I want to say a big thank-you to all my beta testers and early adopters. I’ve received a ton of great feedback over the last three months — it’s helped make Incoming! a much better product than I could have built on my own.

VirtualHostX is great for testing your development sites locally on your Mac, but what happens when you want to show those sites to someone else or test them on a Windows machine? Prior to version 2.0 you had two choices. You could, one, ask that person to step over to your screen or, two, manually edit the hosts file on their Mac (or virtual machine), which totally defeats the purpose of VirtualHostX.

Local network sharing tries to bridge this gap by using Bonjour to advertise your virtual host on the network. It’s exactly the same thing as Apache’s mod_bonjour extension, but, sadly, that doesn’t play nice on Mac OS X. (If someone knows how to make it work, let me know :-)

There are two caveats to this method. One, since VirtualHostX is doing the service advertising, it only works as long as VHX is running. Sorry. Fortunately, VHX doesn’t use many resources, so just close the main window and forget it’s there :-) The other catch is that it makes your URL’s ugly. Instead of the beautiful URL you chose like

http://mysite.dev

the people on your network will see something ugly like

http://your.ip.address:9002

In practice, this shouldn’t affect your development if you structure your site properly, i.e. don’t hardcode the domain name in your HTML.

Now that I’ve explained how it works and what to expect, how do you use it?

It’s simple. Just check the “Share over local network” box and click “Apply Changes”. (You have to click Apply Changes because VirtualHostX needs to modify your virtual host to make sharing work.) Then, in Safari on another Mac, select your site from the Bonjour section of the Bookmarks menu. If all goes well, you should be able to view your site.

But what about in other web browsers that don’t have Bonjour built-in? Well, for Firefox, you’ll need to install the BonjourFoxy extension. In Internet Explorer, you need to install Bonjour for Windows from Apple. Both plugins are quick to install and easy to use.

Questions about this feature? Feel free to contact me any time.

Today I’m happy to officially announce Shine, a revamped version of Appcaster re-written from the ground up. The goal of Shine (more on the name in a bit) was to provide clean, easy to use dashboard for indie Mac developers and also to build a stable foundation that provides for future improvement down the road.

I chose the name Shine because, at it’s heart, it’s a complimentary product to Andy Matuschak’s Sparkle project. (Inevitable tagline: Your app already Sparkles, now make it Shine.) The core functionality, like Appcaster before it, is to automatically generate appcast feeds for your product updates. But it does a whole lot more, too.

Shine handles order processing using PayPal’s IPN service. That includes generating the license information (using either Aquatic Prime or your own, custom scheme), emailing it to the user, and managing the database of orders. It also computes aggregate stats based on your users’ Sparkle update requests, collects user feedback (bug reports, feature requests, questions), and automatically stores your application updates in Amazon S3.

In short, Shine manages my entire Indie Mac developer workflow.

The code is based on two of my other open source projects: the Simple PHP Framework and YUI App Theme. SPF provides a clean, lightweight, active record pattern to model the data, and yui-app-theme is an admin area CSS template built on top of the YUI Grids framework. Combining these two projects let me build Shine in record time (about 24 working hours).

The code for Shine is free to use (MIT license) and available on GitHub. Feel free to email me with any questions or feedback.

(Thanks to Steven Degutis of Thoughtful Tree software for his feedback on this project.)

Incoming! is different from every other Twitter client – it’s wholly focused on searching Twitter. You can’t even sign-in if you wanted to. It’s a tool for following your favorite topics, catching breaking news, and seeing what users are saying about your brand and your products.

Think of it as an RSS reader for Twitter. Create a search, add the terms you’re looking for, and watch the tweets start rolling in.

But with all those tweets there’s bound to be a lot of noise – Incoming! helps you filter through the tweets that don’t matter and zero in on the users who do. Our Influencer score lets you pinpoint the most influential users within the topic you’re researching. This doesn’t mean you should ignore everyone else, but it does let you find the most authoritative voices and respond to them first.

Incoming! (the exclamation mark is part of the name) is filled with advanced features for all you marketing types out there, too. You can flag tweets for followup, keep track of the ones you’ve replied to, and even mark them as good or bad. It’s a great way to see what the prevailing opinion is of your brand. And, once you’re done, you can export your results to Excel and easily calculate word of mouth impressions to share with a client.

Did I mention that Incoming! speaks different languages? If you come across a Tweet in a foreign language, Incoming! can translate it for you with one click.

Incoming! also extracts every link and photo from your tweets. This lets you see an aggregated view of the most popular links and photos. Watching a breaking news story? Instantly find the best news link brought to you by the wisdom of the crowd. Following the Iranian election? View photos from the streets of Tehran as they’re posted.

Incoming! does this all – and more – with a sleek UI built exclusively for Mac OS X Leopard.

Now that the marketing speak is out of the way, it’s your turn. Incoming! is in beta, so please download and let me know what you think. Now’s the perfect time to send in your feature requests and tell me about the parts you don’t like, so I can build the best Twitter search client possible, for you.

First on the list is Bonjour sharing of your virtual hosts. This means that your virtual hosts can be seen by other users on your local network. All they need is a Bonjour capable browser like Safari or Firefox (with the BonjourFoxy plugin).

Shared hosts will appear with a special sharing icon in the sidebar so you can easily see what you’re sharing with the world.

In addition to working with Apple’s built-in web server, version 2.0 also adds improved support for MAMP and compatibility with XAMPP. You can choose which of the three web servers to use from VHX’s Preferences window.

Finally, VirtualHostX now offers finer grained control over your web server. You can manually start, stop, and restart, check its current status, and also scan for problems with your config files.

VHX 2.0 is available for $15. Existing users can upgrade for $5.

Download wordpress2chyrp here.

Like my previous blog post that dealt with AT&T’s Family Map service, my goal was to connect my iPhone with Fire Eagle by Yahoo!. There are a few iPhone Fire Eagle updaters available, but they’re all limited by Apple’s third-party application restrictions. Sosumi gets around those restrictions by running every few minutes on your own server rather than the device itself. In my case, I’ve setup a cron job to run the script every fifteen minutes and push my location to Fire Eagle.

Until Apple releases a location API for MobileMe (not likely, and not their job), this will have to do.

Grab the code on GitHub.

Example:

$ssm = new Sosumi('username', 'password');
$location_data = $ssm->locate();
$ssm->sendMessage('Daisy, daisy...');