Interesting ‘Summary’ UI
I spent a good part of today setting up, playing with and blogging about my new Airport Extreme. Part of the process included using the recently revamped AirPort Utility.app. While well designed overall I really found the way they approached the need to summarize data interesting.
When you are about to configure the base station it will offer the choice to be assisted or do the setup manually. Clearly when you are doing the setup manually there will be a lot of choices and in a predictable way they split up the fields through a number of standard Aqua tabs. What is unique is the fact that the first tab is a summary view of the whole configuration and as you hover over the labels you can click them and it will take you to the tab that info lives in and put focus on that specific area of the UI.
A short movie of the labels in action.
I can’t say if this is a truly unique UI approach but I can say I’m intrigued by it.
Posted on: April 19, 2007 – 11:44 pm | Comments (1)
10.5 delayed till October; Apple blames iPhone
Cost of a WWDC ticket: $1,295.00
Five nights at a San Fransicso hotel: $1000
Airfare to and from California: $500
The opportunity to hear Steve Jobs give a keynote where he explains how well the iPod and iPhone are doing while your own needs have been put on a back burner: priceless.
Posted on: April 12, 2007 – 6:37 pm | Comments (9)
The State of Bliss: 491 Days In
So it’s been 491 days (or 1 year, 4 months, 5 days) since I left “the job” and starting living “the life” — how’s it going? Well first off, I’m still here. As I’ve said before, this is something to be proud of by itself and as important a sign as any that things are going at lest somewhat well.
To recap, the basic plan at the start of Clickable Bliss was to earn revenue in the beginning exclusively from consulting work, develop products as free time allowed and then transition from consulting work to doing my own projects full time.
So far the result is this: I spent the first ten months earning my income exclusively from consulting and as free time allowed I developed Billable. Development time was longer than I might have originally guessed for the following reasons:
- Not only was I building a new 1.0 product, but I was still learning Cocoa.
- Some of the Cocoa topics were new to me and the community (Core Data) or extremely time consuming to learn and implement (UI, custom views).
- Sometimes “free time” was scarce if not totally unavailable.
- The little things added up. Doing a web store, writing a help book, making a screencast, building a web site, each added significant time to development (but in the end were just as important as the app itself, if not more so).
- Billable was not the first idea I started working on. (oooooh. Mystery.app)
So Billable was released in the end of September 2006. Since its release my revenue has been approximately 60% Software Sales and 40% Consulting. As expected Billable 1.X isn’t enough to support me full-time but things are generally on a track I expected.
Total revenue volume is less than I want it to be. To explain, my basic budget plans are split into categories like:
- What I need to live.
- What I’d like to do.
- What I fantasize about.
Needs include rent, health insurance, and taxes. The likes include things such as conference trips, gadgets from time to time and not feeling guilty about taking time off to vacation. The fantasy things would be buying a house, having a nest egg, being able to work on stuff that had no income but was really enjoyable like open source projects, and of course two chicks at the same time.
As of right now I’m floating between the needs and the likes, but probably more on the needs side. For example, it’s pretty clear I won’t be able to attend WWDC this year (again, as I missed last year too — but at least I have those WWDC videos, oh wait; crap.). Money is tight and WWDC is just too darn expensive (Ticket + Hotel + Airfare = $3500-$4000). Ironically, I used to have my employer send me when I wasn’t doing Cocoa at all and now that I earn part of my living from Cocoa I can’t go. I am still hopeful to attend C4 so not all is lost, but this is an example that I’m not where I want to be yet.
Billable development continued after the 1.0 release to produce a 1.1 in January 2007, which added more polish and a few highly requested features. The 1.1 didn’t get nearly as much blog/Mac web focus as the 1.0 did but still gave a nice little spike in sales.
After Billable 1.1 a series of time consuming events away from the computer and various financial needs had me turn up the consulting dial of my daily life and that’s where I’ve been the last two months. In the process I’ve added a little extra cash to my account (which will soon be swallowed by Uncle Sam’s tax season) and am almost caught up.
What’s next? I have started a 1.2 branch of Billable and have also started to sketch out a 2.0 release but its still at the napkin doodle stage at best. I’m also starting to work on a new project which I know I’ll be using internally and like before I hope to product-ize for others. Still too early to discuss, but it is refreshing to be working on something brand new again.
Well thats it for now. I hope you found this interesting. I’m sure I will a year+ from now when I hope to provide another update (and still be in business). Till then.
Posted on: April 10, 2007 – 1:25 am | Comments (21)
Black Ink 1.0
Congratulations to fellow MacSB-er Daniel Jalkut for his release of Black Ink 1.0:
Black Ink is the successor to the most popular crossword solving application on Mac OS X: MacXword, formerly available from Advenio, LLC.
Not a crossword puzzle guys myself, but I did download the app to give it a walk through — it’s very polished and will be enjoyed by many I imagine.
Posted on: March 22, 2007 – 4:22 pm | Comments (2)
Building the Store
A week or so ago I did a presentation for the local Philly on Rails group about how I implemented my store which sells licenses for Billable. I’ve taken the presentation and reworked it into a quick and dirty(1) screencast.
Topics include:
- Reasons why and why not to build your own
- Choosing a payment gateway
- A review of some existing interfaces to PayPal via Ruby
- Why I used SOAP and an overview of how to set it up
- A walkthrough of the user experience paying with a credit card and then with a PayPal account
- Code snippets
- Other resources
It’s available as a QuickTime video (26MB) and since the content can work fairly well by itself a MP3 (14MB) is also available. The total length is about 40 minutes.
Relevant links:
- del.icio.us/zorn/paypal
- Payment Processing with Paypal and Ruby
- James Duncan Davidson: Cautious Advice for Accepting Online Payments
- Active Merchant
(1): Quick and dirty, as in this isn’t based on a script like I normally do. It’s recorded as-is and does contain more “uhs” and “ums” than I’d like
Posted on: March 11, 2007 – 5:35 pm | Comments (8)
Automated Recurring Billing
Automated recurring billing is a topic many web developers are interested in as they want to follow in the footsteps of other subscription based web apps and become super heros. Well a personal favorite payment gateway of mine Authorize.net, which has had this service for a while in manual form, has finally opened up an API!
There are others out there that have had APIs for this for a while but it’s great to see Authorize.net finally get it going. I’ve personally nagged them for at least 18 months.
I don’t have any immediate plans for this but it does come up when talking to other clients and developers.
Posted on: March 6, 2007 – 3:02 pm | Comments (0)
WWDC Student Scholarship Program
Just a quick post to remind people of the WWDC Student Scholarship Program:
ADC Student members may apply for a scholarship to participate in the WWDC Student Scholarship Program. Scholarship recipients get a free ticket to attend WWDC, with complete access to all technical sessions and special events (a US $1,595 value).
I got to attend my first WWDC as a student on scholarship and it was a blast, a great introduction to the community and people I’d come to work with. The application deadline is March 19, 2007 so get moving if you plan to apply.
Posted on: February 28, 2007 – 8:20 pm | Comments (2)
A bright future expected for MarsEdit
For those who may not be familiar, MarsEdit is an easy to use Mac OS X app that is a front end to posting to your blog. I use it when posting to my WordPress blogs all the time (and yes, it supports many other systems too).
Well, ever since NewsGator bought out Ranchero Software, makers of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit there’s been a bit of an issue. Brent is busy working on NetNewsWire, MarsEdit doesn’t naturally fit in with the other NewsGator products, yet lots of people really like MarsEdit. For a little while Gus Mueller did some updates through Brent but as of today MarsEdit has a new home, Red Sweater Software.
Daniel Jalkut, the founder of Red Sweater Software, is himself an avid blogger. “MarsEdit has long been one of my favorite applications, so it’s a thrill to welcome it into the Red Sweater family of products,” he said. “I am both passionate and confident about steering MarsEdit into the future.”
“I’ve already sent a bunch of feature requests to Daniel,” said Brent Simmons, MarsEdit’s original developer. “I use the app every day, and love it, and I’m so glad that it has a bright future. I look forward to being a MarsEdit user, to seeing what cool stuff Daniel does.”
Congratulations to Daniel. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
Posted on: February 22, 2007 – 3:57 pm | Comments (2)
Any questions for me about e-commerce in Rails?
On Monday, February 26, I’ll be presenting one half of the Philly on Rails meeting dedicated to e-commerce. I offered to do the talk since I’ve done a few e-commerce projects over the years (some Rails, some PHP), including my own custom store which sells Billable. After I give the talk I’m planning re-recording my thoughts as a screencast so this call for feedback is not just for the locals.
What I’d like to know, is what you’d like to know. Help me design my talk by posting a comment with the questions you are hoping can get answered. Thanks a lot.
Posted on: February 20, 2007 – 8:29 pm | Comments (7)
The Missing ADC Videos
I’m sitting here tonight listening to another great episode of LateNightCocoa. (It’s a new podcast about, you guessed it, Cocoa). Scott Stevenson is on and talking about lots of good stuff, including the value of joining ADC with the Leopard Starter Kit. Scott goes on to talk about the WWDC videos which are a sore subject for me, and I want to clear the air of misunderstanding that seems to be out there.
In this episode Scott goes on to say you’ll get “all the WWDC videos” if you join ADC as a Select Member. This is a not true. When you join ADC as a Select Member and get the “Leopard Starter Kit” you get a selection of the WWDC videos, not all of them. Only if you attended WWDC do you get all the videos. I’m guessing Scott went to WWDC and thus, he does see them all. The sore point for me was that in 2006 I did not get to attend WWDC. It wasn’t until October, when Apple finally started offering the this Leopard Starter Kit with a Select Membership that I began to catch up on all this new stuff. At the time I jumped right on board and noticed they were distributing the WWDC videos over iTunes (which was better than the previous year of streaming only, but still much less desirable than the DVDs we used to get).
When I first logged on I saw about 50 sessions on iTunes but took the small number as “in-progress” thinking they were still digitizing the sessions and would put more up over time. Now, fast forward to December when I start to get more serious about my 10.5 needs — after reading up on some changes to Core Data I go to look for a session to watch. Nothing. I think it’s strange and so I comment to a friend how weird it is that no Core Data sessions are on iTunes yet and he tells me he sees a ton of them. Huh?!?
So, I go back and reread the marketing for this Leopard Starter Kit. It says nothing about only getting some of the videos. It said (at the time):
Leopard Videos from WWDC
Use ADC on iTunes to view Leopard session videos from WWDC 2006. Whether you’re at your desk or on the go, you’ll learn about Leopard directly from the Apple engineers who are building it.
I emailed ADC Membership Support to ask what’s going on…
Hello Michael,
Thank you for contacting the Apple Developer Connection regarding ADC on iTunes.
Please know that ADC Select Members can only access WWDC 2006 Leopard Sessions. Access to all other WWDC 2006 Sessions are currently only available to ADC Premier Members and WWDC 2006 attendees.
We hope that this information is useful to you. Please let us know if you have any questions regarding this information.
Best regards,
Luke Hoctor
Now to be fair they did give out only selected sessions during the 10.4 Starter Kit, but back then they also clearly advertised thats what you would be getting. The marketing for this 10.5 Starter Kit doesn’t make a note of limited sessions and leads to a huge misunderstanding.
For me it’s also frustrating at the sessions I got versus the sessions I didn’t get. I ended up with this significant stack of OS X Server stuff (which while I’m mildly interested in, doesn’t really impact my work) and then not getting one Core Data session, no What’s New in Cocoa, no User Interface Design, no Complex Controls in Cocoa — I mean those are some sessions that would really help me make Billable a better application.
A few years ago they used to allow any ADC member the ability to buy the WWDC DVDs even if you didn’t attend (and I did so one year as a student who didn’t get to go) but over the last few years Apple has started to institute a behavior that only gives you access to the WWDC sessions if you attended WWDC which I think is a mistake. The reality is lots of people can’t go every year or at all. Some work for smaller companies which have trouble affording it and some are open source projects, thus having even tighter funding issues. Why you would want to limit the distribution of educational materials that help people improve the value of your platform baffles me. I mean sure, back during the DVD days there was a hard cost to distribution, but with the advent of ADC on iTunes this is practically free.
Don’t take this post the wrong way. I am an ADC Select member and I love going to WWDC when I can, but the ongoing drama around these WWDC session, holding them back when sometimes they are the only documentation we have about new APIs is just dumb and Apple should get over it. WWDC’s value is much more about the people than it is about the sessions. Holding back sessions distribution to add value to attending WWDC is just plain stupid.
UPDATE 2/14:
Yesterday I received this in the ADC News:
2 New WWDC06 Video Available for Online Members ADC Online Members can now log in to ADC on iTunes and watch ‘Taking Advantage of Leopard Features in Cocoa’. Gain an in-depth understanding of Cocoa support, and how to use the Cocoa API to incorporate the cutting-edge features of Leopard in your application.
When you upgrade your membership with the Leopard Early Start Kit, you’ll receive access to the complete collection of Leopard session videos from WWDC06, and the essential resources and information you need to develop with Mac OS X Leopard today.
I mean really! This is such a misleading phrase: “complete collection of Leopard session videos from WWDC06”. What a bunch of marketing weasels.
Posted on: February 8, 2007 – 12:37 am | Comments (18)
