Enjoy!

Kyle and I are happy to announce the availability of Transactions and Transactions Lite for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Transactions is a sweet little app that lets you securely process credit cards using either your Authorize.net account, or PayPal’s Website Payments Pro service directly from your mobile device.

We have a bunch of nice touches in there, such as a web-based credentials tool, which allows you to securely setup an email, containing a specially formatted URL, to keep you from having to type credentials strings (which are HUGE) directly into the app. The UI is very intuitive, and features Address Book integration for customer information. All of your information is securely guarded via the iPhone’s Keychain and all of the transactions are performed over a secure SSL tunnel directly to the processor’s backend systems. All of this is combined with logs which you can save from the iPhone into CSV and email directly to your email account.

Transactions is an awesome solution for people who need to be able to accept credit card payments away from the office easily and inexpensively. It’s available at the App Store for $29.99. Get it from the App Store.

Transactions Lite is free, but is limited to 2 credit card transactions every 12 hours. Get it from the App Store.

Twittelator Pro shipped today! Congrats to Andy Stone at Stone Design on a great release. I got the chance to Beta test the app, and I must say that I really enjoyed the experience.

On my iPhone, I use both Tweetie and Twittelator Pro, as each application has strengths and weaknesses. Some of my favorite features of Twittelator Pro include:

• Conversation Threading (just tap the bubble)
• Configurable Photo Hosting
• Multiple Account Support

Plus, the new themes are gorgeous.

For a more detailed list of the features, please visit the Twittelator Pro Feature List.

Cocktails+ happily supports posting to Twitter via Twittelator Pro.

As always, caveat emptor and submit lots of patches. Get SKPSMTPMessage here.

I decided to nuke http://skorpiostech.com/ from orbit and redirect the DNS entry here. Skorpiostech, Inc. is mostly a one-man band, so it makes no sense for me to try to keep up more than one website. Plus, with all of the neat static content features on Wordpress, the need for a placeholder generic company site has been obviated.

Product Websites

Skorpiostech has a bunch of great products out there:

• Cocktails+ - The canonical drink and cocktail recipe app for the iPhone.
• Changes - Diff made delicious, on your Mac. Works with TextMate and BBEdit!
• Handshake - Easily share contact entry cards and pictures on your iPhone, without having to resort to email.

Git Clone Command:

git clone git://github.com/rtmfd/changes-tmbundle.git Changes.tmbundle

Project Home:

http://github.com/rtmfd/changes-tmbundle/

One of the biggest requests we received from customers of Handshake was for the ability to send business cards and images to people who might not have iPhones. Our solution for this was to implement email, which if you’ve done any development at all on the iPhone you’ll know means we had to implement an SMTP client. Apple’s implementation of the mailto: URL scheme is lacking as you can’t attach MIME-encoded messages to body.

The Suck

If you’ve ever written an SMTP client, you’ll understand what a time suck it becomes. There are a whole crap-ton of authentication schemes to implement and of course someone always has a crazy server with some whack interpretation of the SMTP specification, etc. This makes this code an excellent candidate for opensource, because ideally the community can focus around a library, fix bugs, and make it compatible with every server and variation of the SMTP protocol under the Sun.

The Reality

Other than a couple of notable examples, most of the traffic received on SKPSMTPMessage has been from “low-budget” consultants who are asking usage questions, or asking for bugs to be fixed for their projects. Unfortunately, as a consultant I require payment to fix bugs on your project and the code comes with a sample driver that compiles and runs on the iPhone.

Summary

Proper care and feeding of a relatively popular open source project is a time-consuming problem. However, if you’d like to keep the developers on the “service provider” side of the fence motivated, please observe the following rules when interacting with them:

1. Read the docs.
2. Understand the sample code.
3. Use the debugger and figure out where the code is breaking.
4. Fix the bug.
5. Submit a properly formatted patch with your bug to the issue tracker.

I’ve decided to try to post to my blog a bit more. Most of my writing has been soaked up by Twitter, little snatches of 140 word prose, heaved upon the internet at random. Unfortunately, Twitter is like the “junk food” of writing. Satisfying, but never edifying or fulfilling.

Markdown

John Gruber’s Markdown language appears to have some benefits. Namely, one can write without having to worry about the presentation of the text as much as one does with HTML. As a developer, it’s attractive to me to be able to divorce the content from the presentation. It’s a nerd thing.

MarsEdit

Markdown and MarsEdit appear to be an excellent pairing, much like bacon and mayo. MarsEdit features a super-slick preview window which sports built-in support for Markdown. Killer feature, slick app.

LazyInternet

Are there any other tools I should be using to wrangle this blog? Please add your suggestions to the comments.

I was reminded by my new business partner (Kyle Richer) that I should occasionally write something here.

Here are a few of the projects I’m working on:

• Streaming JSON Library based on TouchJSON. Really useful for iPhone apps where memory is at a premium.
• New version of Handshake, with some super-cool features.
• New version(s) of Cocktails, with some more custom content from top mixologists.
• Yes, I’m fixing some of the Changes issues you guys have reported. Planning a big 2.0 release, probably to coincide with the release of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

Hope everyone has a Happy Christmas and a successful 2009! I’ll be busy, as usual.

After a long period of silence, we’re happy to announce the release of Cocktails 1.0, 1400+ cocktail recipes in your pocket from the collection of the world renowned CocktailDB.com.