Justin Williams

I’m trying to clean out my queue of unused domains in GoDaddy because it’s just getting to the point of being ridiculous.

I’ve got two domains, railssolutions.com and rubyonrailssolutions.com, that I purchased a few years ago in the hopes of using for my book. I never got around to it, but they both seem like great domains for someone that is running or planning to start a Rails-based consultancy.

If you’re interested, shoot me an email (justin at carpeaqua dot com) with an offer. Serious inquiries only please.

Today 1.1 is out. If you’re running the application, you can get the update in-application. If not, you can grab it directly from the Second Gear site.

Biggest feature of this release is the ability to filter what calendars are shown in Today. You can see the full post-mortem in the release notes.

implodr:

I was obsessed with these Mike Rowe on QVC videos about six months ago. This lava lamp video is my absolute favorite. It really drives home the fact that all the best TV is on after midnight.

I’m planning on running a small batch of t-shirts for myself for WWDC because my new Daring Fireball shirt STILL hasn’t shipped (I kid, John).

I’m a fan of Mac company and Mac-centric t-shirts, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Because of this, I thought I’d open up the offer to print you a Second Gear shirt. The shirts are American Apparel Jersey T’s because there Hanes Beefy T’s are cheap. Each shirt is $20 which should cover printing and shipping anywhere in the US. If you’re out of the US and really want a shirt, email me and we can figure out the shipping. If you’re a Mac developer and want to swap shirts (or have given me a free one in the past), I’ll print your shirt for free and give it to you at WWDC.

If you’d like a shirt, email me at justin at carpeaqua dot com with the subject “Second Gear Shirt.” Be sure to include your size and mailing address.

I’ll be taking orders until Wednesday morning and then I’ll be putting the order in.

A week after the incredibly successful launch of Today 1.0, I’m happy to announce that Today 1.0.1 has been released, well, today! Version 1.0.1 updates a few little HIG inconsistencies suggested by users as well as a few font-related crashers a select group of PowerPC users ran into. I also added the ability to create a task without a due date because it’s no fun to download a release that doesn’t give you something new.

• Today Homepage
• Direct Download
• Changelog

The sales during my first week was well over 4x my internal goal, and I want to thank everyone that purchased a license. I’m hard at work on version 1.1 that will address some of the most requested features by my users. Look for it soon!

guyinthehat:

First desktop application with an iPhone user interface. Unless you count spoofing to get an iPhone web app in Fluid.

I actually didn’t think think of it in that way when I was brainstorming the UI in my head, but he is right. It does look like a pretty good iPhone UI. Now if only I can get the CalendarStore framework on the phone!

One of the things I’m doing as far as support goes for Today is using a new Web service called Get Satisfaction to handle support. Satisfaction is somewhat like a forum system, but with an interface more designed towards support and feature requests rather than just soapboxing your opinion on something.

I actually was inspired by Buzz Andersen’s use of it as his primary method of support, but also had my own ideas behind it.

1. If there is ever a case where I’m out of town or just too overwhelmed to look at the support queue for a day or two, having a community of Today fans on Satisfaction makes it easy for them to answer someone’s question if need be.
2. Satisfaction has a great feature that let’s people rank their favorite ideas. If you see someone has posted about a feature you’re interested in already, you can just click a button to say you like the idea as well. It made it blatantly obvious that I need to implement calendar filtering in Today asap!
3. I think people are a lot nicer if they know others are going to be reading their message. I’ve only had one snarky post out of almost 100 thus far, and the crowd chastised him for it.

For single-person shops like mine, services like Satisfaction help ease the burden of wearing all the hats. Now if only they could find a way to eliminate support requests entirely.

Here’s a few other Mac developers that are taking advantage of the service

• Buzz Andersen (PodWorks, Cocoalicious)
• Todd Ditchendorf (Fluid)
• Gus Mueller (VoodooPad, Acorn)
• Fraser Speirs (FlickrExport)

When I first decided to pursue Today as a new development venture I knew going in that I didn’t want to spend 6 months building every possible feature I could think of into it. Not only was it not financially viable, but it’s counter-productive in a sense.

I’m a big fan of foundation releases. In other words, release the bare minimum you possibly can to constitute a 1.0 and then let your users help decide the direction your application ships.

When I shipped 1.0 yesterday, I had 5 feature ideas written down. Now that thousands of people have downloaded and tried the application, I have increased that number 5x. More importantly, it’s great ideas that I never thought of myself.

Doing solo development can leave you in a bubble. Don’t worry if your application isn’t 100% perfect (Today certainly isn’t). Just ship what you can in 60-90 days and let actual, paying users help shape the direction of your product. A year from now, rather than having a 1.0, you’ll have a 2.0 that is so much better.

Today marks my entrance into the world of independent Mac software development. I’m happy to announce the release of Today, a utility that makes managing your daily schedule easier than ever.

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

I’d like in on the BrightKite.com fun. If you have a spare invite, I’d appreciate it (justin at carpeaqua dot com). I’ll post more Elisha photos in exchange.

Got my invite: I’ll now share the wealth. I have 3 invites. Same email gets you an invite.

Update 2: I’m presently out of invites. I’ll update this post again when I have more.