Question: I have been using the Mac HelpMate Network Scanner and now, all of a sudden, it's stopped working: it produces an AppleScript error as soon as I l click the "Scan" button. What's going on?
Answer: The service we used to look up vendor information (coffer.com) changed the output format of its web site - now including a link to search for the vendor in Google. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do to fix version 2.2 or 2.5 of Mac HelpMate. Version 2.6 (due in early September 2008) will address this issue by downloading and caching the vendor list from the IEEE and using that for lookups. That will 1) prevent future parsing errors and 2) speed up the process by 10x or more.
Also, version 2.6 of Mac HelpMate will allow the export of captured IP and MAC addresses and vendor information to a tab-delimited text file suitable for converting into computer accounts.
