (15:25) - In the last week or so, several parts of the Features area of the BitWise site have been updated. The main features page has been rewritten to have more whitespace, better organization, and fewer words. The focus has also been changed to help give a better overview of BitWise as a whole. The headings in the feature list on the left side of the screen have been made to stand out more from the list itself, using a colored background...

Open Sound Killer App of the Month (14:50) - I was pleased to learn yesterday that BitWise IM is the Killer App of the Month over at Open Sound. The focus of the page is "Digital Audio for UNIX."...

Indirectly, it's like Skype is advertising BitWise (17:37) - Who would have thought that broad IM news would be good for BitWise? A discussion about Skype's announced video service brought out another mention of BitWise on Slashdot, see here. Pretty wild. Combining the Slashdot posts with the beta announcements, our hits and signups are about 50% higher than they've ever been before. Whoever says word of mouth advertising doesn't work can give me a call. ;)...