As a software developer myself, I built Today to help me easily keep track of ship dates, outside meetings and my daily life. With that in mind, I’m happy to announce that all members of the Mac Developer Network can now receive 20% off of Today just for being a member. See the members area on the site for instructions on how to claim this discount.

If you are a Mac OS X or iPhone developer, you should do yourself a favor and join the MDN to gain access to the plethora of knowledge it holds. Who knows. Maybe you will hear me on a future podcast!

As 2008 is drawing to a close, it is customary to reflect on the year that was. For Second Gear, I think 2008 will be marked as a year of transitions. There were many highs and a few lows, and overall I’d say that 2008 was a success. Some of the highlights included:

• The transition from consulting to sales: At the beginning of 2008, we stopped accepting new clients to instead focus on the development of new products for the Mac, including…
• The release of Today: Today was built to scratch an itch I had for a small, easy to access way to see my daily schedule. It’s launch in April of 2008 was a massive success and was received with high praise. During the rest of 2008, we released Today 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.5 with a few smaller releases in between.
• Bringing Check Off into the fold: Before Second Gear, I had an application called Check Off that I released under my own personal name. It made little sense to keep two separate presences in the Mac development community, so Check Off was folded into the Second Gear brand. I’m working on a major update to the application that I’m hoping to release in 2009.
• F#ckingNDA: The dark horse of 2008 was the iPhone NDA. If you’re wondering why there are currently no applications in AppStore from us, it’s mostly because of the NDA that prevented iPhone developers from discussing the development of iPhone applications with one another. The IconFactory’s Craig Hockenberry coined the phrase F#CKING NDA to describe the frustrations developers felt. The meme picked up, and on a whim we setup a Web site at f#ckingnda.com which garnered quite a bit of press. The NDA is gone and so is the Web site, but I like to think that it had a little bit to do with helping get the NDA lifted. If not, it at least gave other developers a place to find other frustrated iPhone Devs.

It wouldn’t be a reflective post without a few predictions and thoughts for what is coming in 2009. You can be sure that there will be more releases of Today. Presently, we’re working to address accessibility issues and add an AppleScript dictionary for all those scripting fiends out there. There will also be an updated Check Off released sometime that we hope will knock your socks off. As for the iPhone? We’re working on something right now…stay tuned!

After much deliberation, we’ve decided to shut down Porchlight as of January 9, 2009. There are a variety of reasons for doing this, but it boils down to resources and focus. Running a Web service is a full-time gig and Porchlight never has really found an audience like we hoped. The shifting economy has caused us to make some hard decisions and shutting down this service is one of them.

The other major point is that Second Gear’s focus as a company has shifted in the two and a half years since we launched the service. We’re a Mac and iPhone development company, so maintaining a Web service just doesn’t fit in the cards these days.

We tried unsuccessfully to find a suitor to take over Porchlight, so this seems to be the end of the road.

If you are a Porchlight user, we don’t want you to lose your data, so please to export your contents out before January 9, 2009. To do this:

• Login to your Porchlight account
• Go to Account Settings
• Click on “Export all projects and bugs in XML”

The XML output should contain all of your project data so you can take it with you to another service or archive it for your own internal use.

Thanks for supporting Porchlight over the years. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

It’s been a long time coming, but we have finally setup a mailing list to keep our customers and fans up to date on the latest happenings with our products. The list will be low volume and will focus on announcing new product releases, offering a few tips & tricks and offering a few discounts every now and then.

Just so you know, we will never sell your email address to any third party and it will only be used by Second Gear to send you newsletter messages. We hate spam and will never contribute to the problem.

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p>You can find the signup form in the sidebar of this weblog and the Today and Check Off.

One of the indispensable tools we use at Second Gear HQ is a utility application called TextExpander from our friends at SmileOnMyMac. TextExpander works by listening to your typing and expanding abbreviations you type in into longer-form snippets of text.

This really helps out for dealing with common support issues. For instance, I have a snippet with a link to a direct download of the latest version of Today. I type ‘dltd’ into an email and TextExpander will automatically expand it into a full-fledged URL.

The AppleScript support is also an awesome timesaver. When pasting long URLs around the Web, I like to shrink them using bit.ly. There is a script that will automatically take the link on your clipboard and convert it to a bit.ly-fied URL.

TextExpander is $29.95 and well worth the price if you are a keyboard cowboy like myself.

Ever since we released Today a few months ago, I have wanted to take the time and give the Second Gear Web site a fresh coat of paint. The old site, while still good looking to me, had a focus on building custom software solutions for clients. We have not been accepting new clients in the past seven months, so it didn’t make much sense to highlight this former aspect of our business.

While most of the content is the same, we slapped a fresh, modern look on the site that we hope will scale well into the future as more Second Gear products are introduced over the coming months.

With the new Second Gear site we wanted to put the focus on our products and interacting with customers. My favorite feature of the new site is the integrated support. We’re big fans of Get Satisfaction and use it exclusively for handling the support for our products, but the major tradeoff was having to send our customers to a third-party site. The Satisfaction folks recently introduced the ability to use their API to integrate your Satisfaction forum natively onto your own site and we’re happy to be using it.

We hope you enjoy the new site.

We spent some time this afternoon cleaning up some things on the Second Gear Web site, and I thought I could take some time to share how I keep the site up and running.

Many companies use content-management systems like Wordpress and ExpressionEngine to keep track of their content, but I’ve found that for the main Second Gear site managing everything using just PHP and Panic’s Coda is a much better solution for me.

Coda is an integrated Web development environment that combines the functionality of four apps I used previously into one. I previously kept CSSedit, BBEdit, Transmit and Terminal open all at once when I was working on a site. With Coda, I just have the single Coda window up and it has the same functionality of those four apps integrated.

The biggest drawback for many with Coda is the lack of visual page creation. Coda is very much designed for someone that hand codes Web sites. If you want to have a visual editing environment, check out Sandvox from our friends at Karelia.

Coda is $79 for a license. Give it a try.

I’m sure many of you were also waiting in line today to grab your iPhone 3G. I picked one up this morning and am very pleased with the speed improvements of 3G network and (for the most part) the applications that are available on the AppStore.

The thing I am most excited about, however, is MobileMe. Apple’s .Mac replacement makes it incredibly easy to automatically push email, contact and calendaring information to and from the iPhone without having to rely on syncing. This is a great feature for Today users!

Let me give you an example.

This afternoon at lunch I making plans for a meeting for drinks later in the day with a friend. I entered the information into my iPhone, which was now set up to automatically sync calendaring data with MobileMe. When I got back to my desk an hour later, I popped open Today and the new event was automatically in the list: no sync required on my part.

Thanks to the hardworking MobileMe team at Apple for such a great tool. It’s well worth my $99 a year.

Today was recently reviewed on Mac software site MacApper. As part of the review, we did a giveaway where the entry requirements was to suggest features you’d like to see in Today. By far the biggest request was the ability to use the application with Google Calendar.

This is actually already possible! Spanning Sync is an excellent utility that can automatically sync your Google Calendar data with iCal and Today. Here’s a quick tutorial to show you how.

• In iCal, create calendars with the same names as each calendar you have created in Google Calendar. We will use these to sync data between Google Calendar and iCal.
• Download and install Spanning Sync from their Web site. Spanning Sync is a $25 a year subscription or 1-time $65 payment for a lifetime of updates.
• Launch the Spanning Sync preference pane and authenticate with your Google account. This will enable the sync settings window as you can see below.
• For each Google Calendar you want to sync, match it up with it’s corresponding iCal calendar.

• Set your syncing frequency to every hour.
• Press the Sync button. It may take a while to get all your data synchronized between the two services depending on how long you’ve been using Google Calendar.
• Once everything is synced, what you see in Google Calendar will also be in Today. Any changes you make on Google will also be pushed directly to Today each time Spanning Sync runs.

Spanning Sync is a great application for those that want the power and convenience of Google Calendar, but still want to enjoy some of the luxuries of using iCal and applications like Today. If you have any other tips or tricks on how you’re using Today, please do share them with us!

Today uses the same task storage engine as iCal, Apple Mail and any other application that takes advantage of a new framework in Mac OS X Leopard called CalendarStore. This makes it easy to integrate Today’s task functionality with your favorite GTD applications such as OmniFocus or Things.

I’ll show you how I’m using OmniFocus along with Today to have an outside view of my OmniFocus tasks.

1. Open iCal and create a few calendars that will hold your tasks. This is optional, but I have a lot of contexts and they didn’t all perfectly fit in my “Work” and “Personal” calendars. For instance, I setup an “Outside World” calendar that has any of my frequently visited places that I’ve set as contexts.
2. Open OmniFocus’s Preferences window and go to the Sync pane. On the left you’ll see your iCal calendars. On the right will be your unsynchronized contexts.

1. Drag any context that you want to be synced to iCal to the calendar you want it to synchronize to. In my case, I’m only syncing my most important, non-work related tasks over. Usually this is things like errands, bills and phone calls I need to make.
2. Go to the File menu in OmniFocus and select “Synchronize With iCal.” The tasks will automatically be filtered into your Today window’s task pane. It will also pass any task that was already in iCal to your OmniFocus inbox so you can keep them organized as well.

A similar workflow is possible in other applications, so if you have a favorite application you’re syncing with Today, let me know in the comments!