I released WebnoteHappy 1.3 almost a month ago, September 12th. You can read the press release here, which I created in collaboration with prMac. Here’s a quick recap of what’s new:

1. Quick Add Webnote: defaulted to F5 – adds without tags
2. Growl integration: Quick Add will report back when it is added
3. Support for DEVONagent
4. Support for Opera 9.10
5. Adjustable font sizes: Small, Medium, and Large
6. Resizable tag browser
7. Preserve sorting of columns between restarts
8. WebnoteHappy will not start a new instance if other instances are already r
   unning
9. Fixed bug when importing from Firefox

Also, I reset the 30 day trial. So if you’ve tried WebnoteHappy in the past, take another look – you’ll get another 30 days to try it out.

I hadn’t blogged it partly bc I’ve been on the road doing Rails consulting and partly because I’ve been a bit sick. Plus I’d gotten out of the blogging habit. But I’m starting to feel the blog juices flowing again.

Oh, speaking about collaboration, I hired on some help with this release with another fellow indie Mac developer, Martin Pilkington of M Cubed Software, or Pilky as I like to call him. He makes two pieces of software, Minim, for managing music and Code Collector Pro, for managing snippets of code. And now he’s helped me out with WebnoteHappy, for managing your bookmarks. Pilky’s a great fellow and it sort of blows my mind that it was even possible for us to work together. See, I live near Washington, D.C. and he lives in England. The world is getting flatter every day, isn’t it? :)

Well it was good to get 1.3 out – I know it has been too long since the last release. I’ve been getting a lot of good feedback via email. Its nice to hear from everyone. I’m collecting the top requests and trying to get those into the next release. So here’s to WebnoteHappy 1.4!

There’s a hot new beta straight from the Happy Ovens: WebnoteHappy 1.3.0 beta 10.

What’s hot and fresh?

• Quick Add Webnote – default F6 – adds without tags – whatever is selected will become the note (only in Safari)
• Growl integration – preliminary – Quick Add will report back
• Adjustable font sizes in Preferences – Small, Medium, and Large – you can make WebnoteHappy really small with by shooting a small font, small toolbar icons with no text or even no toolbar and hiding the folders. Or you can make it more readable by picking larger fonts.
• WebnoteHappy will not run if there are already other instances running.

As always, let us know how it tastes by sending email to to feedback (at) happyapps.com!

Scott Stevenson put together a special CocoaHeads (that’s when a group of developers get together to talk about programming a Mac) at the Apple Store Downtown San Francisco. That Apple store is conveniently located a block away from where WWDC is being held (The Moscone Center) and also happens to be the same block as the hotel I’m staying at.

This CocoaHeads was special because it was a meeting of some of the finest Indie Mac Developers – Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster who gave us a good lesson in Hype (aka how to do guerilla marketing), Gus Mueller of Flying Meat who told us about how to do the day-to-day of working for yourself (things like setting goals and getting out of the house regularly) and Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater about payment processing. (Note that Wil mentioned a project called Golden Braeburn which might help out with accepting payments in the future.) Brent, the Godfather of MacSB – the Mac Small Business group – and author of NetNewsWire was there as well at the panel discussion after the presentations.

It was standing room only and probably the most crowded I have ever seen any Apple store auditorium. People kept coming over wondering what all the commotion was about. I think it was great. Some of it was a validation of what I’ve been doing, some of it was an admonition of things I should be doing, and some of was “ah good idea – I’d never thought of that!”

BagelTurf recorded the audio and once I get back to DC, I’ll help the next generation of Indie Mac Developers by cleaning it up. I remember a few years back, Niall Kennedy recorded a similar discussion between Indie Mac Developers at O’Reilly’s Mac OS X conference back in 2004. That’s when I realized it was viable to become an Indie Mac Developer. Before that, I thought you had to have a big programming team to make a modern software product, but that turns out to be true mainly in the enterprise and gaming parts of the software industry.

I just built and released WebnoteHappy 1.3.0 beta 8. I added support for DEVONagent for all you DEVONfans out there. Thanks to Eric of DEVONtechnologies for helping out.

Also, I promoted Command-E to be Edit Webnote, and demoted Edit > Find > Use Selection for Find to Command-Shift-E.

I’m curious – what do people think of the public beta process? That is, versus completely a private beta, or private betas for 80% and public betas at the end, or even a completely beta-less app that springs forth from the head of its creators? I personally like betas, but then again I love new technology when I can get my hands on it.

A new day, a new WebnoteHappy beta – WebnoteHappy 1.3.0b7. This beta adds a request that Gita and other users have asked for: to keep the sorting of columns between restarts. So if like to have all the webnotes that you’ve shared via del.icio.us at the top, you can keep them that way. Or if you like to have it alphabetical by title it’ll keep it sorted by title as well.

Please remember to send feedback. Actually, I’ve decided to consolidate emails, so please send it to feedback (at) happyapps.com.

I just released a new beta of WebnoteHappy – WebnoteHappy 1.3.0b6. The new feature here is that you can now resize the columns of the tag browser and these sizes are persisted. Thanks to Ed and Jeff (and I’m sure others) who have suggested this.

Another minor, but important fix is that all the copyrights are updated. Thanks Takaaki for pointing that out.

I’ve been secretly working on WebnoteHappy the past month after a development hiatus. I had to take a break there while Baby Cesar was young (he’s gotten really big now for an almost 6 month old) and while my indie business got off the ground. I feel very blessed to have the Ruby on Rails consulting side of Happy Apps be doing so well. Also I didn’t realize how many things you have to coordinate when you’re running a business, not to mention my struggles with peripheral but really important things like health insurance.

Now back to WebnoteHappy. I used to do completely private betas for the majority of the lifecycle and only release them to the public much later. This time around, I want to try something different and release them to the public much earlier.

These betas are still only for the early adopter types. I would recommend backing up your data first of course, which are located in ~/Library/Application Support/WebnoteHappy/. If you use .Mac, you can use the WebnoteHappy QuickPick.

The first out of the gate is WebnoteHappy 1.3.0 beta 4. Here’s what’s new:

1. Fixed bug with del.icio.us syncing, where it would print a lot of lines in your notes that end with: “from del.icio.us”
2. Fixed bug when importing from Firefox
3. Added hot key and bookmarklet support for Opera 9.10
4. Added support for Leopard

If you try this beta out, please try to exercise one or more of those bug fixes / features. You can send feedback on this beta to beta-1.3-feedback@happyapps.com.

Wow – big news…. Red Sweater bought MarsEdit – the blogging app. Here’s a nice Q&A session about the MarsEdit acqusition with Brent Simmons who developed MarsEdit and Daniel Jalkut who heads up Red Sweater.

If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere…

WebnoteHappy made it in to Macworld! Its mentioned in the sidebar for an article called “Be a Power Browser” and the sidebar specifically is called “Use Bookmarks Anywhere.”

It’s also in the print magazine of Macworld, the February 2007 issue, on page 74. Thanks to Kirk McElhearn for writing about WebnoteHappy.

Here’s to hoping that WebnoteHappy will garner some full reviews in the future!

I downloaded OceanWaves after seeing it on VersionTracker and am trying it out. It generates the sounds of the ocean and it seems pretty good. Very relaxing. Perhaps a bit… too… relaxing… zzz…

Oh where was I? Oh yea, I think you can create an AIFF file of it (after you register for $10 which I haven’t yet) and stuff that in your iPod (or burn to CD). That might be just the thing I need on those sleepless nights.

Also good background noise for conference calls – you can use it like a whitenoise generator which is handy when you’ve got a crying baby way in the background. :)