After what seems like forever, I’m proud to finally be able to unveil Today 2 to the world. Today 2 adds support for creating events or tasks globally, showing events in the future and sports a sexy new user interface. I am incredibly proud of all the work that went into it and even more relieved that the release has been pretty smooth and positively received.

I actually started working on Today 2 way back in April of 2009, but a variety of distractions and complex updates pushed the release to take several months longer than I had hoped or planned. During the course of developing Today 2, I learned quite a few lessons to take forward in future projects. Hopefully you can also learn from my mistakes.

• Developer ADD is a bitch: One of the perks of being “Indie” is the ability to set your own schedule. This can also be a major detriment as I found out. At once time I had three different major releases marinating, Today 2 included. As this has shipped, I am now at Ship 0, but it took over 6 months to get myself out of the mess I setup. Focus on one thing, finish it and then move on.
• Don’t bite off so much: Gus Mueller mentioned to me in email a while back that shipping a 2.0 may be harder than a 1.0. I’m inclined to agree. There were so many things that I wanted to add into the release that I felt were missing in 1.0. So I added them. And then added more. And then updated for Snow Leopard/64-bit. Keep a better development schedule and stick to it.
• Refactor small, often: Besides adding in new features and functionality, I also decided Today 2 would be a fantastic time to completely rewrite the underpinnings of the application to take advantage of things I learned in my journey from a Cocoa Orange Belt to Green Belt. While I can sleep a bit better at night knowing that the architecture is no longer powered by a single, giant controller, it delayed shipping the app by at least a month. The better route would have been to adjust small pieces over the course of several maintenance releases.

Now that I’m caught up on the mess I started in early 2009, let’s start shipping software more often in 2010. Deal?

Download Today 2.0

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.

You can help by taking the survey below or just send me an email at today@secondgearsoftware.com and let me know what features you wish Today had. Thanks for your help and for supporting Second Gear.

Take The Today 2.0 Survey

Since that initial release, we have done 14 minor and point releases that have added the customer requested features to make it an even more polished release.

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. He definitely deserves to smash his face into a big piece of cake today.

There is some great stuff happening with Today for the next major release. Stay tuned!

Check out Today 1.7

The eye catching feature of the release is ability to create new events and tasks using natural language date entry. Up until now Today has used an NSDatePicker, which is a fairly tedious method of date input. With Today 1.6, you can now just type in the date in the format you’re comfortable with or use some natural language queries like tomorrow, friday, etc.

If you’ve got feedback on the build or run into any errors, please contact me via the Second Gear support page.

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 MUPromo page

But first, the backstory.

Towards the end of 2007, I was suffering from some incredible burnout. I was coming out of a long, stressful client contract and needed to recharge. I took the entire month of December to step away from computing and try and get myself psyched back up to enter the world of Ruby on Rails. January came and I slowly started to pick back up with it, but it wasn’t sparking my interest nearly as much as it had in the past.

I’d begun developing a bad taste in my mouth towards the whole Web 2.0 space and the Rails community in general. In a lot of cases, it seemed like people were stroking each other for how few lines they could put in a method rather than innovating anymore.

More than anything I was working on Check Off 4.0 and other personal projects that were centered around Mac OS X development. I’ve shifted away from OS X in the past 3 years because Rails has been paying the bill, but it’s always been in the back of my mind as where I’d rather be. Mac OS X and the iPhone are where the innovation is now and it was time for me to take advantage of it.

I had enough in savings to live off of for a few months and decided to just make a go of Indie development 100% to see what happens. It was definitely the biggest risk I’ve taken in my short career, and while it definitely paid off personally, it’s also my hope that it will pay off financially. I gotta eat!

Today is the fruit of the past 75 days of development. As I was working on Check Off 4.0, I knew I was going to be using the system’s calendar store. I also had the urge to keep track of my daily calendar in a way that was less intrusive than iCal. Check Off works because, unlike iCal’s task management features, it doesn’t take up much screen real estate and its visibility can be toggled in a split second.

I wanted that for events as well, so I forked the Check Off 4 code base and Today was created.

While my decision to forego a paycheck for the first quarter of the year may not have been good for my pocket book, it was definitely great for personal growth. I don’t think I’ll be ready to exit the consulting world entirely off this project, but it’s hopefully a good foundation. I am still pursuing a few Mac OS X and iPhone development gigs and hopefully Today will help shine a light on my little consultancy.

So I guess April 22, 2008 is the day I was born as Indie. Happy birthday to me.

Visit the Today Web site