Downshift: The Second Gear Weblog

Use MarkdownMail 2 To Post To Tumblr Or Posterous

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 09:14:59 -0400

Use MarkdownMail 2 To Post To Tumblr Or Posterous:

We just released MarkdownMail 2 this morning. In addition to making it a universal app and drafts support, we added the ability to email raw formatted Markdown posts within the app. Many Posterous and Tumblr users emailed us requesting this feature because both platforms allow emailing of Markdown formatted posts.

We’ve created a little walkthrough guide on the Second Gear site to get you set up to use it in that manner. Check it out!

If you don’t have MarkdownMail yet, you can get it on the App Store

MarkdownMail, our new mini-app for iOS, is now available on the...

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:10:14 -0400

MarkdownMail, our new mini-app for iOS, is now available on the App Store.

What is it? MarkdownMail is the easiest way to compose HTML emails on your iPhone or iPod touch. Based around John Gruber’s popular Markdown markup syntax, you can now send emails with bold text, italics, bulleted lists and more. MarkdownMail will convert your Markdown formatted messages into an HTML message that you can send to your friends, family or colleagues.

MarkdownMail 1.0 has these great features:

Write HTML emails using the Markdown markup syntax
Preview your message before sending
View Markdown syntax in-app
TextExpander touch support
Free customer support via email

MarkdownMail is available for just $1.99 on the App Store. We hope you enjoy using MarkdownMail and eagerly await your feedback.

Setting up Notational Velocity to sync with Elements

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:34:44 -0400

Setting up Notational Velocity to sync with Elements:

Here’s an interesting use I didn’t think of. You can setup Elements to work with the popular notes app Notational Velocity. Really neat idea. I’m going to give it a whirl myself and see how it works out.

Elements Now Available For iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:34:19 -0400

Elements, our new iOS application, is now available on the App Store.

What is it? Elements is a plain text editor that uses the Dropbox cloud storage service to store your data. By storing your files on Dropbox, it makes it incredibly easy to have access to everything you store in Elements on your iPhone, iPad and even your Mac or Windows desktop.

Elements 1.0 has these great features:

Create, view and edit text files on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch
Cloud based: Elements stores all its data in a subfolder on your personal Dropbox account so you can access it via your iPhone, iPad, Mac or PC
Autosaving
Offline support: upload your changes to Dropbox next time you’re connected
Word counts, line counts, character count
A Scratchpad to flesh out ideas or store random bits of information
Email files as an attachment
Customize the look of the text editor to fit your workflow
TextExpander touch support
Free customer support via email

Elements is available for an introductory price of $4.99. We hope you enjoy using Elements as much as we enjoyed creating it and eagerly await your feedback.

Student Discounts For Today Now Available

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:30:00 -0400

Having just graduated from Purdue University in 2006 (Boiler up!), we remember how hard it was to scrounge up the cash to buy our favorite apps. Because of that, we want to help you out by offering a student discount on Today to any students currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program of study.

Today makes a great companion for college students. Each day you can see what classes or club meetings you need to attend. You can also keep up on what assignments or other tasks you need to complete.

Students with a valid ID can purchase a single user license of Today 2.0 for just $12.95.

For more information check out our new Student Discounts page which has all the details on how to claim your Today 2 license.

Second Gear On Github

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:17:42 -0400

Open source is one of the great things about software development. Even if you are building commercial software like the products at Second Gear, it’s great to be able to share a piece of code you’ve developed with other developers to hopefully save them a bit of pain down the road. More often than not, that reciprocates back to you as a piece of code someone else has shared publicly will help you out along the way.

Many of our products make use of great open source code. When you send in a feature request or bug report in Today, you’re using Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s most excellent JRFeedbackProvider. If you happen upon a crash in either Check Off or Today, you’re presented with Stephen F Booth’s SFBCrashReporter.

For a while I have had various projects sprinkled around the Internet. The problem was that it was hard to find it as some of the code was linked on this blog, while others code was stored on my personal Github account. It wasn’t too much effort to find with a bit of Google searching, but it wasn’t as meticulously organized as I’d like.

With Github’s recent Organizations feature I finally took an afternoon to get everything neatly organized into a single location. plus add some new goodies to the bunch.

Second Gear now has its own page on Github that lists all of our open source contributions. Here you will find:

SGMimiMailer — Our Objective-C wrapper that lets you prompt users to subscribe to your newsletter using the MadMimi service.
SGHotKeysLib — Our modernized fork of PTHotKeysLib that lets you create global hotkeys for your Mac applications.

I’ve also published two new repositories:

xcode-templates — These are the Xcode templates I use to build our upcoming iOS products. They are pretty similar to the ones that ship with Xcode 3, but adjustments to match my preferred formatting and coding style. My code has been described as insanely organized, which I think was a compliment…
SGSplitViewController — This is a replacement for iOS 3.2’s UISplitViewController that allows for side-by-side views in portrait mode a la Settings.app for the iPad. I’m hoping that the next version of the iPad SDK will render this class useless in the future, but for now it’s a decent solution for the problem.

Down the road, I’d like to add more information about our open source offerings on the proper Second Gear site, but for now I hope this new Github account will prove useful to many of the other developers out there.

Today Classic Now Available For Mac OS 9! Looking for a new...

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 02:03:00 -0400

Today Classic Now Available For Mac OS 9!

Looking for a new piece of Classic Mac software? Well, are you in luck! While everyone else has been distracted by the iPhone and that newfangled iPad, the Second Gear crew has been hard at work giving love to a dedicated group of Mac users who haven’t felt the love lately: the Classic Mac diehards.

You know there’s one of them in your circle: that guy who swears Mac OS X is terrible and will never bail on OS 9 until Apple fixes that abomination that is the 10.6 Finder.

Well, they have a schedule too and we wanted to offer the same great Today 2 experience that our Snow Leopard users have to these platinum themed diehards. With Today Classic you can keep track of what’s on your plate for any given day without keeping Now Up-to-Date & Contact open all the time. Today syncs with Now Up-to-Date & Contact and your life’s agenda so daily events & tasks are always available via one, convenient little interface.

Second Gear's Latest Builds

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:13:00 -0500

Are you interested in being on the cutting edge of each release of Today and Check Off? Check out the new latest builds page, which will house the most recent in-house versions of both applications for you to test and try out.

Right now there is a fresh version of Check Off 4.1b1 that has some crash fixes and accessibility improvements in it.

Before you get your click on, a few words of warning. These are unsupported and uncooked versions of our applications, so if you are not comfortable with dealing with a few crashes and unpolished bits, you’re going to want to stay on the shipping versions of both products. These versions are also experiment grounds, so it’s entirely possible we may deploy something in a beta and then pull it back before the final shipment.

Haven’t scared you off yet? Go forth and fetch fresh bits!

Latest Builds Page

Indie+Relief Aftermath

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:03:00 -0500

A few days ago I mentioned that Second Gear was organizing a Mac & iPhone software charity drive called Indie+Relief.

In total, the Mac & iPhone community raised over $143,000 for Haitian relief charities. Thanks to everyone who bought either Today or Check Off on the 20th and to everyone else who came out in droves to buy software from all the other participating companies.

If you’d like more in-depth details, please check out this post on my personal site, but suffice to say it was a resounding success.

Indie+Relief

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:07:00 -0500

If you’ve been following the @secondgear Twitter account, or my personal one, you’ve probably seen reference to Indie+Relief, the charity event we’ve been organizing over the past few days with the help of our pal Garrett Murray.

Indie+Relief is a gathering over nearly 140 Mac & iPhone developers who have pledged to donate their sales for today, January 20 2010, to charities that benefit the relief effort in Haiti. Both Today and Check Off are taking part, and the proceeds (everything less the processing fee I pay to my merchant provider) of any purchase made today will be donated to the International Rescue Committee.

Even if you don’t buy our software today, please do check out all the other great applications available on the Indie+Relief site. I’m sure there’s something there for everyone.

Find Us On Facebook And Save On Today or Check Off!

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:45:00 -0500

Now that Today 2.0 is officially released, we are starting to get a few smaller projects that were put on the backburner out there. One of those is our new Facebook fan page. Everyone on earth (my grandmother included) is on Facebook, so we wanted to make it easier to interact with our customers.

We’ll be using the Facebook page to post product announcements, tips & tricks and hopefully highlighting some of our friends in the Mac development community who are also on Facebook. If you want to join, just click the image below.

As a bonus for becoming our fan on Facebook, we are currently offering a $1 off coupon for any of our products just for becoming our Facebook fan. We’ll periodically update the Facebook exclusive offer with deals for our existing customers as well as some of our favorite third-party Mac products.

Thanks for supporting Second Gear.

Today 2.0 Released!

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:26:00 -0500

Things have been relatively quiet around Second Gear HQ, but that is only because we have been hard at work on building the next great version of Today. After what seems like forever, Today 2.0 is now available!

Today 2.0 was our opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start from a blank canvas. We reimagined the user interface to be lighter, brighter and infinitely more usable. We also rewired everything under the hood to absolutely fly on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Oh, and we finally went 64-bit.

We also took the opportunity to adjust how events and tasks are created in Today. It didn’t make much sense to keep the windows attached to the main Today window as sheets. With 2.0, you can now create as many new event/task windows as you desire. Even better, you can assign global hot keys to the action so that you’re just a keystroke away from adding a new event to your calendar.

We hope you enjoy this new release. I am genuinely proud of how it turned out and couldn’t imagine going back to the old version. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Looking Back On 2009

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:37:00 -0500

2009 was an interesting year at Second Gear HQ. We had several product releases and a few product acquisitions. Let’s look at some of the highlights.

Today was improved: Today saw several incremental updates that added support for printing, iCal-esque date sorting and more smaller tweaks.
Check Off 4 was released: We also shipped Check Off’s first major update in several years, which refreshed the user interface, added 64-bit support and purging of checked items.
Snow Leopard: We made updates to both Check Off 4 and Today to be compatible with Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard release. We’re big fans of Snow Leopard and can’t wait to harness all the power it has to offer
We jumped on…and off…the iPhone bandwagon: And probably the most interesting part of the year was when we released both FitnessTrack and Emergency Information in the spring and then subsequently sold them to BitBQ to once again focus exclusively on the Mac platform. I waffle on whether the iPhone experience was worth it or not. As a learning experience, it taught us to not jump on the sexy and shiny, but it also caused delays in innovating on our existing products. I won’t say we’ll never get back on the iPhone, but it won’t be until Apple makes the AppStore somewhere we feel welcomed and comfortable being.

As for 2010, I think you will be incredibly pleased with what we have coming very soon. We hope you have a great 2010 and thanks for supporting Second Gear.

BitBQ Acquires FitnessTrack & Emergency Information

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:00:00 -0400

It’s with great excitement that I announce that BitBQ has acquired FitnessTrack and Emergency Information and will taking both applications to the next level. Curious about the what’s and why’s? Read on.

What’s Happening

BitBQ has acquired Second Gear’s stable of iPhone applications: FitnessTrack and Emergency Information.

Why are you selling the iPhone apps?

There are a few reasons for it, but mainly it is because Second Gear wants to get back to focusing on the Mac platform rather than dividing attention between two different platforms. BitBQ, on the other hand, was looking to get into the iPhone development business and was a fan of both applications. It seemed a natural fit.

Do I have to repurchase either application?

We hope not, but right now that depends on Apple. Both companies are working with Apple to transfer the applications in the iTunes program so that the transition is as seamless as possible for existing users. To keep up-to-date on this, subscribe to BitBQ’s blog and/or Twitter

Who do I contact for support, feature requests or other questions?

Please contact Patrick at BitBQ for anything related to FitnessTrack and Emergency Information going forward. You are in great hands.

So what is Second Gear working on now

Right now we’re hard at work on updates to both Check Off and Today, our two Mac applications. There may or may not also be a third Mac application at our top secret shop. Stay tuned!

Check Off 4 Now Available

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:32:00 -0400

We are pleased to announce the release of something that has long been in the works: a major update to Check Off. Check Off is a quick to-do list that sits in your Mac’s menu bar. Simply click the check mark and your personal to-do list will drop down.

This release focuses on modernizing the the application going forward. Much like Apple is doing with Snow Leopard, we wanted to update Check Off so that it is ready for the next decade of software and hardware advancements.

The release sports a new coat of paint with a modernized interface. Check Off now looks and feels like it belongs on Leopard and Snow Leopard with its modernized toolbar, list styles and preferences window.

Check Off 4 also includes a new purge feature which will allow you to remove all of your checked off items with a single click so you can just focus on what’s left to be done on your list. The application is also more friendly to international users with its new support for non-ASCII characters in the list, printing and exporting.

Under the hood, the application saw substantial upgrades and enhancements.
We took the opportunity of 4.0 to rewrite key portions of the architecture to use modern features of the Mac OS X development experience and to add support for 64-bit. Check Off should be leaner, more stable and maybe even a bit snappier as well.

The new core will make it much easier to add functionality to the application going forward. It also gave me the opportunity to fix some lingering usability issues. Check Off now behaves more like a Mac application should and even has standard keyboard shortcuts.

We are very proud of this release and am glad that others can finally get a chance to use it.

The Transition From Free To Paid

Check Off has long been a free product, but with 4.0, the decision was made to start charging a license fee. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it boils down to having to support a company and the developers behind it. We want to continue to build great products for the Mac platform, but short of inheriting quite the trust-fund, making for-pay products is the only way to can do that.

Single user licenses are $12.95, or you can purchase the family pack for $19.95 for use on up to five computers in your household.

Transitioning from free to paid is always an awkward situation and I’m not sure if there is a right way to do it. As part of the transition we have offered free 4.0 licenses to anyone who has made a donation towards Check Off in the past three years. Whether it was a dollar or fifty, we wanted to thank those that took the time and saw fit to support the development of a free product.

Give It A Try

Please download it today and let us know what you think. We are very proud of this release and hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed build it.

Use BusyCal with Today

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:04:00 -0400

The folks at BusyMac just released a public beta of BusyCal, their new iCal replacement that adds support for live weather forecasts, graphics, recurring todos and more. What’s great about BusyCal is that it is fully compatible with iCal still, and any event or task you create in the application will automatically sync back to iCal, and subsequently to Today.

If you’ve been looking for a more powerful calendaring solution than what iCal offers today, be sure to check out BusyCal.

Emergency Information 1.0 Now Available

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 01:51:00 -0400

FitnessTrack 1.1 is unfortunately still in review with Apple, but I am pleased to announce that a weekend project from a few weeks ago is now available in AppStore for just 99 cents: Emergency Information.

An In Case of Emergency (ICE) card is something everyone should be (but usually isn’t) carrying on them. It contains your emergency contact information, allergies and medications should you ever be involved in an accident.

I had the idea for building an iPhone version on a recent Friday afternoon and wasn’t satisfied with the existing offerings on AppStore. I used it as motivation to spend my entire weekend building what I envisioned an ICE application should look and function like. This is the fruits of that labor.

Be sure to check out Emergency Information for only 99 cents and tell your friends & family about it. Thanks for supporting Second Gear.

FitnessTrack 1.0 Now Available On AppStore!

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:45:00 -0400

I’m pleased to announce that my first iPhone application, FitnessTrack is now available on the AppStore.

FitnessTrack is designed to help you keep track of your progress at the gym. Whether you lift weights, run or just want to shed a few pounds, FitnessTrack is designed to replace your notebook or clipboard workout sheets.

The application was an idea I’ve wanted to pursue for quite a while. It started as a side project for the Mac a few years ago, but was given a new breath of life with the release of the iPhone. It became obvious that it would and should be on the iPhone.

FitnessTrack features the following:

**Workouts: I tried the other fitness applications on the iPhone and none of them worked the way I thought when it came to actually being in the gym and keeping track of what you are doing. FitnessTrack is my spin on how I think this should happen. Add your exercises, set the number of sets and adjust your weights: all in a beautiful and intuitive interface.
Exercises: FitnessTrack includes over 65 professionally designed exercises. I’ve partnered with Custom Fit Personal Training here in Evansville to design the exercises and give detailed, easy to follow instructions on how to perform them. You can also create your own exercises should you need to supplement the list.
Routines: Have a workout you repeat often? Save it as a routine that you can use to populate a new workout. Routines store the exercise and number of sets for each respective exercise.
Fitness Profiles: Fitness Profiles is designed for those that are trying to reach a certain weight or inches goal. I tend to put myself in 6-8 week cycles where I have a certain goal of trying to put on a certain amount of muscle in the timeframe, losing a certain percentage of body fat, etc. I designed Fitness Profiles to allow me to keep track of that information via the iPhone.
Gorgeous UI: One of the things I’m most proud of in the application is the look & feel of the app. Thanks to the work of the awesome William Wilkinson, FitnessTrack looks like it belongs on the iPhone. I’ve tried to ride the line between a completely custom UI and the iPhone standard (striped table views = yuk), and I think it looks tremendous.

FitnessTrack is available right now for the low introductory price of $3.99 on the AppStore. I have quite a few features planned for the future and I hope you’ll come along for the ride with me.

Happy 1st Birthday Today!

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:22:00 -0400

It is hard to believe that it has already been a year since we announced the release of our flagship product, Today. Since that initial release, we have done 14 minor and point releases that have added the features you’ve requested.

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

Get the forecast in Today with WeatherCal

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:13:00 -0400

Today is a great way to see what’s on your daily schedule of events and tasks, but with WeatherCal, a new utility from Bare Bones, it can also be an instant way to see what the forecast is.

WeatherCal creates a new calendar in iCal that has the daily forecast as an all day event in iCal and subsequently Today.

This is such an ingenious use of iCal that I can’t believe no one thought of it until now. Great job, Bare Bones!