A friend and colleague of mine, Justin Williams of Second Gear, just released his first Mac app: Today. It’s a fresh new look on iCal that helps you see your events and tasks for just today. It kind of reminds me of those daily desktop paper calendar where you rip off the page each day. Well except for the Dilbert cartoon or whatever in the corner.

I use iCal for my events so I find Today useful. Now I’m considering using iCal more for my Tasks - I’ve been using TaskPaper for that recently.

Congrats to Justin. It is amazingly tough to actually ship a 1.0 release. Its sort of the digital equivalent of having a baby.

We released WebnoteHappy 1.3.2 earlier today.

Here is what’s new in this release:

1. New: Shortcut support for Camino 1.6
2. New: Tag browser can now be tabbed to
3. New: Started catching 503 response code from del.icio.us API, which means that user has been throttled
4. Leopard fix: Library folder not edited when tabbing away from Source list
5. Fixed dragging webnotes to Mail.app
6. Fixed new webnote creation for URLs that have spaces in them
7. Fixed AppleScript tags accessor
8. Fixed Edit sheet bug where we would get an empty token bubble if there were no tags
9. Removed secure communication preference to del.icio.us, since all requests must go over https now
10. Updated SparklePlus framework

Camino 1.6 was just released yesterday. Since I’m a browser aficionado, I’ll be taking this latest release for a test drive this weekend. It seems like the Mac Browser Wars will be heating up yet again.

Last Saturday we had a local Cocoa Washington DC Meetup over at Bear Rock Cafe in Falls Church, VA. It was the third of these meetups that I helped organize, the first in 2006 (aka CocoaDevHouse Washington DC) and the second last year. We’re planning to have these more often now - about once a month.

There were 8 of us there and it was a diverse group. Two of us had shipping Mac OS X apps: Booxter and WebnoteHappy. Two more were working on creating new Mac apps, which is great to see. One of us had a shipping web front-end for a Mac telephony device. And another of us worked on an AFP/Print Server that ran on Windows. Several of us were of course interested in developing for the iPhone.

There was a lot of discussion about the iPhone. Specifically: how much should iPhone apps be priced? It seems like there’s a bigger market for iPhone, but it seems like the price points will be lower.

Also, extrapolating from the fact that roughly 2/3rds of iTunes users are Windows users, its likely that iPhone will be also roughly 2/3rds Windows users. So you can’t just assume that iPhone users will have access to a Mac to run a companion desktop app.

We talked a bunch about the neat things that were built into the iPhone like the accelerometers, location, and camera.

We were also curious if there would be some common Apple API for Push, like how iPhone supports “push” email. That would help us write apps that depend on asynchronous events being received. On the Mac, you would write a background app that polls or listens to some queue. It might be interesting if this push API was somehow integrated with .Mac.

Also we were wondering if iTunes syncing would be available for iPhone apps.

We talked at length about the high bar that is set for Mac applications. You have to have a good application icon and a good look and feel overall. Someone said it was intimidating. I think though that this results in a better overall experience for everyone because when apps are released they have a much better chance of being good overall.

Then we debated the age-old question of quitting your day job. We decided that it’d be good to:

a) have a lot of savings,

b) write your website marketing copy first (so you build the right things),

c) make sure your wife/significant other supports you and

d) know your worst case scenario - which in the DC area is usually just getting a job.

Finally we wrapped up with a bit of Intellectual Property advice: write down your idea, put it in an envelope, stick on a stamp and mail it to yourself. The postal service postmark serves as a cheap way to authenticate the time that you had that idea and establishes prior art.

Bear Rock Cafe was a great host - they gave us a reserved table with a semi-private room and pushed together a few tables for us. They also had wifi though I think I was the only one with his laptop open, taking notes.

Expect the next one to be in the first or second week of May. Viva Cocoa!

I saw a nice definition of tags on the del.icio.us home page today (which isn’t something I normally visit because of WebnoteHappy.) The definition goes like this:

Tags

A tag is simply a word you use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web.

Very well put!

I just recently upgraded to the Leopard 10.5.2 update and I thought I’d share my short but sweet process on performing upgrades of OS X (aka applying or installing a system update) without regrets:

1. Wait a day or two.

Sometimes updates have an issue with them ever after extensive beta testing, people report bugs, and then these get fixed and rolled back into the update. You usually don’t need to be on the latest right away. The folks at O’Grady’s PowerPage recommend waiting 72 hours.

2. Empty your trash and restart your Mac.

This gets you to a clean state. Also if you’re on a laptop, make sure you’re plugged in.

3. Make a bootable clone with SuperDuper! and make sure you can actually boot from it.

This is pretty easy to do - in the Options, set the “On successful completion” to “Restart from YourBackupVolume”. Also I repair permissions before copying. This may seem tedious but its worth it in case something happens. You’ll be able to go back, keep working and try updating again.

I personally use a Firewire 400/800 drive I bought from Other World Computing (aka macsales.com). I connect with FW800 with my MacBook Pro and FW400 with my iMac. OWC is really focused on the Mac market and their drives have been fast and reliable.

4. Unmount and unplug your bootable clone.

For good measure, do the same with any other external drives. This is a good precaution - if something goes wrong, then your clone is safe and so are your other drives.

5. Download and use the Combo Updater.

I search for this (ex: google “combo updater 10.5.2″) and download it, rather than using Software Update to get the system update. This seems to be more reliable. It also lets you skip point releases, so you can go from 10.5.0 to 10.5.2 without having to install 10.5.1 inbetween.

Happy New Year! 2007 was a great year for Happy Apps and all things Apple in general. It was my first full year as a Mac Indie - more on that later.

Here’s to an even better 2008!

MacSanta is back this year! MacSanta for the uninitiated is like a big sale of Mac software from independent developers (who I like to call Mac Indies.) There’s different featured Mac software deals every day, all for 20% off, good for that one day only!

Today (Friday December 7th), we’ve got Hazel from my friend Paul at Noodlesoft, WriteRoom from Jesse at Hog Bay, Fetch, MacGourmet, SQLGrinder, VelaClock Deluxe, and VelaTerra.

Happy Apps will be participating in MacSanta this weekend - so please keep an eye out for WebnoteHappy. ;)

WebnoteHappy’s shortcut keys sometimes don’t seem to work on Leopard. By default, these are Command-Shift-D for Add, F5 for Quick Add, and Command-Shift-Space for Search. There seems to be a simple workaround for this:

• Choose the menu item WebnoteHappy > Preferences…
• Click on the Shortcuts toolbar button
• For each of the Hotkeys (the other word I use for Shortcut), press the Set… button, followed by the OK button

I did this with Jose of GreenMango.org at NSCoderNight DC a few weeks ago. It was nice to see someone trying out WebnoteHappy for the first time. Fortunately for me, he showed me this bug in person and we tried this workaround and it worked. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be easily reproducible, but at least one other user has reported this. I’ll add this to the FAQ and keep searching for the underlying cause.

However, I see that fellow Mac Indie Daniel Jalkut is having similar issues with FastScripts. Well hopefully we can work together to find a solution.

Since yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought I’d share 10 things I’m thankful for in Leopard.

1. If you don’t unmount a file share before you leave a network, Finder doesn’t lock up liked it used to in Tiger
2. Safari 3 - so many things to like about it - its faster, improved tab behavior, better find. But one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that it will warn you if you try to close a window when you’ve entered text into a form.

   

   I can’t tell you how many times before I started using MarsEdit (and perhaps one of the main reasons I started using it) that me or one of my friends would start typing out a blog in TypePad or Blogger and then poof - something would happen and our entry would disappear because the web location changed.

3. Terminal has tabs now so I’m actually using it instead of iTerm. Plus you can customize the window look via themes.
4. iChat has tabs and remembers what your open chats.
5. Finder rename doesn’t try to rename the extension.
6. Spotlight works really well.
7. The Network panel in System Preferences is beautiful and easier to use.
8. EVDO support seems improved.
9. Quick Look is amazing - it speeds up my workflow when viewing certain Mail attachments or just figuring out if a certain document is the right one to open when there’s several with similar names.
10. My kids love the new Photo Booth video backdrops.

So fellow Mac users, what are you thankful for in Leopard?