Happy 1st Birthday Today!
It is hard to believe that it has already been a year since we announced the release of our flagship product, Today. Since that initial release, we have done 14 minor and point releases that have added the features you’ve requested.
I opened up Today 1.0 this morning just to reminisce and I can say I’m quite proud of how the little guy is growing up. There is some great stuff happening with Today for the next major release. Stay tuned!
Today 1.7: Printing, Task Sorting and Classic Date Formatting
I’m happy to announce that Today 1.7 is now available. Version 1.7 of Today adds following:
- You can now print your daily list of events & tasks
- Rewrote the task sorting algorithms to be more reliable when sorting by due date or priority
- Improved verbage and sizing issues in both French & German localizations
- Reverted to iCal-style date selection in place of natural dates
The full change list is listed in the release notes.
I want to touch on the last bullet point I listed. With Today 1.6, the big feature was the support for entering dates using natural language instead of the traditional date picker. I thought this was a great way to enter dates and was quicker for me than using the date picker in iCal. I think some people also agreed with this, but the majority of users found this incredibly confusing.
How do I know this? The support queue for Today 1.6 went up over 300% with people not understanding why they couldn’t create events. In many cases the problem was built around the idea that people didn’t understand what that blank text field had to do with a start/end/due date.
Given the high level of confusion this feature caused my non-geek users, I decided to pull the feature and revert back to the standard iCal-style date picker. The lesson to take away from this for other developers is don’t over engineer for the sake of geek cred. The iCal-style date pickers worked great and I’m sure Apple did plenty of testing to determine they were the best way to work with.
If you were a fan of the natural date selection, I’m sorry to take it out of this release, but given the choice of keeping Today easy to use and accessible to as many classes of users as possible, I think this change is for the best. I may try a hybrid of the natural date entry and date picking down the road. I have some ideas, but I’ll make sure to do a wider beta test before putting it out in the wild.
Thanks for supporting Second Gear and Today.
Get the forecast in Today with WeatherCal
Today is a great way to see what’s on your daily schedule of events and tasks, but with WeatherCal, a new utility from Bare Bones, it can also be an instant way to see what the forecast is.
WeatherCal creates a new calendar in iCal that has the daily forecast as an all day event in iCal and subsequently Today.
This is such an ingenious use of iCal that I can’t believe no one thought of it until now. Great job, Bare Bones!
Today 1.6: Natural Day Entry and Spaces Fixes
We’ve published a new release of Today that adds one of the most requested features by our users. Today 1.6 adds support for natural date entry when creating new events and tasks within today. Rather than having to manually adjust the date, month, year and time using the Mac OS X date picker like in iCal, users can now enter dates as they would say it. Set a task to be due January 28, 2009, 1/28/09 or even approximate values such as tomorrow or Friday. Today will automatically decipher what you enter and convert it to a proper date.
What’s New In Today 1.6
- Added natural language parsing for new events and tasks.
- Today should be a better Spaces citizen when running in menu-bar mode. Due to a bug in Apple’s Spaces implementation, be sure to restart Today if you adjust it’s Spaces settings.
- Updated compiler to be LLVM-GCC 4.2
- Other smaller bug fixes and performance tweaks.
We hope you enjoy the new release and look forward to getting feedback from you on it.
Today is 40% off thanks to MUPromo.com (1 Day Only)
To celebrate today’s Phil-note, we are pleased to have a one day sale in partnership with our friends at MUPromo.com. Until 11:59 EST today you can purchase Today for the low-low price of $8.95, a 40% savings.
If one of your new years resolutions was to be more productive and organized, Today is a fantastic application to help you achieve your goals.
To get the discount, head over the .
Mac Developer Network members can save 20% on Today!
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!
2008 Year In Review
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!
Porchlight Service Shutting Down
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.
Today 1.5: Alarms, Growl, Notifications, Oh My!
After a bit of a delay, we’re pleased to announce that Today 1.5 is now available. Today 1.5 is our biggest update since 1.0 was released back in the spring. We’ve added three of the biggest features that users have requested. The first is support for creating and adding alarms to new events and tasks you create in Today.
The new alarms panel lets you define any variety of predefined alarms. We include a few commonly used types (5 minutes before, 30 minutes before for example). We’ve also added support for showing past-due notifications on any task that has lapsed its due date.
The final feature is for the power-users out there who are as big of fans of the Growl notification framework as me. When you perform a few actions in Today, there will now be notifications posted to Growl to give you an extra visual cue that the operation completed successfully.
Today 1.5 is a free update to all Today users, so please do try it out and let us know what you think.
Join the Second Gear Mailing List
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.
