There is one thing that is inevitable about the world of computers, and that is change.  This is also what makes computers and programming so exciting.  But, it also can cause some pain as you need to upgrade to new technologies and adapt to new changes. This is the case with CrystalBall and our old website hosted by .Mac.

At Apple's World Wide Developers Conference Steve Jobs introduce a new service called Mobile Me (www.me.com)  This new service while somewhat cool is replacing the .Mac service.  Ever since we purchased our new domain here at CrystalBallSoft I have wanted to transition all of our offered apps here.  But this has not always been easy since some of these apps would need to be updated to include the new web address of the new site.  However, because of this new change to Moblie Me I have decided it is time to make the transition.  Even though Apple says that all email addresses and web pages using the old .Mac urls will still work... it makes me a bit leery because things do not always turn out exactly as they are supposed to.

The following apps will need to be updated in order to make this transistion:

• CrystalBall 3.1.8
• To-Do Stickies
• ThumbPrinter

New Support / Payments E-mail
We have already moved CrystalBall Lite over to this site.  We have also just recently changed the payments made through PayPal for CBLite to use our new E-Mail address .  This transition has also required that we create another new email address to help deal with support issues.  This new support address is .  While we prefer support issues to be addressed on the Message Boards there are times you will want to contact us directly via email.  Feel free to use the support email address above.  If you use the Contact link above for support it will send your text to our support email address also.

To-Do Stickies  & ThumbPrinter
It will be fairly easy to transition these two apps to the new site.  I will be releasing an update in the near future that will update the contact information and help information to point to our new website.  You will also see changes taking place on the Message Board as we introduce new categories for these Apps.

CrystalBall 3.1.8
This morning when I woke up I decided to see what the issues were with pushing CrystalBall 3.1.8 into a more recent version of REALbasic.  I had my worries about trying this, and unfortunately, those worries were not unfounded.  I surprised myself this morning with one interesting discovery about the CrystalBall 3.1.8 code.  I have not transitioned this code beyond REALbasic 4.5.  For those of you familiar with REALbasic, version 4.5 is ancient when compared in terms of technology and the speed at which it changes.  This version of RB was released back in 2002 back when Apple was just beginning its transition to OSX.  While this version of RB still works just fine many many changes have been made in the framework for REALbasic since then.

The major issue I am dealing with right now is this: Text Encodings.  Back in RB 4.5 there were no text encodings issues.  Everything was written out to disk and read from the disk with the default encoding used in Mac OS Classic which was Mac Roman.  Today OS X uses Unicode (UTF8) as a default encoding that is much more robust and allows for many more characters in text.  But because of this, all files read into CrystalBall 3.1.8 are being read in as UTF8, when they are actually Mac Roman.  This has broken large parts of CrystalBall 3.1.8.  In order to fix this I will need to add code to every place I read a file and write a file and specify the text encoding as Mac Roman.  This will allow the older versions of the CrystalBallData files to continue to work with an updated version of CB.

Updating CrystalBall 3.1.8 will also have the following added bonuses:

• Native support for Intel Macs (Universal Binary)
• Scroll Bars will allow you to move them with the mousewheel.
• Scroll Bars on Listboxes will autohide when no scrollbar is needed.
• And there are probably other minor tweaks that will benefit CrystalBall.

But updating CrystalBall 3.1.8 will also require more time.  I definitely do no plan to add ANY new features.  And there is a great possibility that there will be some new bugs that I will have to fix in addition to the Text Encoding issues.  So I am not sure if it is worth the trade-offs. The other possibility is I update the current version of CrystalBall Lite to include the new web addresses and we continue to use it as it is now. (A PowerPC Native app using Rosetta on Intel Macs)

I would be interested in your opinions on this.  Please post your ideas here in this Message Board thread .