Welcome to MacSharewareOffice. MacSharewareOffice has a lot to offer you, so you probably won't understand how to get the most out of MSO at first. This documentation should help you accomplish that.
Setting your preferences. You will initially have to set up all of your preferences. This does not mean that every field will have to be filled in. To setup your preferences, select Edit > Preferences... So now you have about 10-15 fields, so what do they all mean? Here is a complete listing :
Product Setup of MSO. Now you have set up your preferences. MacSharewareOffice knows where to get email, and how to send email, but not much else. It doesn't know the names of your products, what serial numbers to send your customers, or even if payments you get could be for your product. So now, we need to let it know what our products are. This will also give MSO the information it needs to use the Submit To... feature (atleast the info that you need to define manually. more on that later.) To add a product, press the button on the toolbar with a CD icon, or select Products Window from the Products menu. Now, in the top right hand corner of the products window, there is a menu button. Either click that button or select the Products menu and select New Product... Once again, there are a lot of fields, here is what they all mean:
Do you wish to configure serial number preferences? Thats what you should see after adding a product. If you are using MSO to send autoreplies with serial numbers, you basically have to click OK. Clicking cancel will still add the product, but your customers will never get their serial numbers. Provided you clicked OK, you can now begin setting up your serial numbers. How do you do this? If you are worried that MSO is going to steal your serial numbers and send them all over the place, you can choose the option to enter your serial numbers manually, which means that you are the only place MSO can get serial numbers. If you choose this option, you will simply be prompted to enter a serial number whenever you enter a payment. If you simply have a list of serial numbers, or you wish to use an external generator, read on!
The folders included with MSO. MacSharewareOffice includes 7 folders, and in the next release, will include an 8th (for AppleScripts) This alone can be confusing. So, to understand what MSO can do, you have to know what these folders are for. You already have found out what the Documentation folder is for, because this file is located there. What about the other 6?
So what about the other two serial number methods? Well, the last two items of the last section pretty much explain everything. The only thing you have to do now is choose your file to use. If you selected to recieve serial numbers using a list, select the list file from the menu. If it doesn't appear, hit OK. Your product was already added, so now you have to select it in the products window, and choose "Serial Number Setup" from the menu button on the window or the Products menu and the list should be there. If you chose Apple Events, you must have compiled a serial number generator application using or based on the AE Serial Number SDK. Press the button under that option and choose your application.
But what about the friendly emails I always send my customers with their serial numbers? You still can have them! MSOs auto-replies are template driven. This means that the only thing you have to do is create a template, put it in the Auto Reply Templates folder, and choose it in from the Auto Reply Template list in the Serial Number Setup window. But wait a second...templates have to follow some kind of formatting, right? Well of course, keep reading.
So how do I make all these templates for MSO? Its actually incredibly simple. If you have used HTML before, this is even easier. There are only about 20-25 commands, most of which are used on plugins, auto reply templates, and press release templates. About 5 of these are only used by one thing. Each tag is replaced by whatever it describes. Here is the full list:
The following tags can be used in templates or plugins:
Note that the last 4 can be used anywhere, while everything else can be used anywhere except Press Releases where no product is chosen. Also note that plugins require more than just these tags.
The following tags can only be used in Press Releases and Auto Replies:
The following tag can only be used in Press Releases:
The following tags can only be used in Auto Replies:
Ive created my template to send to my customers, now what? If the serial number window is open, you will have to once again, hit OK and reopen it. If its closed, open it for the product the template is for and choose your template in the menu labeled "Auto-Reply Template". Believe it or not, you can now receive payments. But first, to make sure your template is working right, and to learn more about the payment system, you can hit OK in the serial number setup window and then close your products window. If you want, you can add all of your products the same way you did your first one, just so you can test them all at once.
Testing your setup. To test your setup, press the button on the toolbar that looks like a dollar sign ($), or select "Payments Window" from the Payments menu. There will now be a window with a listbox, editfield, a couple of popupmenus, and a menu button in the top right hand corner of the window. Press the menu button and select "Add Payment" or select "Add Payment" from the Payments menu. (If you haven't figured it out already, the menu buttons in the products and payments windows simply mimic the menus on the menubar associated with each window.) We will worry about the other things on the window later.
Even more fields? You bet. This is a much smaller window, so it should be a little bit more managable than the preferences window or the new product window. Anyway, if you don't know what each field does, Ill tell you :
How are settings tested? Punch in your name, email address, date, a fake quantity, and check the Generate and Send Auto-Reply checkbox and click OK. Now dont press anything until you see the payment added to the database in the payments window. Wait a few minutes, and check your email. If you do press the mouse or switch applications before you the payment was added, there is a slight chance the email will not be sent successfully. If you recieve the email, and it looks as you expected, you did everything right, and MSO worked fine. If you dont get the email within 10 minutes but the payment is added to the database, MSO probably had an error, and you should report it to Support@SplitSW.com. If you get an error, make sure you have not moved or renamed any files in your serial settings, and that you have compiled the serial number generator correctly (if thats the method you are using). Try it again. If you still can't get it right, email us.
So how does MSO actually retrieve a payment message from Kagi? Press the button on the toolbar that looks like a dollar bill next to a checkbox (that icon is there because the feature is actually called PayChecker) and a status bar will appear on the toolbar. If you have payments, MSO will go into action and add all of your payments and send autoreplies. If not, MSO will beep and the status bar will disappear.
Now what about those other things on the payments window? MacSharewareOffice offers you search capabilities right in the payments window. The first menu is what column in the list you are searching in. The second menu is how to search (ie : how much has to match) and the editfield is the text to search for. A nice thing about this is that it will update the search records on the fly. Once you type or delete a letter in the editfield, the listing of records will automatically update to fit the criteria you entered. The records will also update when you change a menu selection.
Payment Summarizing. Sure, the payments database is nice, the search features make it better, but why would anyone want to add up the values from a list of payments, especially if there is a lot of payments? Why would anyone want to count up all the payments for each application they have? They wouldn't. So you wouldn't have to do it, MSO has a very helpful feature called Payment Summary. When you choose that option from the payments menu, you will see a listbox with two items : Total Payments followed by the total number of payments in the database, and Total Earnings followed by the total amount of money you have made. There is also disclosure triangles next to each item. If you click those, you will see how many payments each product got, and how much money each product has made you.
What good are payment features when nobody can find a product? Of course, we had that in mind when we developed MSO. These next two features are much simpler than the payment system. We know how much of a pain it can be to submit your software to the same websites over and over again, just to find out that they got the same reviews, not many downloads, and it just takes so much time to do it.
Submit To... with what was just said above, products won't sell if nobody can find them. That is a fact. However, with MSO, you can get this whole procedure done in record time. Open your products window again. Choose Products > Submit To... a small window will come up listing various websites, with checkboxes next to them. Check off all of the ones you want your software to be sent to. Press the submit button. Now you should see a progress meter popdown and a status message. Within a couple of minutes at most, your software will now be submitted to all of the sites you checked. Now, MacSharewareOffice is not what actually gives these sites the info, so if your software doesn't get listed, theres probably something wrong with the plugins, or your product info was not filled out enough. All the info sent using plugins is gathered from the Products database section, so make sure that everything you possibly could filled out, is.
Plugins. Thankfully, you dont have to be a C/C++ whiz to add functionality to MSO. All you need is a text editor to write them up in. Plugins depend on the tags previously described for instructing MSO what data to place in the plugin. But how does MSO know the names of the form components, the address, submit type, or anything else besides what data to replace? Its very simple actually. First, plugins must start with a web address, like this, which is the location of the cgi script where the data will be sent to :
http://www.downloadsite.com/cgi-bin/submit.cgi
Next, the plugin needs to instruct MSO the form type, either GET or POST. Like this:
http://www.downloadsite.com/cgi-bin/submit.cgi
POST
Next, we have to list all the form components. This is simply done by writing the name of a form component, followed by a colon (:) and then its value. No spaces can be used when doing this. The tags are used to represent the values. Heres the final plugin:
http://www.downloadsite.com/cgi-bin/submit.cgi
POST
Success:submitpage.html
ProgramName:<appName>
ProgramVersion:<appVersion>
ProgramDownload:<appURL>
A note about plugins : For some reason, certain websites will reject the form data, or send an error. This is not typical, but unfourtinately, it can happen. This is the main reason why there is not a VersionTracker plugin available. A reason for this maybe that the site used an underscore (_) which is not acceptable to all web browsers, etc.
So that means that any website that can't have a plugin must still be manually punched in? Not at all. Most websites will provide you with an alternative way of submitting your software, usually through email. Simply create a mailing list and send a press release. Mailing List? Press release?
Mailing Lists. To keep track of everyone you need to email about your company or software, MSO has a simple mailing lists feature to make it a little easier. To access your mailing lists, press the button that looks like an envelope on the toolbar, or select Advertising > Mailing Lists. Now, the next window that comes up is very straight forward. You have a listing of all the names of your mailing lists, along with buttons to add, delete, edit, and launch (ie:send an email in your default email client to that address) addresses. To create a mailing list, simply press New, type in a name for the list, and the recipients. (You may have noticed that these lists aren't actually lists. However, they are called mailing lists because mailing lists are mainly who you will send press releases to probably) If you need one list to have multiple recipients, simply separate the addresses using commas.
Press Releases. The submit to feature can get your software on websites, but what about people who depend on mailing lists to get their software? Thats where press releases come into play. MacSharewareOffice provides a very powerful tool to create and send these press releases. Its main strong point is that you can send a complete press release about a product, without typing anything into the body of the message. To send press releases, select Advertising > Press Release Wizard or press the button on the toolbar that looks like a newspaper. In the window that comes up, you will see the press release wizard. It may, at first glance, look simply like a regular email client, just with an added menu to be compatable with the MSO mailing lists. But incase you can't understand everythings purpose, here is the final list of this document:
The Wizard. So what is a wizard? No, its not magic on your computer, but its close enough. A wizard helps you do something much faster than you could on your own. Like the plugins and auto-reply templates, the Press Release Wizard is template driven. You have already seen the tags for these templates, so you should have a fairly good idea of how to make one. The templates do not have to be formatted any specific way, so you can pretty much make them as customized as you want. Once you make one (see the Announcement Example included), you must place it into your Press Release Templates folder.
So, what is the base document? Simply another word for a template. They are simply a list of all items in the Press Release Templates folder.
What is the Product menu for? If you are announcing information specifically about a product, you can send a full press release by choosing a product and template. All the information that needs to be inserted is retrieved from your Products section of the database.
What is the main field for? That is if you want to add any info to a press release, like company news, that cannot be added using the tags. The text you enter into this field is inserted into the press release where ever the tag "<messageBody>" is found.
But what about...? This document was obviously pretty long, and I tried to make it as complete as possible, but there will always be more questions. So, here is everything else, and how to contact us if you need more help: