FaxSTF Pro Dashboard widgets cause trouble on Leopard

Smith Micro has provided online instructions for uninstalling FAXstf. To see them, head for the Smith Micro site and click Support > Knowledge Base; from there, you can find the entry "Uninstalling FAXstf on your Mac OSX computer". The entry reads, in part (please note that, to help support the world's merriment quotient, the spelling has been left as is):

FAXstf if a very robust program and depends a lot on the computer. As the computer gets updated and changes are made, FAXstf may become unable to function properly. No problem! Uninstalling and reinstalling the software resolves most issues with FAXstf.

You will definately want to do this if you are upgrading from one versino to another as well.

What Smith Micro may be saying through all that gobbledygook, without quite admitting it, is that FAXstf doesn't work properly with Leopard and should be uninstalled. There doesn't seem to be any information about this on the site, but a reader informs us that "there is no ETA for fixing FAXstf to work with Leopard". Indeed, we've already published an email from Smith Micro to another reader, which is repeated here:

Thank you for contacting Smith Micro technical support. At this time, no version of FAXstf X Pro will work with Leopard. We are working on a version that will be compatible with Leopard but a release date has not yet been announced. Please check our website periodically for any updated information as we drawn near to the release date. Thank you for your interest in Smith Micro Software products.

Our informant discovered the problem in a curious way:

When I open Dashboard, it opens Address Book. Dashboard holds onto the address book so I can't quit or force quit Address Book without it reopening! Address book "cancels" logout (That's what the message says), so the only way to logout or shutdown is with the power switch.

My suggestion to him was that, since he couldn't guess which Dashboard widget was the source of this ill-mannered behavior, he should use the new Widgets widget to disable all Dashboard widgets, and restart. His response:

Thanks. That did the trick. Turns out that FAXstf had two widgets; one or both caused the problem. I mistakenly thought that it had to be visible to be active.

So there are really two stories here: Dashboard widgets are tricky beasts (something already known to those of us who intentionally disable Dashboard so that it can never run, even accidentally), and FAXstf is misbehaving on Leopard.

The deinstallation procedure, by the way, involves downloading a separate product called "Faxterminator" and running it. Faxterminator's icon bears an astonishing resemblance to that of Otto, the Automator robot. A general rule springs to mind: beware of applications that require another application to uninstall them. Good things, in general, are simple.

An interesting observation about the Smith Micro Web site, by the way, is that when you go to the front page you can't even find a list of their products. If you didn't already know they make some software, you'd never find out. Between this, the StuffIt kerfuffle, and now this business with FAXstf, one suspects that for some companies the clue train has left the station long ago.

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