Today Classic Now Available For Mac OS 9!
Looking for a new piece of Classic Mac software? Well, are you in luck! While everyone else has been distracted by the iPhone and that newfangled iPad, the Second Gear crew has been hard at work giving love to a dedicated group of Mac users who haven’t felt the love lately: the Classic Mac diehards.
You know there’s one of them in your circle: that guy who swears Mac OS X is terrible and will never bail on OS 9 until Apple fixes that abomination that is the 10.6 Finder.
Well, they have a schedule too and we wanted to offer the same great Today 2 experience that our Snow Leopard users have to these platinum themed diehards. With Today Classic you can keep track of what’s on your plate for any given day without keeping Now Up-to-Date & Contact open all the time. Today syncs with Now Up-to-Date & Contact and your life’s agenda so daily events & tasks are always available via one, convenient little interface.
Today 2.2 Released
The latest version of Today is now available. This version fixes a few issues users were running into when trying to use Today in conjunction with Snow Leopard’s Exchange support. It also adds a few UI niceties that I’ve wanted to get to for a while: hovering over an event will now show the location if it exists and event/task windows now show calendar colors.
Today 2.2 is a free upgrade for all registers users of Today 2.0. Upgrades to Today 2 from Today 1 are $11.95 and available for purchase from the Second Gear store
Today 2.0 Released!
Things have been relatively quiet around Second Gear HQ, but that is only because we have been hard at work on building the next great version of Today. After what seems like forever, Today 2.0 is now available!
Today 2.0 was our opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start from a blank canvas. We reimagined the user interface to be lighter, brighter and infinitely more usable. We also rewired everything under the hood to absolutely fly on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Oh, and we finally went 64-bit.
We also took the opportunity to adjust how events and tasks are created in Today. It didn’t make much sense to keep the windows attached to the main Today window as sheets. With 2.0, you can now create as many new event/task windows as you desire. Even better, you can assign global hot keys to the action so that you’re just a keystroke away from adding a new event to your calendar.
We hope you enjoy this new release. I am genuinely proud of how it turned out and couldn’t imagine going back to the old version. Check it out and let us know what you think!
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.
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.
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.
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.
