For toddlers who need a fun distraction. Bubbles brings the simple pleasure of popping bubbles to your iPhone. Unlike other iPhone games, Bubbles is free entertainment that's fun for little ones on up. Requires iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 or later.
Please check out the app and the story.
Tomorrow we head off on our big family vacation to Korea and Japan until June 5. I'm excited for the trip, but just a little worried about how Hog Bay Software will hold up while I'm away. I won't have my computer, though I will try to keep up with email as best I can in internet cafe's, etc. I think this should mostly work, but I can see it taking me a few days to get to emails most of the time.
Please help me out if you see any angry posts in these forums from users that I've not responded too. I'll get back to them as soon as I can, and at worst I'm always happy to give a full refund if someone is not satisfied, so just tell them I'll be getting back June 5.
In the meantime things are likely to get pretty quite (from my end anyway) around here for the next month. But I'm just on vacation, will be back in full force in early June. See you all then!
Here's a recent interview by Arun Kale. If you want to hear more about the Hog Bay Software story check it out.
Subversion for Writers. If you are a writer, and want a better way of versioning your files than saving old copies on your desktop check make sure to check that article out. It's a great step by step introduction to version control, geared to writers on OS X.
I'm looking for some developer help.
Leopard introduced a new "etched" tab style that's used in Safari and in Terminal. I want that look in the next version of TaskPaper, but from what I can tell neither of the open source tab bar projects (SMTabBarControl, HMBlkAppKit) support that look yet. Also those project are both much more complex with dependencies then what I want. And so I've started reinventing the wheel... (Dear apple, really wish I could see your code for this and the rest of your frameworks, would save me tons of time so I could work on my apps actual funcationality)
Here's how this code (free, do whatever you want with it) differs from the other open source tab projects.
I've put a good day into the code so far. I think I've got the easy 80% complete, but still some issues that I'm hoping some other developers with more custom UI experience can help on. In particular...
Anyway if you are looking for a simple safari style tabs implementation that looks good in leopard please try this out, and help clean it up or give me some tips on how I can make it better myself.
Here's the current download.
There's an article on WriteRoom in today's Washington Post. Yeah! (Login Required)
TaskPaper 1.0 was released in October 2007. It was/is a good initial test of an idea (text based GTD tool), but is missing a number of features that I thought were essential. Because of this I've been selling TaskPaper 1.0 at a discounted price of $18.95.
My initial plan was to add those features (mainly plugin and applescript support) and release a 1.1 update sometime in January. Well, it's march now, and it's still at least a month or more away from the next release...
This is for two reasons. First, implementation is always harder then I imagine. Second, the next version has been experiencing a bit of feature creep (the good kind I think) and so it's been a lot more work then I expected. In the end it turns out that this next version is going to be pretty much a complete rewrite of the program. It will also require OS X 10.5 or later. Because of this big changes the next version will be named version 2.0 instead of version 1.1. (Still free upgrade to all existing TaskPaper users)
That's the big picture of where things are. The "today" picture is that I've just seen some great progress on the new text system that I'm building for TaskPaper 2.0. I think it's really cool, will offer you some features that you didn't think were going to be possible with TaskPaper, and in general I hope in the end you'll be happy that the next version of TaskPaper got delayed a few months so that I had time to rethink the problem find a better solution from scratch.
Hype... Hype... I'm hyperventilating with all the hype ;)
I won't have solid web/email access again until Monday night. I hope everyone has a good weekend!
I'm looking for some help writing TaskPaper plugins, and am willing to sponsor their development. The end result will be open sourced and free.
If your comfortable with Objective-c and want to play around with TaskPaper's plugin API please let me know what plugin you are interested in (see below) and how much you'll need to do the work. To start with I just want to select one person, if that's successful longer term I may try to do this more often.
Taskodone has a simple API and stores it's data in the TaskPaper text format. I think to the best approach is to use standard unix tools (merge maybe?) for synching/merging text files. (tools that I'm not all that familiar with, but hopefully you are, or can learn). The basic idea would be to download the file from taskodone, merge the changes, and send the merged result back to the server and also keep it locally.
I don't have a great idea of how this will work yet, but the basic idea is... lots of people want TaskPaper to synch with iCal... so TaskPaper needs a solution. I recently did a quick 1 hour hack solution that you can start playing with to get some ideas. But I think I used the wrong API. I used the Calendar Store framework, but I think a better solution is to use Synch Services, because that deals with merging changes, while the Calendar Store framework looks to be more for just reading and writing to the store.
If you are interested send me an email, or post in this thread.
I'm about to test a new pricing idea.
Right now I have a fixed price for WriteRoom ($24.95). In the past I've also periodically sold at a discount through sites such as MacZOT. I think this mix of prices is good, standard prices pay the rent, discount prices bring in new customers. But the problem with this approach is that it's never really felt very fair to my customers.
Some pay full price, some pay hardly anything.
I want some way to reward the customers who pay full price, and my idea is to reward them by letting them decide who gets to buy at a discount.
It will work like this. When someone orders at full price along with a license file they will also get a few coupon codes. These coupons will be theirs to keep or distribute as they see fit.
This way customers are rewarded for buying at full price and I can still sell some copies at discounted prices without feeling to guilty.
A while back Andy Kim from the Potion Factory wrote a blog post titled Will the Real Techie Please Stand Up?. That post struck a cord with me, and so I started looking for stand up desk solutions... and wow they are expensive!
That's until today when I found a bunch listed on ebay for a little over $600 each after shipping. Still pretty darn expensive, but nice compared to the normal $1500+ that I could find on the web. They don't include tops, so you'll need a door or plywood, but they do have the basic adjustable frame and motor. They are also bigger then most of the solutions came I ran across on the web, good thing. Anyway the price looked good, so I though I would share here.
Always a little nervous ordering things off ebay, lets hope it works!
Lucas Holland just create a nice TaskPaper screencast. It's a great starting point if you are just getting into TaskPaper and want to learn a bit more about how it can be used.
I've just released XcodeTemplateFactory. It's a free open source mini app for creating and maintaining Xcode template projects.
The Sunday (1/6/08) NY Times just posted an article on writing and software. Whilst they rightly point to Scrivener as an elegant writer's tool, they give a good shout-out to WriteRoom. "But if, when it comes right down to it, full screen is your holy grail, and the ultimate antidote to the bric-a-brac of Word, then you must enter the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia."
Check it out...http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06wwln-medium-t.html?ex=1357275600&en=affecce1ea0d5a68&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
WriteRoom will be featured on MacSanta tomorrow. That means 20% off when you order WriteRoom from the Hog Bay Software store. To take advantage of this offer use the coupon code MACSANTA07. If you miss tomorrow's (Dec 7) 20% off WriteRoom sale, you can still use the coupon code MACSANTA07 to get 10% off for the rest of this month.
Last if you like the idea of MacSanta please dig it!
Recently it seems that most of the emails that I send to yahoo.com email addresses are not getting delivered. Stupid Yahoo! Stupid Yahoo! I'll try to get some time to look into this, in the meantime if you have made an order from a yahoo email address please provide me with an alternate email address that I can try sending to. I can change that on your order, and then we should be set.
Stupid Yahoo!
Just crossed out the "Stupid Yahoo!" comments. In the end I'm sure that it's the darn spammers that are the source of the problem... I hope they all stub their toes this morning. Yahoo on the other hand likely does want to deliver valid email, they are just a bit confused at the moment and my emails are not getting through. I wish they would get less confused and let my stuff through soon.
We were just down at my parents for Thanksgiving for the last few days. Lots of fun, but only a dial-up web connection, so I've fallen behind on email and the user forums again. I'll try to catch up tomorrow morning, if for some reason I don't respond to an email please resend it to me a again. Thanks.
The MacUpdate sale yesterday generated a lot more interest, orders, and email then I was expecting. I think all the license keys are finally sent out for it, but I'm pretty behind on email, and user forum postings. Added to all that Jaeda (our two year old) was up much of night with a fever, and then stayed home today... mommy too, but I haven't really had a normal work day to catch up. So this is me saying, that I'm behind, but will try to get to your emails as soon as possible. Thanks!
TaskPaper's launch has been the best yet for a Hog Bay Software product.
The most orders.
The most downloads.
And the most press coverage.
The success has reached the point that it has been deemed suspicious...
"Something is fishy. I find it strange that TUAW, who doesn't exactly cover GTD extensively, posts this shortly after Infinite Loop (Ars' Mac blog) reviews it. Sounds like TaskPaper is fishing for reviews a bit too hard..." — Commenter, Big John
That reaction is certainly not representative, in fact it's the only such comment that I've seen. But in the interest of full discloser, and because I think it might be fun for some people to read, I've decided to fully document everything that I can remember about TaskPaper's launch, and tell you what I think helped make it a success. I hope this will ease Big John's concerns, but more importantly I hope it will help other indie developers think about, and improve, their own product launches.
First let me define my "success".
In the first four days since the launch I've had about 170 orders for a bit over $3000 in sales. For me that's absolutely fantastic. But to put it in perspective Pixelmator reported $60,000 in first day sales. Pixelmator is a bigger program to be sure, but compare that to my $1000 in first day sales, and the 6 months it's taken me to developer TaskPaper...
...That means that it either took them 30 years (well maybe 15 years since there are two of them) to develop Pixelmator. Or maybe I still have something to learn about product development and launching... A number of other indie developers have been nice enough to share their numbers with me and I'm middle of the pack at best, so take what I say with a grain of salt. If you think you know a better way, you may just be right.
Also for everyone who thinks they would be plenty happy pulling in the $360,000 salary that that I'm making with my $1000 a day. Nope, shareware, at least mine, sells in spikes. (I've heard of legendary exponential graphs, but have yet to experience one myself) Last year was my best yet and I made $27,000. The previous year to that was my best yet and I made $17,000. The previous year to that was my best yet and I made $15,000. For each of those years I've been putting in full time-plus hours. This year I'll do better again, but I could still be making a lot more at a "real job".
Financially the success is a bit qualified, but indie development has a bunch if intangibles that make it well worth the effort for me... plus my wife's soon getting out of school and into a full time engineering job. Yeehawww!
Now onto TaskPaper's launch, here's what I did and what I think made a difference.
A few years back I held my nose (I'm a programer after all) and decided that I should really learn a little bit about marketing if I wanted to run a business for real. My favorites were Purple Cow, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, and Crossing the Chasm. In my brain I've encoded what I learned from those books as:
"Be remarkable. Describe your product as it relates to other products. Your biggest problem is that most people have never heard of you."
This is how that sentence helped shape TaskPaper's release.
1. "Be remarkable."
A few years back that was the question, how to make Hog Bay Software remarkable. We had an active user community, and I really enjoyed that part of the work, so I decided that's how we would become remarkable. Hog Bay Software went from "Hog Bay Software - We are really pretty cool" to "Hog Bay Software - User-powered software". Hog Bay Software is now remarkable because I allow users to participate in all aspects of the development process. From concept, to testing, to pricing, to marketing. And in return I try to be as open as possible about every aspect of development and the business.
A side effect of allowing users full access into the development process is you get more passionate users. The user-powered development process that I use helps make a better 1.0 product, and makes it more likely that some of the users involved will tell their friends about the product on launch.
While a "remarkable" company might make it easier to launch a new product, much more important is to make a "remarkable" product. I, and I think a lot of others, often confuse remarkable with "best in category". But that's not what it means, it just means different in a remarkable way.
For instance my application WriteRoom is remarkable because it does one thing (full screen writing) well. It wasn't the first Mac app to have a full screen feature, but it was the first to be built around that feature, and that make it remarkable.
TaskPaper is another example. The Mac platform has tons of high quality programs for getting organized and getting things done. But TaskPaper is remarkable because it's the first to be based around a simple text based user interface.
2. "Describe your product as it relates to other products
Or as the marketing books say, "position" your products.
I think this is even more important now that we have the internet then it was back when the marketing books were written. On the internet potential buyers have the problem of to many choices. And as odd as it may sound indie developers have the problem of to many customers. Positioning helps solve both problems.
On each of my product pages I have a section titled "Is ProductName the right tool for you?" In that section I compare my product to the highest quality product that I can find and position my product against.
The goal here is not to say that my product is better, because for a lot of users it isn't. Instead the goal is to say that my product is different, and then describe how. This helps the user understand my product better, and gives them a better chance of making a good choice. For an indie developer who's time and reputation are key it's much better to have a user happily buy someone else's product at your referral, then for them to buy your own product and not be happy with it.
3. "Your biggest problem is that most people have never heard of you."
TaskPaper was my biggest launch ever. I've sold 170 copies... and there are 10 million Mac users? I don't have a great answer to this, other then to say that you shouldn't worry about giving away a few free copies in the name of marketing. Selling at a discount is also OK too in my book. Do people want to see TaskPaper in the next MacHiest? Go lobby Phil, I'll be happy to participate :)
4. The mechanics of TaskPaper's release.
Here are the actual things that I've done while releasing TaskPaper:
And I think that's about it. Maybe Big John still thinks that is to much, but I don't see it that way. My goal is to write more software. Money allows me to stay home and write that software. The way that I get the money is by telling people about what I've written.
I hope this post dispels the "Fishy" idea and helps another indie developer go full time.
I did a MacUpdate sale yesterday for TaskPaper and sold a bunch more copies that I had expected. Good! But it means I'm a little behind on sending out keys, and way behind on answering emails...
I can't send the keys out all at once because my web-host will think I'm trying to send spam, and then ban me. So I need to send them in batches. I have started that process now, but it will take a few hours before I can finish the list.
I'll edit this post to notify everyone when that process is finished. At that point if you haven't yet received your license email please let me know.
I've started offering free TaskPaper and WriteRoom license keys to bloggers who review them. So if you decided to write a review and want a key let me know. If you already bought the app, I'll consider a partial refund if you write a review. Thanks.
Update
Thanks for everyone who's been writing reviews. If you decided to take this offer here are a few more notes...
In the near future I will be moving all my apps to Leopard only. Tiger compatible versions will remain available for download on my site, but new development will be Leopard only. This will make my life easier and will give me more time to perfect my applications instead of spend it worrying about backward compatibility. Again the current versions of WriteRoom and TaskPaper will remain available, but new versions, including TaskPaper 1.1, will be Leopard only.
I've been pushing to get TaskPaper 1.0 out this Monday, but I just decided to throw in the towel and postpone until Tuesday. I've been thinking that I was done all weekend, but then I ran into a number of problems doing the actual deployment, and then my wehost went down, then the baby woke up... so it's time to call it a night and push things off until Tuesday.
For some people the new WriteRoom license keys are not working. I think it's likely a character encoding problem, ie if you names got some cool characters that are not asci then your license might now work :( But I haven't actually tracked that down to be the problem yet. Anyway I'm working on it now, so if you new license doesn't work check back here in a bit and see if I've found the fix.
Thanks for your patience.
I just released WriteRoom 2.3. This is an odd sort of release... lots of changes, but all under the hood so not very many new features. These are some of the visible changes:
Getting ready to release TaskPaper on Monday now... please keep an eye out for any bugs that I may have introduced into WriteRoom through all the low level code changes.
Thanks.
Kupuk just posted this interview with me. I can't claim to be the most interesting interviewee, but at least the questions are good! Here's the link:
I've always been really bad at localizing my software. It's one more thing that I'd like to do, but that never gets done. That's why I'm really happy to show off the WriteRoom Localized project.
It's a project created by Franck Guadagnini to localize WriteRoom. Right now it includes a French localization, but I bet that before too long more will come. The project now has a description page that will help future localizers get started, and it's also got a history of WriteRoom localizations that you can download.
I think it's a great example of the user-powered software idea that I keep pushing. Here's a case where (thankfully) Franck didn't want to wait around for me to create a localization. So instead he created his own. He also wanted to share it with others. So he created a project. And he also wants others to join in, so he wrote up some notes on what software to use to create you own localization.
Thank you!
For the last few years I've had a policy of free upgrades forever. I'll honor that for existing customers, but I now want to change to a more standard policy. I've got no plans to charge for any upgrades in the near, or even foreseeable future. But I'd like to reserver that option in case it makes sense at some point in the future.
Copyright © 2008 Jesse Grosjean. All rights reserved.