René Rebe

The last years I posted some Apple App Store review times. As the review times now got significantly longer I wanted to drop a note where we stand now:

August 15, 2012 06:31 Upload Received
August 15, 2012 06:33 Waiting For Review
August 30, 2012 10:14 In Review
August 30, 2012 10:20 Apple Pending Developer Release

So welcome two full whole weeks review time for your precious App updates :-/

You got a Canon DR-series scanner, such as a DR-M140, DR-M160, DR-3010C, DR-6010C or DR-6030,C older, or never and like to use it on an Apple Mac(intosh)? Search no more!

ExactScan now comes with built-in drivers to supper a whole range of Canon DR-series scanners, no matter if they are a couple of years old - or brand new!

Simply plug in the Canon DR scanner USB cable to a free USB port of your Mac, download and lunch ExactScan and the feature rich document capture application will list the scanner and batch scan at high speed on your Mac! Using ExactScan Pro you can even scan with OCR to searchable PDF, use the digital imprinter, and rely on many more automatic detection, such as automatic detection of colors and text orientation.

The possibilities are endless.

You have an archive of PDF files, e.g. scanned with the scanner driver standard software, that takes a lot of storage space?

Chances are OCRKit can reduce the file size quite a bit due it’s built-in color detection and advanced compression. Simply drag and drop the files on the OCRKit icon and it will do it’s work. If the files had no text from OCR before you even get searchable PDF along the way, … And usually the resulting files should be quite a bit smaller¹. Of course the same works with plain bitmap files, such as JPEG and TIFF.

The possibilities are endless.

¹) The size may increase for PDF files already stored as highly compressed PDF. We are working to further improve compression for future updates.

Being abroad over the May-day public holidays (in most of Europe), I had to compare some numerics without a spreadsheet at hand (traveling without my main MacBook, …). App Store hipsters would probably be lost, now, but knowing some good old Unix Kong Fu there was help around:

Cut’n paste the values (from an PDF, …) into raw txt files, and setup equations (with sed substitutions) to feed bc:

paste out in | sed ’s/\.//; s,[^0-9], / ,; s/^/100 * /’ | bc > res

And for the prettiness one can also paste together the table columns:

paste in out res

From the famous tip of the week series: The other day I was wondering what CLI tool I used years ago to mass convert / fixup encoding of text (e.g. program, source code) files and just could not find it, e.g. with googling, … As I just remembered, somehow, accidentally (maybe due to some T2 Linux maintenance work, …) I quickly wanted to share that note: recode. An older piece of software, apparently not updated since 2001, … (!?!?) Easy to use, just like this:

recode latin1..UTF-8 file.txt
recode UTF-16..UTF-8 …
recode cyrillic..utf-8 …

I guess you get the idea, …

Update: Now with camera RAW support!

I updated my ExactImage-based QuickLook plugin to also correctly display 16 bit per channel files, enjoy: 1.7 update with improved 16 bit channel support. As usual: If you have another image format you like to preview on the Mac just let me know!

In late-2010 I already wrote in depth about Apple’s iTunes Connect App review times. As one of our latest Mac App updates kinda rushed a little faster thru the review, I wanted to give a brief update about the current state:

December 14, 2011 08:52 Prepare for Upload
December 14, 2011 08:52 Waiting For Upload
December 15, 2011 08:49 Upload Received
December 15, 2011 08:52 Waiting For Review
December 19, 2011 12:36 In Review
December 19, 2011 14:19 Pending Developer Release
December 20, 2011 00:16 Processing for App Store

While I do not know if that is just due lucky Christmas, at least it looks like the review times are now less than a week.

Update: And another such sprint:

December 18, 2011 06:15 Prepare for Upload
December 18, 2011 06:16 Waiting For Upload
December 18, 2011 07:57 Upload Received
December 18, 2011 08:05 Invalid Binary
December 18, 2011 08:20 Waiting For Upload
December 18, 2011 08:30 Upload Received
December 18, 2011 08:34 Waiting For Review
December 20, 2011 17:52 In Review
December 20, 2011 18:16 Pending Developer Release
December 21, 2011 01:04 Processing for App Store

Update 2: late-2012 report

With all the reviews about Bulldozer performance, I wonder how much is to be attributed to Intel’s compiler not generating latest, greatest, vectorized code for AMD CPUs, …

I still believe that Bulldozer delivers excellent server performance, especially when it comes to hardware assisted virtualization, and that desktop performance would look better with unbiased benchmarks, (and a better “core package” aware Window process scheduler) …

I got quite some CPU cycle requirements. For some time now I’m waiting for AMD to deliver sub 100 Watt (e.g. 95W) CPUs, but unfortunately the 95W editions of the Phenom II X6 1055T and 1065T are nearly impossible to come by (except you are an OEM ordering thousands of them). So I got a test system with the regular, 125W 1055T, and it just keeps running too hot.

While I’m still waiting for the Bulldozer to appear, and in a 95W flavor no less, I decided Sunday is a great day to experiment with undervolting the aging, hot silicon I got at hand. Actually it turned out the beast of a silicon I got can be undervolted by huge margins, from the factory settings:

NbVid NbDid CpuVid CpuDid CpuFid UNb CpuMult UCpu PCore
P-State 0: 32 0 6 0 17 1150.0mV 16.50000 1475.0mV 23305mW
P-State 1: 32 0 14 0 12 1150.0mV 14.00000 1375.0mV 20625mW
P-State 2: 32 0 18 0 6 1150.0mV 11.00000 1325.0mV 15370mW
P-State 3: 32 0 22 1 14 1150.0mV 7.50000 1275.0mV 10838mW
P-State 4: 32 0 26 1 0 1150.0mV 4.00000 1225.0mV 6738mW

Down to so far stable:
(more…)

You got a Fujitsu fi-series scanner, such as a fi-5120, fi-6130, fi-6140, older, or never and like to use it on an Apple Mac(intosh)? Search no more!

ExactScan now comes with built-in drivers to supper a whole range of Fujitsu fi-series scanners, no matter if they are a couple of years old - or brand new!

Simply plug in the Fujitsu fi-scanner USB cable to a free USB port of your Mac, download and lunch ExactScan and the feature rich document capture application will list the scanner and batch scan at high speed on your Mac! Using ExactScan Pro you can even scan with OCR to searchable PDF, use the digital imprinter, and rely on many more automatic detection, such as automatic detection of colors and text orientation.

The possibilities are endless.