All Second Gear Products Are Snow Leopard Compatible
With Apple’s impending release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard this Friday, I’ve received quite a few emails from users wondering if Second Gear’s products are ready for Snow Leopard.
In a word: YES.
Both Check Off 4.0.1 and Today 1.8.1 have been tested and run natively without issue on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Check Off is a bit ahead of the curve with its native support for 64 bit in Snow Leopard, but we are hard at work on a new release of Today that will add 64 bit support as well as a slew of other features for our users.
As always, if you run into any issues with our products as you migrate to Snow Leopard, please contact support.
Check Off 4 Now Available
We are pleased to announce the release of something that has long been in the works: a major update to Check Off. Check Off is a quick to-do list that sits in your Mac’s menu bar. Simply click the check mark and your personal to-do list will drop down.
This release focuses on modernizing the the application going forward. Much like Apple is doing with Snow Leopard, we wanted to update Check Off so that it is ready for the next decade of software and hardware advancements.
The release sports a new coat of paint with a modernized interface. Check Off now looks and feels like it belongs on Leopard and Snow Leopard with its modernized toolbar, list styles and preferences window.
Check Off 4 also includes a new purge feature which will allow you to remove all of your checked off items with a single click so you can just focus on what’s left to be done on your list. The application is also more friendly to international users with its new support for non-ASCII characters in the list, printing and exporting.
Under the hood, the application saw substantial upgrades and enhancements.
We took the opportunity of 4.0 to rewrite key portions of the architecture to use modern features of the Mac OS X development experience and to add support for 64-bit. Check Off should be leaner, more stable and maybe even a bit snappier as well.
The new core will make it much easier to add functionality to the application going forward. It also gave me the opportunity to fix some lingering usability issues. Check Off now behaves more like a Mac application should and even has standard keyboard shortcuts.
We are very proud of this release and am glad that others can finally get a chance to use it.
The Transition From Free To Paid
Check Off has long been a free product, but with 4.0, the decision was made to start charging a license fee. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it boils down to having to support a company and the developers behind it. We want to continue to build great products for the Mac platform, but short of inheriting quite the trust-fund, making for-pay products is the only way to can do that.
Single user licenses are $12.95, or you can purchase the family pack for $19.95 for use on up to five computers in your household.
Transitioning from free to paid is always an awkward situation and I’m not sure if there is a right way to do it. As part of the transition we have offered free 4.0 licenses to anyone who has made a donation towards Check Off in the past three years. Whether it was a dollar or fifty, we wanted to thank those that took the time and saw fit to support the development of a free product.
Give It A Try
Please download it today and let us know what you think. We are very proud of this release and hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed build it.
Use BusyCal with Today
The folks at BusyMac just released a public beta of BusyCal, their new iCal replacement that adds support for live weather forecasts, graphics, recurring todos and more. What’s great about BusyCal is that it is fully compatible with iCal still, and any event or task you create in the application will automatically sync back to iCal, and subsequently to Today.
If you’ve been looking for a more powerful calendaring solution than what iCal offers today, be sure to check out BusyCal.
Track Second Gear progress via @secondgear on Twitter
Brent Simmons, Internet superstar and developer of NetNewsWire, recently started tweeting his workday. Brent describes it as coding as a performance.
It’s a fairly good idea, so I’ve decided to use the Second Gear Twitter account to document what exactly is being worked on here in the labs. If you follow right now, you’ll see I’m hard at work on a new release of FitnessTrack. Rather than updating on every single thing I’m doing in a given day, I’m planning to just do one to two updates per day just so you can follow along.
You can follow along by following @secondgear. Hopefully this proves to be an interesting experiment and gives you a closer glimpse of how things work around Second Gear HQ.
Emergency Information 1.1 Now Available on AppStore
Emergency Information 1.1 is now available via the AppStore. This new version resolves a few issues that cropped up with the iPhone OS 3.0 release as well as adds support of creating emergency contacts on the iPod touch. While iPod touch users can’t call their contacts, they can view the contact information on their device should the need arise.
Emergency Information is just 99 cents.Download it today!
Today 1.8: Better Snow Leopard Compatibility
I’m happy to announce that Today 1.8 is now available. Version 1.8 is a minor update to address a few Snow Leopard issues I was running into as I’m starting to use the new operating system more.
The new release also improves the French localization and should launch a bit faster than before. As always, it’s a free update to registered 1.x users. If you aren’t yet a Today user, why not give it a spin? A 10-day fully-functioning demo of Today can be downloaded at the Second Gear site.
FitnessTrack 1.1 Now Available
FitnessTrack 1.1 is now available via the AppStore.
Here’s the highlights:
- You can now filter the exercise list when browsing or adding exercises to a workout
- You can now view exercise information & previous sessions from within any workout
- FitnessTrack will now remember your selected view position on close
- You can now adjust the date of a workout
- Added set of default routines for first launch
- You can now email a specific workout or routine to anyone
- Improved compatibility with latest iPhone OS 3.0 beta
- Miscellaneous performance, stability and UX adjustments
The full changelog is available over here. FitnessTrack is available for the ridiculously low price of $2.99. Check it out!
Emergency Information 1.0 Now Available
FitnessTrack 1.1 is unfortunately still in review with Apple, but I am pleased to announce that a weekend project from a few weeks ago is now available in AppStore for just 99 cents: Emergency Information.
An In Case of Emergency (ICE) card is something everyone should be (but usually isn’t) carrying on them. It contains your emergency contact information, allergies and medications should you ever be involved in an accident.
I had the idea for building an iPhone version on a recent Friday afternoon and wasn’t satisfied with the existing offerings on AppStore. I used it as motivation to spend my entire weekend building what I envisioned an ICE application should look and function like. This is the fruits of that labor.
Be sure to check out Emergency Information for only 99 cents and tell your friends & family about it. Thanks for supporting Second Gear.
FitnessTrack 1.1 Submitted to AppStore
It’s been a little less than a week since FitnessTrack made it’s debut on the AppStore and we can’t thank you enough for the response. We’ve spent the past week listening to your feedback and planning out the next several releases which we are excited to get into your hands.
The first one is FitnessTrack 1.1, which is a mix of features and tweaks we’ve been working on behind the scenes while 1.0 was in review and stuff you have requested and reported. One of those features is search. When you are adding exercises to a workout, you can now filter the list to find what you are looking for quickly. There are several other small tweaks & enhancements in there as well that we’ll highlight in the changelog once the update goes live on the store.
Look for it in AppStore in the next week or so, depending on how quick Apple is at approving it.
FitnessTrack 1.0 Now Available On AppStore!
I’m pleased to announce that my first iPhone application, FitnessTrack is now available on the AppStore.
FitnessTrack is designed to help you keep track of your progress at the gym. Whether you lift weights, run or just want to shed a few pounds, FitnessTrack is designed to replace your notebook or clipboard workout sheets.
The application was an idea I’ve wanted to pursue for quite a while. It started as a side project for the Mac a few years ago, but was given a new breath of life with the release of the iPhone. It became obvious that it would and should be on the iPhone.
FitnessTrack features the following:
- **Workouts: I tried the other fitness applications on the iPhone and none of them worked the way I thought when it came to actually being in the gym and keeping track of what you are doing. FitnessTrack is my spin on how I think this should happen. Add your exercises, set the number of sets and adjust your weights: all in a beautiful and intuitive interface.
- Exercises: FitnessTrack includes over 65 professionally designed exercises. I’ve partnered with Custom Fit Personal Training here in Evansville to design the exercises and give detailed, easy to follow instructions on how to perform them. You can also create your own exercises should you need to supplement the list.
- Routines: Have a workout you repeat often? Save it as a routine that you can use to populate a new workout. Routines store the exercise and number of sets for each respective exercise.
- Fitness Profiles: Fitness Profiles is designed for those that are trying to reach a certain weight or inches goal. I tend to put myself in 6-8 week cycles where I have a certain goal of trying to put on a certain amount of muscle in the timeframe, losing a certain percentage of body fat, etc. I designed Fitness Profiles to allow me to keep track of that information via the iPhone.
- Gorgeous UI: One of the things I’m most proud of in the application is the look & feel of the app. Thanks to the work of the awesome William Wilkinson, FitnessTrack looks like it belongs on the iPhone. I’ve tried to ride the line between a completely custom UI and the iPhone standard (striped table views = yuk), and I think it looks tremendous.
FitnessTrack is available right now for the low introductory price of $3.99 on the AppStore. I have quite a few features planned for the future and I hope you’ll come along for the ride with me.
