After a farewell e-mail this morning, I checked out Casady & Greene's website. Yup, it's "shut".
The whole company, which marketed superb Mac software including Conflict Catcher -- a standby of many who ran into problems with the now "Classic" operating system -- and Spell Catcher, which also works a treat on OS X (I use it mainly for French), will be gone in three days:
"'Goodnight Everybody!' is the farewell cry we have heard every night since Charles has been at C&G - He has usually been the first one here in the morning and as he left each night around five he would bellow out his goodbye for all to hear. We will hear that cry for the last time when we close our doors on July 3rd."
The "Charles" is Charles R. Fulweiler, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer, who had a habit of writing topical and sometimes highly controversial monthly letters to C&G customers who wanted them, sometimes tackling political and economic issues. I enjoyed them.
The closure notice on the C&G website includes links to developers taking over -- or reclaiming -- some of the famous applications.
Reclaiming? One company has just announced that "Spell Catcher has come home!".
Was not all as rosy as it seemed, quite apart from the economic problems, in the apparently benign Fulweiler firm? At Rainmaker's new site, there's a little addendum tagged on about possible charges for an upgrade to Spell Catcher for Mac OS X and their why:
"Please realize that we have only received a few pennies from each copy of Spell Catcher X that C&G sold (our normal royalty would be around $6-$7). If this causes a big uproar from existing customers, we may try to make it optional. Understand that we have only been nominally compensated for over a man-year in development time on Spell Catcher X."
No reason for this apparent lack of benevolence is given by Rainmaker, so I won't rush to hasty conclusions.
More details on several Mac sites, including MacMinute.
zzz
To be explored: "Want new music that suits your taste? Start 'scrobbling'." This is the headline from a weekend Boston Globe story by Michael Prager.
He explains:
"If even one commercial music station were better than warm spit, I might have been in the position to hear the Eels and Vertical Horizon, two of my new favorite bands, when they started out in the '90s.
But because radio stations all play the same 10 songs or are as stuck in the past as my music collection used to be, I never listen to them. For a long time, that meant if a pal didn't turn me on to new music, my collection stood still.
But now I have Audioscrobbler.com, and I am loving it."
"In a nutshell," they say at Audioscrobbler:
"Audioscrobbler endeavours to be your personal music advisor. It grows to know what music you like by monitoring what songs you play on your computer. From this information you can discover other users that share some or all of your taste in music. You can also view data showing what your most-played artists are, and find out who likes a particular artist the most. Audioscrobbler makes it easy to find people with similar musical tastes, and allows you to browse their profiles.
Plug-ins for major Mac and Windows programmes can be had via Audioscrobbler.
Prager began consecutive paragraphs with a "but" -- not a sentence starter that worries me, but two?
That, however, is only a very mild protest about a pet bugbear. It's not one of the big differences between US and British approaches to journalism, which are more complicated.
"Jeremy O'Grady, representing Britain's edition of The Week, remarked that American journalists display a reverence for the government and are often afraid to question the official line, while British journalists are more skeptical and irreverent."
That's one of a series of contrasts picked up in an article at YellowTimes. I don't agree with all of it. I think it's tougher on Americans than it should be, certainly going by most of those I work with. But it makes some good points. Thanks to Dru Oja Jay, who sometimes labels himself a journalist, for that one. Dru makes his own comment at the excellent misnomer.
1:54:51 PM link 
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