Daylite Delivery
A while back, I had posted about how Apple was proactive about security – contrary to what some people think.
Apple’s security police told us that we had to sandbox the database engine used for Daylite or Daylite would not be allowed to run on Leopard period. Well, Daylite Delivery got hit too. The original Daylite Delivery worked pretty good on Tiger and the initial release of Leopard as a “headless” daemon. As of Mac OS X 10.5.1, Apple shut down the avenue we used to talk to the WindowServer (needed for rendering those beautiful PDF reports) due to security concerns and a violation of how the process stack works (which is now enforced on Leopard).
We had a choice to make – do we kill Daylite Delivery or spend a whole lot of time and effort to rewrite it?
The thing is – Delivery is pretty damn cool. We don’t have to waste time running reports (never mind being lazy to run them in the first place), we just get them as PDF’s via email (nicely viewable on the iPhone too!). And unlike other much more expensive systems out there, you can design your own reports (or have one of our report certified partners create custom ones for you), if one of the 50 built-in reports doesn’t do the right thing for you.
As a business, Delivery really helps to keep things in perspective. It’s becoming pretty vital to our business and we figured it’s going to be become pretty vital for our customers as well, so we bit the bullet, re-invested and re-wrote it as a standalone application.
Turns out, that the standalone application is a good thing. We’ve reset the trial period, so if you’ve tried before. Release notes are here.
Daylite
Daylite 3.7.3 is an important release for those of you who use offline databases. We’ve significantly sped up the “sync with online database” feature. In some cases we’ve seen 10x speed improvement and other cases, we’ve seen about a 5x speed increase. It’s hard to give specific figures because every network, database size, record composition is different. Our beta testers have been very happy with the improvement.
Some of our customers have huge databases – in some cases the compressed backup is as high as 15GB in size! Think of all the email attachments a 10 or 15 person company can accumulate in a short period of time. So we’ve added the ability to either strip out or archive attachments to a volume, which you can later access via AFP (Apple File Share).
As usual, we’ve made other improvements to Daylite – so please take a look at the visit our what’s new page here.
Until next time…
AJ
