The Soulmen Blog » Chatter http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog Just another WordPress weblog Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:33:06 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 The Issue with Ulysses and the iPad http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2010/05/29/the-issue-with-ulysses-and-the-ipad/ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2010/05/29/the-issue-with-ulysses-and-the-ipad/#comments Sat, 29 May 2010 17:38:48 +0000 max http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/?p=491 Compared to our measurements, we have received like a zillion inquiries lately that asked us when an iPad version of Ulysses will be available. First things first, here’s the answer: We have no clue…

This does not sound too promising, I guess, but let me explain. We are having major technical and/or legal problems. All of Ulysses can easily be realized on the iPhone — except one part: Ulysses’ heart. Semantic text editing.

More precisely, the whole problem resolves around on single issue: Displaying styled text while editing it. We need this ability to display the styles, which is the core of our concept. Everything builds on top of it. Apple greatly improved in the iPhone OS 3.2 on what is possible for text editing, however there are still major parts missing. Currently, we see two ways we could do the coloring:

1) The hacky way: We observed that the text editing view in iPhone OS is actually a web view. A web view which edits and displays HTML. HTML which we can get access to. Access we can use to modify the structure and styling and hence add colors, etc.
The Problem: Private API. Each of the steps I just described is private API. And you know what that means. Bummer.

2) The legal way: New to iPhone OS 3.2 is an advanced text rendering engine, CoreText. This does nothing but display text, but it does it well. And there is the ability to directly grab the keyboard input.
The Problem: All the rest. We would basically have to re-write ALL user interaction! Text selection, text loupe, copy and paste, spell checking, etc. All these things are missing. Even worse, while we could eventually implement all of these, we will never be as sophisticated as Apple. I bet they used a couple of man-years to implement this stuff, no power we have. Ulysses would always feel like an alien on the iPad. If you know the level of quality we require from our products, you know that we’d never go for such a solution.

And this is the mess we are in. We have – right now – an implemented working version of the first approach. We also have an implementation of the second one – except of all the nice user interaction you’d naturally expect. I will be going to WWDC next week and talk to some guys at Apple. I hope they will have good news for me, but I’m afraid they won’t.

We would sooo love to do Ulysses on the iPad. 1) is that Apple would not let us, 2) is too much effort for producing average results. We know no other way. Let us hear what you think! We’d like to discuss this issue with you!

The Soulmen

]]> http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2010/05/29/the-issue-with-ulysses-and-the-ipad/feed/ 33 XMAS Sale, 20% off http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/12/21/xmas-sale-20-off/ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/12/21/xmas-sale-20-off/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:05:31 +0000 Marcus http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/?p=454 Just a quick note: We’re currently doing a christmas sale. By entering “XMAS” into our shop’s coupon field, you can grab any of Ulysses licence types at a drastically reduced price:

  • Ulysses – 35.99
  • Ulysses edu – 27.99
  • Ulysses core – 19.99

That’s it, nothing else to add.
Oh, well… Merry Christmas everybody. :)

Update: The christmas sale is over. Happy New Year everybody!

]]> http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/12/21/xmas-sale-20-off/feed/ 5 Forums down [update: not anymore] http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/09/19/forums-down/ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/09/19/forums-down/#comments Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:25:30 +0000 Marcus http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/?p=395 As some of may have noticed, the forums are currently down. We don’t know what happened, but it might have to do with us migrating some internal stuff to a new server. Or maybe it’s the weather.

EIther way, thank god it’s saturday, haha, so we’ll be back up and running in no time sometime later this weekend. I guess. Dunno, because I don’t even know what happened.

Stay with us.

UPDATE: Forums are back.

]]> http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/09/19/forums-down/feed/ 0 The Case of the Missing Serial Numbers (or Screw the Gmail Spam Filter) http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/09/04/the-case-of-the-missing-serial-numbers-or-screw-the-gmail-spam-filter/ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/09/04/the-case-of-the-missing-serial-numbers-or-screw-the-gmail-spam-filter/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:25:09 +0000 Marcus http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/?p=376 We’re currently experiencing a pretty hefty problem: A lot of customers are contacting us via email, saying they’re still waiting for the registration info to show up in their mailboxes.

Turns out 99% of them are using gmail.com — which, plain and simple, is treating our registration email as spam.

Now, I find this rather curious, and to be honest, I’m angry as hell, but before I let my temper run amok, I’ll take a deep breath and just leave it at this. For now. It’s pretty obvious that Google have messed up their spam filter for good; just do a… haha… google search on gmail filtering legit mail, and you know which provider NOT to use for day-to-day correspondence.

I bet their confirmation mails still get through, but whatever.

Sooooooooo, if you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from us regarding your registration: Check your spam filter and go blame Google. You should do this more often anyway. Blaming Google, that is.

]]> http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/09/04/the-case-of-the-missing-serial-numbers-or-screw-the-gmail-spam-filter/feed/ 6 Threaded Comments http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/08/14/threaded-comments/ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/08/14/threaded-comments/#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:52:32 +0000 Marcus http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/?p=373 I just activated threaded comments, three levels deep. Not that we need it right now, he, but as soon as people are replying to certain comments, it’s nice to have the feature activated.

So… not much to see here, please move along.

And come back again. :)

]]> http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/08/14/threaded-comments/feed/ 1 It’s been a long time comin’ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/04/07/its-been-a-long-time-comin/ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/04/07/its-been-a-long-time-comin/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 07:10:39 +0000 Marcus http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/?p=150 Ulysses at The Soulmen

A warm welcome to everybody who’s visiting from our old site. This is it. It’s true, for real, no going back now.

As announced over at the travelog, we’ll be bringing every single blue-tec application to our new home — The Soulmen. Beginning with Ulysses 1.7, which is due in a just a few weeks, The Blue Technologies Group as you know it will cease to exists.

These are exciting times and we got a long road ahead.
Welcome aboard, we hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

]]> http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/04/07/its-been-a-long-time-comin/feed/ 1 I Don’t Even Know Any Farting Jokes http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/02/17/i-dont-even-know-any-farting-jokes/ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/02/17/i-dont-even-know-any-farting-jokes/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:03:07 +0000 Marcus http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/?p=134 But I know that this here will not end good in any way. For neither of the two involved.

We’ve had our share of dealing with guerilla tactics in the past. Bad reviews on VersionTracker and MacUpdate, so-called fans of competing applications hijacking “our” review pages in order to promote their beloved app.

My first impulse has always been to go against these types, but then again I didn’t want to spend my time arguing with idiots over advertising disguised as user comments. There’s just no way whatsoever to get to an agreement on that matter. If anything, all you get is bad press and additional downgrading comments from hyped fanboys.

Now, going to court over something like this is just crazy, even if it shows how much money is to be made off the current iPhone market.

Sure blows. Dunno…

[via]

]]> http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/02/17/i-dont-even-know-any-farting-jokes/feed/ 0 Ladies and Gentlemen… http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/01/26/ladies-and-gentlemen%e2%80%a6/ http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/01/26/ladies-and-gentlemen%e2%80%a6/#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:50:57 +0000 Marcus http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/?p=46
The Empty Stage by elward-photography

Here we go, welcome to THE SOULMEN blog!

Not much here at the moment, but expect this to change pretty soon-ish-ly-esque. We’re a small group of software developers and are currently hard at work on several applications for both the iPhone/iPod touch and Mac OS X.

This blog will be our primary output for the next couple of weeks. We intend to post information on our projects as well as provide insights to ideas, decisions and general thoughts on various issues.

You can subscribe to this blog via RSS, and you can also follow us on twitter if you wish.

Drumroll, please…

]]> http://www.the-soulmen.com/blog/2009/01/26/ladies-and-gentlemen%e2%80%a6/feed/ 2