After January 6th, 2009 http://homepage.mac.com/crystalballmac and will no longer work!

It seems like forever ago when I introduced CrystalBall via my .Mac homepage years ago.  It was a good solution for hosting CrystalBall for others to download.  But things have changed over the years.

For one, the static HTML pages that made up the old http://homepage.mac.com/crystalballmac website were a pain to maintain.  I used Dreaweaver to create and maintain the website.  It has become too difficult and expensive to maintain a fresh copy of Dreamweaver.  Editing the site HTML by hand was too painful.

In addition we didn't have a lot of money to include a message board, nor did .Mac offer any solutions for a message board on our .Mac site.  We relied on free message boards which worked fine, but we could never integrate it into the site the way we wanted.

When Austin (Mr. Cryptic) changed jobs and started working with PHP he needed a way to play with PHP code so we purchased a hosting solution through SiteGround.com.  I have been very happy with this change.  We have been able to use a Content Management System for our main website.  We have been able to have our very own Message Board.  And more importantly we now have our own domain which is easier to remember than the .Mac web address

Over the years .Mac (now called MobleMe) has languished in features while the rest of the world has moved forward.  I am sure MobleMe is great for those who do not want to deal with setting up a hosting solution on a Linux machine and deal with installing web apps.  My .Mac (MobileMe) account is about to expire.  And the old website will be no more.

Also, my old email address will expire.  You will no longer be able to contact us via the and addresses after January 6th, 2009.

This has caused some concern with me because I still receive support questions from time to time on that old email address.  The reason is mainly because CrystalBall 3.1.8 still has the old email address and website address listed inside the app.

I have also been concerned that Apple is fast-moving away from supporting PPC applications.  And that one day they are going to close the lid (and nail it shut) on Rosetta Apps running on Intel Macs.

I have therefore decided to take the plunge and update CrystalBall 3.1.8 so that it will be a Universal Binary application.  Also I will be updating the support URLs and email address to reflect our new site.  This process is not as easy as it seems.  I have to figure out a way to read all the old CrystalBallData files (which were all encoded in MacRoman) into an updated version of RealBasic that now defaults all text to UTF-8 encodings.  Once I have made the switch I will need help testing the new version of CrystalBall to make sure it works like it previously did.  I will not be updating any features of CB 3.1.8 since we a concentrating on CrystalBall Lite version 3.0 and ultimately the next version of CrystalBall. (I have already started working on this and have all the errors squashed out of the code that the new version of RB didn't like.)