In a recent post, he wrote about email lists being an excellent way to engage with potential and existing customers. Having had Second Gear mailing list for a little over a year now, I certainly agree.

Signups for the Second Gear mailing list have for the most part been based off of customers who have purchased one of my products or the customer physically signing up via the sidebar of many of the pages on secondgearsoftware.com. This has netted a relatively decent sized list, but I’ve long wanted to be able to prompt users who download a trial of Today or Check Off to subscribe to the list. Panic, SmileOnMyMac and Karelia are just a few examples of companies that are already doing this.

As luck would have it, my mailing list provider, MadMimi, offers a REST-based API that allows you to capture new signups among other things.

I spent some time last night wrapping the capturing portion of the API and have posted it to my Github page as SGMimiMailer. SGMimiMailer is a standalone class as well as an example project that shows you how to prompt the user for their email address.

The SGMimiMailer class itself really isn’t that complicated, but since I couldn’t find an existing wrapper, I thought I’d share my work. At this point it does just wrap around the Add Audience List Membership method, but it can certainly be expanded upon. In addition, the code uses garbage collection as it targets 10.5. I stopped worrying about retain cycles when I quit the iPhone.

If you have any feedback on SGMimiMailer, please let me know. Hopefully someone else will find it useful.

• Download SGMimiMailer

It wasn’t until I discovered Gabriel Handford’s GHUnit that I genuinely got interested in incorporating TDD into my projects. GHUnit is installed as a framework that you can then run as an application in a separate test target. It took about 10 minutes to get setup and writing code.

As I have adopted it into my workflow, I got tired of manually creating new GHTestCase classes or repurposing the default templates to do my bidding. Luckily you can pretty easily extend Xcode to use custom project and file templates. I just posted my GHUnit Test Case template to GitHub, which will create a new GHTestCase subclass as well as the setup and tear down methods. It’s not much, but anything that saves me a few keystrokes a day is a win.

• GHUnitTestCaseTemplate

I’m pleased to announce that BitBQ, also known as the corporate entity in front of Mr. Patrick Burleson (@pbur), has acquired both FitnessTrack and Emergency Information from my company Second Gear.

The Backstory

Back in July I wrote:

I no longer enjoy building software for the iPhone because of the bureaucracy and infrastructure that surrounds it. I can build great software for the Mac without the headaches and bullshit of dealing directly with Cupertino and their AppStore.

After my rant, Patrick contacted me asking if I was serious about selling off my iPhone business as he was looking to get into the Indie development world and was a fan of both of the products. At the time I was half-considering it, but the prospect of someone excited about taking over the products was too good to pass up. We ironed out the details, signed a few contracts and now everything is ready to go¹.

As with most things in my life, I have to be fully committed and passionate about something, or I can’t do it at all. While I loved the iPhone applications I had built, I couldn’t bring myself to invest time and money in a platform where I was constantly questioning and second guessing.

The biggest thing I took away from my iPhone development experiment is how different both the Mac and iPhone platform are. While they share so much in common on the technological side, the marketing aspects and user base are such polar opposites. As a one-man show, it seems almost too daunting to try to juggle between two polar opposites like the Mac and iPhone market.

Just because I didn’t gauge my iPhone development experience as a successful doesn’t mean that others can’t succeed. In fact, I think Patrick is going to do an excellent job bringing both FitnessTrack and Emergency Information. I’ve got an idea of the roadmap he has for both products and I’m confident this will be a successful venture for him and for all users of both applications.

Moving Forward

As for me, I’m back to focusing exclusively on the Mac platform improving on Check Off and Today while also working on another larger scale project in the garage. I won’t rule out a return to the iPhone platform in the future, but it won’t be before Apple changes more of their policies and behaviors towards their development partners. The in-app purchases announced recently are a start, but there’s still miles to go before it’s anywhere near where I want it to be. Until then, I’ll enjoy using things like blocks, GCD and garbage collection while everyone else toils with memory warnings.

Good luck, Patrick and welcome to the Indie development community!

The Fine Print

• BitBQ - Acquisition Press Release
• BitBQ - FitnessTrack
• BitBQ - Emergency Information
• Second Gear - BitBQ Acquires FitnessTrack & Emergency Information

1. Well, almost. We’re still waiting on Apple to officially transfer the apps from my iTunes Connect account to his.

This release focuses on modernizing the the application going forward. Much like Apple is doing with Snow Leopard, I 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. Check Off was originally developed during the 10.2 days when Project Builder was the IDE of choice. There was no such things as Bindings, Core Data, and garbage collection back then. The idea of a 64-bit OS was still a ways away as well.

I took the opportunity of 4.0 to rewrite key portions of the architecture to use Objective-C 2.0 features such as properties and garbage collection. Sprinkle in support for bindings, an updated data engine and support for 64-bit and what came out is a code base that might not recognize its old self. 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.

I’m 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, I have decided to start charging a license fee. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it boils down to having to support myself and my company. I 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 I 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 I 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, I wanted to thank those that took the time and saw fit to support the development of a free product.

Give It A Try

I use Check Off as the quick list for everything I don’t want to put in Things or as reminder of the things I need to fix or tweak before I can completely close out a ticket in FogBugz. I’m sure you can find a use for it too. Please download it today and let me know what you think.

One of the projects going on in the Second Gear labs is upgrading both Today and Check Off to run as native 64 bit applications. This involves a lot of rewiring of numbers to use the modern NSInteger/NSUInteger, removal of deprecated and removed method calls and hoping that your dependent libraries are updated as well.

With that in mind, I present SGHotKeysLib. SGHotKeysLib is a fork of Quentin D. Carnicelli’s excellent PTHotKeysLib library for registering shortcut keys on Mac OS X.

PTHotKeysLib has served us well for many years, but as I was working on upgrading my applications to run natively in 64 bit I was running into issues. The original code itself used many deprecated methods, used 32 bit integer types, etc. As I fixed those issues, my OCD started to get the best of me and I began reformatting and rewriting portions of the code using modern Objective-C practices and paradigms.

SGHotKeysLib does the following:

• Adopts Objective-C 2.0 syntax, properties and other language features (suck it dot syntax haters)
• Uses Leopard’s Text Input Sources (no patching required)
• Runs natively in 64 bit
• Supports Garbage Collection
• Removes legacy code support (no more checking for 10.1, no more Project Builder)
• Cleans up the code formatting & variable declarations
• Puts the code on GitHub for hot forking action

SGHotKeysLib includes:

• The SGHotKeysLib itself
• A sample application that demonstrates how it works.

The sample uses a custom-built version of the ShortcutRecorder framework to demonstrate setting a hot key.

SGHotKeysLib is a modernization of a piece of code many of us have been using for several years, and I’m sure it could be improved even more. If you have ideas for how to do that, please fork away. If you find the code useful, please do let me know.

• Visit SGHotKeysLib GitHub Page

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 shamelessly rip off the idea and use the Second Gear Twitter account to document what exactly is being worked on here in the lab. 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 my day goes along.

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.

I take part in the roundtable discussing some tips for a surviving WWDC along with Kevin Hoctor, Marcus Zarra and Mike Taylor. I use my time to warn against convention hall food and offer some restaurant tips around the Moscone area. In many ways, it is an audio companion to a blog post I wrote a year ago on having a Healthy WWDC.

This isn’t my first time on an MDN show. I previously was a guest on Late Night Cocoa discussing CalendarStore and the MacSB show talking about the hunt for a graphic designer.

The Mac Developer network is a great resource for the Mac and iPhone development. If you aren’t supporting Scotty’s hard work with the MDN, consider this a great opportunity to join and show your support. It’s only $10 and will help ensure that he can continue to burn the podcasting oil for many years to come.

Listen to The MDN Show Episode 01

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.

I didn’t envision that I’d ever create a 99 cent application, but I am using this as an experiment to see how well it fares in AppStore. I’ve got a longer post in production where I plan to discuss some of my frustrations with AppStore as an independent, non-game/Twitter client developer. This application is, in a way, a software supplement to that post.

In any event, be sure to check out Emergency Information for only 99 cents and tell your friends & family about it.