Day: May 20, 2012

For those of you who are into browser plugins, you may have run across a plugin called Inquisitor.  According to the website, Inquisitor:

speeds up your searches like no other

While this may be true after several searches I determined that I wanted to go back to using the default Safari search plugin features instead.  Unlike the XMarks plugin, the Inquisitor plugin doesn’t come with an uninstallation script.  The Inquisitor FAQ lists the following instructions on removing the plugin for Safari on Mac OS X:

• Navigate to your hard drive device
• Select the “Library” folder
• Select “InputManager” folder
• Delete the “Inquisitor” folder
• Restart Safari

My experience with this was not quite as nice as the FAQ would lead you to believe.  The main issue was that I had to actually logout of my user session before the bundle was released and could be emptied from the trash.

The second issue I had with the instructions was that they are incomplete.

Like many software developers on the Mac, David Watanabe, did not provide a complete uninstaller for the plugin, he just told you to go delete a few files.  I find this a very poor practice when writing software.  If you installer writes files and preferences to particular locations, then you should provide an uninstallation routine that removes those files.

After some searching, here is a list of the files that you need to remove in order to completely expunge Inquisitor from your system:

• /Library/InputManagers/Inquisitor/
• /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Inquisitor/
• /Library/Recipts/inquisitor.pkg
• /Library/Recipts/inquisitorPreflight.pkg

However, since this is a plugin for Safari that gives you options to configure, you should also take the time to remove the entries added to the Safari plist file.  The plist is named com.apple.Safari.plist and is stored in the /Users/username/Library/Preferences/ directory.

Here are the entries to remove from the plist file:

• kInquisitorAutocomplete
• kInquisitorBeaconEnabled
• kInquisitorNumberOfResults
• kInquisitorNumberOfSuggestions
• kInquisitorOrdering
• kInquisitorRepairDefaultShortcuts
• kInquisitorSearchHistory
• kInquisitorSearchSitesA
• kInquisitorSearchSource
• kInquisitorShowSearchViewA
• kInquisitorVersionCheck

For those of you who are in the iPhone developer community or just are just geeky enough to pay for the developer program in order to get a sneak peek on your friends, I thought I would let you in on some information I received from Pandora concerning problems with the Pandora Radio application and the 3.1 beta.

I noticed that after updating to 3.1 Beta I was no longer able to access my Pandora Radio application.  The application would run, but eventually I would get an error screen that told me it couldn’t connect.

After trying various troubleshooting techniques on my own I e-mail Pandora support.  Mike at Pandora gave me an extended set of instructions to follow:

In particularly stubborn cases, in addition to deleting Pandora from your iPhone, you may also have to:

1. delete Pandora from the iTunes list of Applications on your computer (it’s an option in iTunes from the list on the left, below Music)
2. sign out of the iTunes Store (click your iTunes Store sign-in information, usually an email address, in the upper right of the screen and select ‘sign out’)
3. re-sync your iPhone within iTunes
4. then sign back in to the iTunes Store (again, in the upper right)
5. re-sync your iPhone one last time

Then re-install Pandora, either via the App Store on your iPhone, or via iTunes on your computer.

After trying all of that, the application would still not talk to Pandora’s system.  I then tried the drastic step of doing a factory restore on the iPhone using the 3.1 Beta download as the firmware.  This still didn’t help much.

After reporting all of this back to Mike at Pandora, I received the following reply via e-mail:

Hi Andy,

Sorry about that. We’re aware of this issue with the app not working with the 3.1 OS and we’re hoping this is solved in our next release. Thanks so much for your patience in the meantime!

Best,
Mike @ Pandora

While this was not unexpected, given that I am running a non-production release of the OS, I was quite gratified to find out that they were aware of the issue and working on it.  There have been other times where support personnel have told users “Sorry, we can’t help you because you are running our software in a non-standard environment.” Kudos to Pandora for not reacting that way and for giving a meaningful response.

Update (2009-07-14 11:52PM EDT):

After updating to Beta 2 of OS 3.1 tonight Pandora Radio is now working again.