Aether Blog

Overview

Yesterday, Apple released macOS 11.1. One of the new features in this release is privacy labels in the Mac App Store. These labels are intended to help you clearly understand the data collected by an app, how that data is used, and its impact on your privacy.

Aether has long had a privacy policy, and now also includes privacy labels on its Mac App Store page. I think these labels are a great step toward making it clearer to people how apps are using their data.

However, because they’re designed to be something that every app displays, they’re necessarily a bit generic. I thought it might be helpful to lay out specifically what data collects, why, and how it’s used.

If you’re not interested in reading this entire post, the summary is that Aether collects little personal information, it is never shared with or sold to third-parties except to facilitate its management (ie. never shared with third-party advertisers), and you can opt out of its collection except as required to process a purchase of Aether.

These are the specific times that data is collected by Aether and transmitted to Open Reel Software or a third party:

When you purchase Aether directly from the website.

When you first launch Aether, fill out the welcome window, and check the “Allow us to send occasional email with Aether news”.

When the Mac App Store version of the app crashes and you you submit the report to Apple.

When the non-Mac App Store version checks for an available update if you enabled the “collect anonymous system profile information” checkbox.

You can opt out of any or all of these.

I’ll detail these below:

Purchasing Aether

When you purchase Aether from the Aether website, your payment information is processed by our third-party payment processor, FastSpring. At no time are your payment details (credit card number, etc.) available to or stored by Open Reel Software. Fastspring has their own privacy policy. Open Reel Software receives a receipt for your purchase including your name, physical address, and email address. We store this data solely for the purposes of looking up previous purchases in case you lose your license, or request a refund. It is never transmitted to another third party, nor is it used for marketing.

If you purchase Aether from the Mac App Store, Apple handles all aspects of the transaction. The only information Open Reel Software receives about you or your purchase is that a purchase occurred, and which country it came from. Your name, email address, remain solely with Apple. As such, only Apple can handle refunds, etc.

Opting Out

You cannot opt out of sharing this information when purchasing Aether on the Aether website, as it is needed to process your purchase. You can choose to buy Aether on the Mac App Store, which will ensure that your data is only shared with Apple, not Open Reel Software. If you would like your purchase records removed from our database, please email [email protected]. Note that this will prevent us from recovering your license key should you lose it.

Welcome Window

When you launch Aether for the first time, it presents a welcome window asking for some information. You are asked for the following:

Callsign

Name

Address

Grid Square

Email Address

There is also a checkbox titled “Allow us to send occasional email with Aether news”.

The information collected by this window is primarily used to set up your logbook, specifically the information you’ll find in the Station Info window. If, and only if, you click “Start Using Aether” with the “Allow” checkbox enabled, your name, callsign, and email address are transmitted to Open Reel Software.

This information is used solely by Open Reel Software itself for a low-traffic marketing email list and will never be sold or given to others for their own marketing. The data is stored by Mailchimp, a company that allows you to easily email a large list of people at the same time. Mailchimp has their own privacy policy.

Opting Out

If you uncheck the “Allow us to send occasional email with Aether news”, the information you’ve entered will not be sent to Open Reel Software. If you have already submitted your information, you can request it be removed by emailing [email protected] or by clicking Unsubscribe in any emails sent to you via this list.

Crash Reports

Aether crashing is a bad thing, and means there’s a problem that should be fixed. In order to diagnose problems and fix them, Aether collects crash reports via Apple. Currently this is only done by the Mac App Store version of Aether using macOS’s built in crash reporting service.

Crash logs are aggregated by Apple, anonymized, and only shared with Open Reel Software by Apple if the same crash is reported enough times. (In practice this means that crash reports are usually not visible to Open Reel Software, and it’s always helpful if you email support with a bug report and the crash log!) Because of this, crash reports can not be used to identify you in any way.

Additionally, in the non-Mac App Store version of Aether, if Aether crashes, you will see a crash report asking if you’d like to submit the report to Apple. These reports are not shared with Open Reel Software, and only go to Apple.

Opting Out

You can opt out of sharing crash logs with all third-party app developers via Apple’s built in service in the “Analytics & Improvements” section of the Privacy tab of the Security & Privacy pane of macOS System Preferences. Uncheck the box titled “Share with App Developers”.

Update Checking

The non-Mac App Store version of Aether includes the ability to check for updates and download them. This is done by asking an Open Reel Software server for information about the latest available version of the app. By default, the second time you launch Aether, an alert is presented asking if you want to automatically check for updates. This alert also includes a checkbox titled “Include anonymous system profile”. If that box is checked, when Aether checks for an update, it will also occasionally send some anonymous system profile information to the server.

This information includes information like the type of Mac you’re using, the version of macOS it's running, and the version of Aether you’re running. No personally identifiable information is included, and this information is not tied to your identity or other information collected about you in any way. It is used solely to understand Aether usage, to make decisions about which versions of macOS to support, etc.

The Mac App Store version of Aether collects similar completely anonymous analytics and usage data via Apple’s own service. This data is shared with Open Reel Software only in aggregate and completely anonymously.

Opting Out

You can opt out of this data being collected by unchecking the “Include anonymous system profile” box when first prompted to enable automatic updates in the non-Mac App Store version of Aether. It is not currently possible to opt out later. This is an oversight that will be corrected in an upcoming update to Aether.

You can opt out of the collection of this kind of analytics data for the Mac App Store version of Aether via Apple’s built in service in the “Analytics & Improvements” section of the Privacy tab of the Security & Privacy pane of macOS System Preferences. Uncheck the box titled “Share with App Developers”.

The Future

If changes to the data collected by Aether, it use, or the Open Reel Software privacy policy are made in the future, they will be communicated on this website and as appropriate in the Mac App Store.

This month, Apple released macOS 11 Big Sur and the first Macs using Apple Silicon. I participated in the developer transition program, and am happy to report that Aether was available for Big Sur and running natively on M1 Macs on day one of their release. While older versions of Aether should run fine on M1 Macs under Rosetta 2, the Aether 1.6.9 is built as a Universal binary, and as such runs completely natively on both Intel Macs and M1 Macs.

As always, if you notice any issues, please email me.

The latest version of macOS (formerly OS X), Sierra, was released today. Based on my own testing over the past few months, I'm happy to report that the current version of Aether, 1.6.3 is fully compatible with macOS 10.12 Sierra. I do not know of any problems related to the new OS update and Aether.

I'd like to introduce the new Aether help website, which can be found at help.aetherlog.com. I've spent the past while working hard on this, and my hope is that it will be a significant help to Aether users in general.

Motivation

As I mentioned in my post about the future of Aether, an increasing portion of the time I'm able to devote to working on Aether is taken up answering support emails. While I very much enjoy interacting with Aether users, and am always happy to help with problems that come up, this does take away from time and concentration I'm able to spend on updates to Aether itself.

From the very beginning, Aether has included built in help, accessible by choosing "Aether Help" from the Help menu, like any good Mac app. However, writing and maintaining this help is a cumbersome process. Because of that it has been relatively skimpy and I must confess that I've not always done a great job keeping it up to date. This has contributed to my support load as users are not always able to find help even with simple or common question.

A number of posts on this blog include information about solving common problems, and sometimes I receive an email where the question is thoroughly answered by a post I've made here. That makes it very easy and fast to answer those emails. This experience made me realize that a better help system would decrease the amount of time I spend doing support.

Instead of needing to contact me for help with a question, many people should be able to find an answer on the new help site. Additionally, when someone does contact me with a common question, I can send them a link to relevant documentation instead of rewriting the same answer I've given others before. All this should decrease my support burden giving me more time to work on cool new stuff for future updates to Aether.

Technical Information

A little about the new site: The site is built using mkdocs which is a really nice static site generator geared toward building software documentation. All of the content is written in simple, plaintext Markdown files, which means that it's really easy for me to update and add new content. It takes me just a few seconds to deploy an update to the site. If a user is not able to find the answer to a question they have, and ends up emailing me about it, I can update the site with the answer to their question just as easily as sending them a one-off reply. The advantage is, the next time someone asks the same question, the answer is just a link away.

I will be releasing an update to Aether, 1.6.3, so that the Aether Help menu option opens help.aetherlog.com in the coming days.

Open Source

I've decided to make the site open source, released under the Creative Commons . This means that others can suggest and contribute new content, report and fix mistakes, or even download the text source of the site for offline use if desired. If you'd like to check out the source you can find it here: https://github.com/armadsen/help.aetherlog.com .

Work In Progress

One final note: I decided to put the site up now as it's already proving helpful to people who have emailed me with questions in recent weeks. However, it does remain a work in progress, so consider it a beta test version. There are pages that are empty right now, as well as a small number of broken links. I'll be working to fix these and expand the content as quickly as I can. If you'd like to help, I would very much appreciate it. Feel free to Open an issue if you find a mistake or want more information about something in Aether. If you're feeling really generous, you can even contribute to the site yourself!

Thanks!

Since the Aether 1.6 update was released yesterday, I’ve heard from a few people that are having trouble launching the app after updating it using the Mac App Store. I and am writing this post to explain the problem, along with providing instructions for fixing it. Important note: this problem does not affect any customers who purchased Aether directly from the Aether website.

On Sunday February 14, 2016, one of Apple’s security certificates expired. This is discussed by Apple here. Apple explains that some users “may receive a notification that your Mac app is damaged if it utilizes receipt validation to request a new receipt from Apple. They can resolve this issue by restarting their Mac or updating to OS X El Capitan (v10.11.2) or later.” At first, I thought this explained the problem Aether users were seeing.

However, after hearing from a few people already running 10.11.3, and for whom reinstalling Aether and rebooting their Macs didn’t fix the problem, it became clear that at least for some users, something else was at play.

After some patient help from a couple of these users, I’ve identified the problem, as well as a fairly straightforward workaround. I have also fixed this bug and submitted a fixed version to the Mac App Store. With any luck, Apple will review and approve it quickly. I expect it to be just a few days. In the meantime, in order to prevent others from encountering this problem, I have pulled Aether from the Mac App Store.

Solution Instructions:

If you have already updated to Aether 1.6 and are having trouble launching it, please follow the instructions below to fix the problem and allow Aether 1.6 to launch again.

In Finder, open the Go menu, then select Go to Folder (or press command-shift-G).

In the window that appears, copy and paste the following line:

~/Library/Containers/com.openreelsoftware.aether/Data/Library/Application Support/Aether/App Store Receipts/

Click the Go button.

A Finder window will open at that folder. You should see a single file called Receipt:

Select the ‘Receipt’ file and drag it to the Trash.

Relaunch Aether, and it should successfully start up and run.

I sincerely apologize for the annoyance and inconvenience caused by this problem. If after following these instructions, you’re still having trouble, or if you have any questions at all, please contact me.

Technical Details

For those that are interested in knowing more about the technical details of the problem, read on:

When an app is downloaded from the app store, the app store itself inserts a into the application itself. Aether checks this receipt to make sure that it is a valid, paid-for copy before launching. If the receipt is invalid, it requests a new one from the app store. However, Aether also saves a copy of its internal receipt to an external location so that beta versions of Aether distributed outside the app store will be able to verify it and run fully-licensed. This allows app-store customers to beta test upcoming updates to Aether, and is a useful feature. Unfortunately, it is also this feature causing the trouble.

One of the changes I made in Aether 1.6 was to switch to using a secure connection to communicate with eQSL.cc. This was done at the recommendation of eQSL, for better security. Unfortunately, after I made and tested this change, eQSL.cc’s security certificate expired. A number of Aether users have emailed me reporting this problem after updating. The problem is actually not limited to Aether. With the expiration of this certificate, any logging program that attempts to connect to eQSL.cc using secure HTTP, will error out due to the bad certificate.

According to Tom, DL2RUM, the author of RUMLog, the people at eQSL are aware of the problem and working on fixing it.

In the meantime, there is a relatively simple workaround. To fix the problem and allow Aether to upload to eQSL again, do the following:

Open Safari (another browser such as Chrome may work, but I haven’t tested it).

Navigate to https://www.eqsl.cc/. Note the ‘https’ rather than just plain 'http’ in this URL, which is important.

You should see a warning about an invalid certificate:

Click the Show Certificate button.

Check the box that says “Always trust eqsl.cc when connecting to www.eqsl.cc”:

Click Continue.

I've had a number of inquiries in the past few weeks asking about the future of Aether, so I wanted to write a post to clarify a few things. First of all, despite the lack of recent updates, Aether is most certainly still alive. I continue to actively provide customer support, and am readying an update, Aether 1.6, which will pave the way for the next major update to Aether. In this post, I'd like to provide more details about Aether's current status and what you can expect in the future.

First, A Little History

When I started work on Aether, I was fairly new to Mac programming, having previously mostly written software in C both for UNIX machines and firmware for microcontrollers. I wanted a good Mac logging application, and it turned out to be a great project to improve my Objective-C/Cocoa programming skills. After Aether was far enough along to be useful to me, I released it online, and was very pleased that it quickly attracted a base of loyal users. Aether has been and continues to be a labor of love for me. I'm very grateful for the wonderful customers I've had over the years, some of whom I've gotten to know through frequent emails, help with beta testing, translation, etc. (and a few I've even met in person!).

In the meantime, I've gone from working full time as an electrical engineer doing hardware design, to making my living doing Mac and iOS application development professionally. For a number of reasons, this career change has been very positive for me, and I largely have Aether to thank for making it possible.

The Situation Today

As anyone who has followed Aether closely knows, I haven't released an update in quite some time, and haven't released an update with major new features for even longer. I love Aether, and find working on it very fulfilling, but while I absolutely appreciate every customer who has ever purchased a copy, Mac ham radio software is very much a niche market. Aether has succeeded far beyond my expectations, but it essentially makes ham radio a self sustaining hobby for me. I make enough money on Aether sales to buy new ham gear now and then, and to buy cool new Apple products more often than I might otherwise, but it's not enough to sustain me. The unfortunate downside of this is that I can't justify working on it to the exclusion of the full time development work that sustains my family (which has gone from just me to three of us!). As Aether's user base has grown, I've also had to devote a larger share of my time working on it to responding to email from users. All of this has meant slow progress on a long list of ambitious goals for Aether in the recent past.

The Future

So, what does this mean for the future? First of all, I recently have scaled back on work for others, in order to be able devote more time to personal projects, including Aether. This should mean that I have more time and energy to devote to development of and support for Aether. There are three milestones on the horizon for Aether:

Aether 1.6. This will be a minor update including bug fixes, and a few features and improvements around LoTW support and label printing. However, the most significant change is that Aether 1.6 adopts Apple's sandboxing technology. This has been required for new apps and major updates to existing apps on the Mac App Store for some time. Aether not being sandboxed has been one of the impediments to substantive updates, since Apple wouldn't approve them for distribution through the Mac App Store. Implementing sandboxing, particularly in a mature, complex existing app like Aether, is far from trivial, and has taken a significant amount of development and testing time and effort. With this update finished and released, updates that add new features will be easier for me to release. Aether 1.6 is available for beta testing now. If you're interested in testing it, please contact me.

A brand new ham radio app. This will be a great companion to Aether and will also be useful on its own. I'm not ready to announce this app's functionality, because I want it to be a surprise, but it's something that many users have asked for. Development is about 70% finished, but there is still significant work to be done, especially on the UI. I'll have more to announce as the completion of development gets closer.

Aether 2.0. I have been working on and off on a major update to Aether for some time now. This release will add a number of major, often-requested new features. It will also include quite a number of smaller improvements. Needless to say, in the time since I started work on Aether, my skills as a Mac developer have improved immensely, and I'm putting a lot of effort into improving Aether under the hood in addition to adding new functionality. This is a major, long term effort, and while very substantial work on it has already been done, there's a fair amount left to do. I'm excited to dig back in and get it finished up.

Again, thank you so much to all the loyal users of Aether over the years. It continues to be a joy to work on, and I appreciate all the support I've had.

I've had a number of people inquire about Aether's compatibility with the new release of OS X, 10.11 El Capitan over the past few weeks. I'm happy to report that the current version of Aether, 1.5.14 is fully compatible with OS X 10.11. I do not know of any problems related to the new OS update and Aether. At this point, nearly 40% of Aether users are running 10.11, and I expect it to become the most popular version of OS X among Aether users within the next few weeks.

There is one issue worth mentioning here, that while not specific to or caused by Aether is something that affects many Aether users. With OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Apple is strictly enforcing a requirement that USB drivers be signed. This includes the drivers necessary to use USB to serial adapters. As of this writing, the latest drivers for adapters using Prolific and Keyspan chipsets are signed and 10.11 compatible. Drivers for FTDI-based adapters are included by Apple with OS X, and are of course signed and 10.11 compatible. I haven't yet been able to confirm whether Silicon Labs' drivers -- as needed for many rigs that connect directly via USB -- are signed and 10.11 compatible. If you have trouble with rig control after updating to 10.11, please make sure you have installed the latest drivers for your USB to serial adapter. Links to pages with the latest drivers can be found here:

Keyspan: http://www.tripplite.com/support/USA19HS

Prolific: http://www.prolific.com.tw/US/ShowProduct.aspx?p_id=229&pcid=41

FTDI (not usually needed): http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

Silicon Labs: https://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBtoUARTBridgeVCPDrivers.aspx

I receive questions about using Aether with fldigi fairly frequently. While Aether doesn’t officially include any integration with fldigi or vice versa, it is possible to set fldigi up to log QSOs in Aether. This is enabled by a script written by a generous Aether user, Alan Hawrylyshen, K2ACK. I thought it would be useful to have detailed instructions for setting this up, so here they are:

Download K2ACK’s script from: https://github.com/muonzoo/ham-utils/archive/master.zip

Extract the downloaded zip file by double clicking on it.

In the exctracted folder, find the script file itself, which is called fldigi-aether-logger.py

Open the .fldigi folder by choosing Go->Go to Folder in the Finder’s menu (or pressing command-shift-G) and typing or copy/pasting the following path:

         ~/.fldigi/

In the folder that appears, find and open the folder called “scripts”. If it does not exist, create it.

Copy fldigi-aether-logger.py into this scripts folder.

Open Terminal, which you can find in /Applications/Utilities (or use Spotlight to search for Terminal), and copy/paste the following command, then press return:

         chmod +x ~/.fldigi/scripts/fldigi-aether-logger.py

Open fldigi. In the main window, right click on the macro button you want to use for logging in Aether.

In the window that appears, For the Macro Button Label, enter whatever you’d like. I use “Log in Aether”. For Macro Text, copy/paste the following:

         <exec>$HOME/.fldigi/scripts/fldigi-aether-logger.py & </exec>

         When you’re done, click Apply, then Close.

You should be all done. Test it by entering a callsign, etc. at the top of the fldigi, then click Log in Aether. If everything is set up correctly, Aether should launch (if it is not already running) and the QSO from fldigi should be added to the frontmost Aether logbook window.

Important update: p1k.arrl.org is now back online, and Aether 1.5.13 and older will once again sync correctly with LoTW. The Aether 1.5.14 update is no longer urgent, but is still recommended.

Original post (with annotations) below:

As many of you have probably noticed, Aether's ability to sync with LoTW was broken early on Thursday, October 2, 2014. This post gives an explanation of the problem, and information about the solution.

The Problem

When I originally added LoTW support to Aether, the ARRL server used for most LoTW functionality was p1k.arrl.org. At some point in the past year or so, the ARRL moved LoTW functionality over to a new server, lotw.arrl.org. p1k.arrl.org was maintained as a proxy so that Aether and other logging software using p1k.arrl.org would continue to function. When I recently learned of this change, I made the switch to the new server URLs in my development version of Aether, and that switch was to be included in the soon-to-be-released Aether 1.6 update.

However, with little, if any, public notice, the ARRL has taken p1k.arrl.org offline as of yesterday, breaking Aether's ability to sync with LoTW. Aether 1.6 is nearing completion, but is not ready for release today, which leaves Aether users without a way to sync with LoTW (p1k.arrl.org is back online and LoTW syncing works once again, even in older versions of Aether).

The Solution

I have released a quick-fix update to Aether to fix this problem. The update is Aether 1.5.14 and is available now to those using a version of Aether purchased directly from the Aether website. The update can be installed by choosing Aether->Check for Updates in the Aether menubar. It can also be manually downloaded here.

For Mac App Store Customers

This update has also been submitted to the Mac App Store and is awaiting review and approval from Apple. This review process is expected to take about a week.

In the meantime, if you urgently need to upload your Aether log to LoTW, the process can be done manually using the same process as would be used to sign and upload an ADIF file from any logging program. If you need assistance with this, you can email me and I'll be happy to help.

Again, I apologize for the trouble this problem has caused. Feel free to contact me via email with any questions.

Last summer, I wrote a series of four posts about Aether and Logbook of The World (aka. LoTW). The first post give an overview. The next three posts describe solutions to common problems encountered when using Aether with LoTW.

It turns out that these posts are helpful enough that I find myself frequently sending people links to them. In order to make doing that easier, I've gathered links to all 4 posts -- along with a short description of each -- here:

Part 1: How Aether works with LoTW - An introduction to the overall process of syncing with LoTW in Aether, along with basic instructions for getting set up.

Part 2: Certificate Import Trouble - Look here if you're having trouble importing an LoTW certificate into Aether.

Part 3: Missing Certificates - This post talks about the solution to a "missing valid LoTW certificates" error.

With the release of Aether 1.5.12 today, I wanted to post an explanation of changes to Aether's support for older versions of Mac OS X. First, a little history. The very first public version of Aether was released in beta form in January of 2007. It was fairly simple, and was missing most of the features Aether contains today. At the time, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was the latest version of Mac OS X, and Aether made use of new features provided by Apple in that release. As such, it required 10.4, and wouldn't run on any older versions of Mac OS X. In the time since, I've released many updates to Aether, including adding major new features like LoTW and eQSL.cc support, printing, support for multiple callbook lookup sources, awards tracking, import/export support, and many more. Still, the current version of Aether, 1.5.12, runs as well on Tiger as it does on the newest Mountain Lion, which is quite rare among still-maintained Mac software.

Apple is known for releasing frequent major updates to Mac OS X. These releases often feature many new features for users. What the average user doesn't see is all the work Apple does behind the scenes for developers. In fact, with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple made very few changes that were visible to the end user. However, for Mac developers, Snow Leopard was one of the very biggest releases of Mac OS X, and included hundreds or even thousands of changes and improvements, including major new ways of writing software for the Mac.

Continuing to support older versions of Mac OS X means using older programming techniques that make it considerably slower to implement new features, much more testing, and the inability to take full advantage of new features in OS X like Notifications, Autosave, iCloud, etc. Apple has been aggressive about making it easy for users to upgrade by moving to distributing new OS versions online and drastically reducing the price of upgrades (Mountain Lion is just $20). They have been just as aggressive in encouraging Mac developers to adopt the latest Mac OS X technologies. They tend to be quick to drop support for older operating system versions in their developer tools. While my primary development machine runs 10.8 Mountain Lion, I actually have to move to an older, much slower Mac, running a years out of date version of the development tools to build Aether (Apple's tools dropped support for creating PowerPC-compatible apps nearly 2 years ago).

Meanwhile, the percentage of Aether users using Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 has steadily fallen. As of today, under 3% of all Aether users are running 10.4, with about 5% running 10.5. Less than half of these users are using PowerPC Macs that can't be upgraded to a newer version of the operating system.

With all this in mind, Aether 1.5.12 will be the last version of Aether to support Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard*, and therefore also the last version to support PowerPC Macs. Further, while Aether 1.x will continue to support 10.6 for the foreseeable future, I intend to move to a policy of supporting only the current version of Mac OS X and the one previous. This will allow me to provide new features in Aether faster, and will improve its ability to integrate with modern features in OS X.

For those still running older versions of Mac OS X, older versions of Aether will continue to be available for download on this website, so you needn't worry about being unable to use the software you've purchased.

As always, if you have any questions about this change, please feel free to email me.

cocoaModem is a popular Mac program for digital modes including RTTY, PSK, MFSK, etc. cocoaModem includes the ability to log contacts in an external logging program using AppleScript. Aether's AppleScript support makes it possible to easily transfer contacts made in cocoaModem into your Aether log. This post explains how to set this feature up.

Download the scripts found here: http://www.aetherlog.com/files/scripts/cocoaModemScripts.zip.

Save these scripts somewhere on your hard drive. I put them in /Library/Scripts/Aether, but that's hard to access in OS X 10.7 and later, so just put them somewhere that makes sense to you, it doesn't matter where. /Users/yourusername/Scripts would be fine. (If you're just logging, only LogInAether.scpt is actually necessary, the others are for PTT control and require hardware support in your rig control interface. Contact me if you want information about PTT.)

Open up cocoaModem and select "Preferences" from the cocoaModem menu (or press command-comma).

Click the AppleScript tab, then click the "Browse" button to the right of the "QSO Log - Log Button" box. Navigate to the location where you saved LogInAether.scpt, select it, then click open.

After doing that, the preferences window should look like this:

From cocoaModem's "QSO" menu, make sure "Show QSO Info" is enabled:

You can now click the log button at the bottom of the cocoaModem window to log a QSO in the frontmost open Aether log:

Last month at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple announced that the next major version of Mac OS X, called OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, would ship sometime in July. Knowing that it will be released soon, a few users have asked me about Aether's compatibility with Mountain Lion. I'm happy to report that I haven't found any issues with Aether running on Mountain Lion.

There is a new feature in Mountain Lion called Gatekeeper, which is designed to improve security by giving you the option to automatically prevent OS X from running any applications that are not signed by a developer who has been given a Developer ID by Apple. It is possible to manually override this setting and tell Mountain Lion to run an unsigned app, or to disable Gatekeeper altogether. However, leaving the option enabled should indeed provide better security, and I'd encourage Aether users to leave it at its default setting, which is to allow only apps from the Mac App Store and apps signed with a Developer ID.

The current version of Aether (1.5.11) is not signed (see update below) with a Developer ID. However, the next version of Aether, version 1.5.12, will be signed with a Developer ID and will be fully compatible with OS X Mountain Lion. I intend to have this update finished and released before Mountain Lion is released to the public. As is always the case for minor updates to Aether, this will be a free download for all current users. If you're interested in helping me test the update, please let me know.

I've just released a new open-source Objective-C serial port library on GitHub (link). More information is available in a post on my personal blog.

This post is the fourth in a series of posts about using LoTW in Aether. The first post described the processes Aether goes through when working with LoTW and is useful in understanding how various errors can occur. You can find that post here. Posts with information about other errors can be found here and here.

Another frequent question from Aether users is something like: "I synchronized my log with LoTW and Aether said the upload was successful, but I don't see anything on the LoTW website. What's wrong?".

Generally, this doesn't indicate an error at all. When the LoTW server receives an uploaded log, it does not process the log immediately. Rather, it puts it into a queue to be processed at some point in the future. The amount of time the log sits in the queue before being processed is heavily dependent on how busy the server is. During normal, low-traffic periods, the delay is as short as as a few minutes. However, occasionally, after a big contest weekend for example, LoTW queue wait times can be much longer, up to a day or two.

When Aether uploads a log to the LoTW server, the server sends back an acknowledgment telling Aether that the log was received and was put into the processing queue. Aether presents a message indicating a successful upload only if this acknowledgment is successfully received. If the LoTW server instead returns an error, Aether puts up an error message to let the user know that the upload failed. So, if you see a message from Aether indicating that an LoTW upload succeeded, you can be confident that your log is in the queue and will be processed by the LoTW server, even though it doesn't show up on the website immediately.

This post is part of a series on using LoTW in Aether. The first post described the processes Aether goes through when working with LoTW and is useful in understanding how various errors can occur. You can find that post here. A previous post with information about another error can be found here. The next post in this series can be found here.

This post describes a problem where an error like the following is shown when trying to sync a log with LoTW:

This error is shown when Aether is unable to match one or more QSOs with a valid certificate as explained in upload step 2 of the LoTW background post. As the error message indicates, this will show up even if only one QSO was unable to be matched with a certificate. This can be caused by a few things. The most common is that one or more QSOs have a date that doesn't fall within the valid QSO start and end dates for any installed certificate. This might happen because the QSO's date is in error, in which case the fix is to correct the bad date. If the QSO's date is correct, the solution is to request a new certificate(s) with QSO start and end dates that cover the QSO(s) you want to upload.

Another cause of this error is that the information in the station info for the log is either missing or doesn't match the callsign and DXCC entity number of the certificate needed for signing and uploading QSOs in the log. This can be fixed by selecting "Show My Station Info" from Aether's View menu, then filling in the correct callsign and DXCC entity number (and other information) in the station info panel.