Downshift: The Second Gear Weblog

Track Second Gear progress via @secondgear on Twitter

2009-07-07T10:33:00.001-07:00

Brent Simmons, Internet superstar and developer of NetNewsWire, recently started tweeting his workday. Brent describes it as coding as a performance.

It's a fairly good idea, so I've decided to use the Second Gear Twitter account to document what exactly is being worked on here in the labs. If you follow right now, you'll see I'm hard at work on a new release of FitnessTrack. Rather than updating on every single thing I'm doing in a given day, I'm planning to just do one to two updates per day just so you can follow along.

You can follow along by following @secondgear. Hopefully this proves to be an interesting experiment and gives you a closer glimpse of how things work around Second Gear HQ.

Emergency Information 1.1 Now Available on AppStore

2009-07-07T10:16:00.001-07:00

Emergency Information 1.1 is now available via the AppStore. This new version resolves a few issues that cropped up with the iPhone OS 3.0 release as well as adds support of creating emergency contacts on the iPod touch. While iPod touch users can't call their contacts, they can view the contact information on their device should the need arise.

Emergency Information is just 99 cents. Download it today!

Today 1.8: Better Snow Leopard Compatibility

2009-06-29T05:13:00.001-07:00

I'm happy to announce that Today 1.8 is now available. Version 1.8 is a minor update to address a few Snow Leopard issues I was running into as I'm starting to use the new operating system more. The new release also improves the French localization and should launch a bit faster than before. As always, it's a free update to registered 1.x users. If you aren't yet a Today user, why not give it a spin? A 10-day fully-functioning demo of Today can be downloaded at the Second Gear site.

FitnessTrack 1.1 Now Available

2009-06-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

FitnessTrack 1.1 is now available via the AppStore.

Here's the highlights:

You can now filter the exercise list when browsing or adding exercises to a workout
You can now view exercise information & previous sessions from within any workout
FitnessTrack will now remember your selected view position on close
You can now adjust the date of a workout
Added set of default routines for first launch
You can now email a specific workout or routine to anyone
Improved compatibility with latest iPhone OS 3.0 beta
Miscellaneous performance, stability and UX adjustments

The full changelog is available over here. FitnessTrack is available for the ridiculously low price of $2.99. Check it out!

Emergency Information 1.0 Now Available

2009-05-31T22:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Today: Give us your feedback for version 2.0

2009-05-27T05:16:00.000-07:00

We're starting to plan the release of Today 2.0, and we want your input to help shape the release.

You can help by taking the survey below or just send us an email at today@secondgearsoftware.com and let us know what features you wish Today had. Thanks for your help and for supporting Second Gear.

FitnessTrack 1.1 Submitted to AppStore

2009-05-10T23:41:00.000-07:00

It's been a little less than a week since FitnessTrack made it's debut on the AppStore and we can't thank you enough for the response. We've spent the past week listening to your feedback and planning out the next several releases which we are excited to get into your hands.

The first one is FitnessTrack 1.1, which is a mix of features and tweaks we've been working on behind the scenes while 1.0 was in review and stuff you have requested and reported. One of those features is search. When you are adding exercises to a workout, you can now filter the list to find what you are looking for quickly. There are several other small tweaks & enhancements in there as well that we'll highlight in the changelog once the update goes live on the store.

Look for it in AppStore in the next week or so, depending on how quick Apple is at approving it.

FitnessTrack 1.0 Now Available On AppStore!

2009-05-04T21:45:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-04-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

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!

Today 1.7: Printing, Task Sorting and Classic Date Formatting

2009-03-24T01:36:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that Today 1.7 is now available. Version 1.7 of Today adds following:

You can now print your daily list of events & tasks
Rewrote the task sorting algorithms to be more reliable when sorting by due date or priority
Improved verbage and sizing issues in both French & German localizations
Reverted to iCal-style date selection in place of natural dates

The full change list is listed in the release notes

I want to touch on the last bullet point I listed. With Today 1.6, the big feature was the support for entering dates using natural language instead of the traditional date picker. I thought this was a great way to enter dates and was quicker for me than using the date picker in iCal. I think some people also agreed with this, but the majority of users found this incredibly confusing.

How do I know this? The support queue for Today 1.6 went up over 300% with people not understanding why they couldn't create events. In many cases the problem was built around the idea that people didn't understand what that blank text field had to do with a start/end/due date.

Given the high level of confusion this feature caused my non-geek users, I decided to pull the feature and revert back to the standard iCal-style date picker. The lesson to take away from this for other developers is don't over engineer for the sake of geek cred. The iCal-style date pickers worked great and I'm sure Apple did plenty of testing to determine they were the best way to work with.

If you were a fan of the natural date selection, I'm sorry to take it out of this release, but given the choice of keeping Today easy to use and accessible to as many classes of users as possible, I think this change is for the best. I may try a hybrid of the natural date entry and date picking down the road. I have some ideas, but I'll make sure to do a wider beta test before putting it out in the wild.

Thanks for supporting Second Gear and Today.

Get the forecast in Today with WeatherCal

2009-03-18T13:13:00.000-07:00

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!

Today 1.6: Natural Day Entry and Spaces Fixes

2009-01-20T04:36:00.000-08:00

We've published a new release of Today that adds one of the most requested features by our users. Today 1.6 adds support for natural date entry when creating new events and tasks within today. Rather than having to manually adjust the date, month, year and time using the Mac OS X date picker like in iCal, users can now enter dates as they would say it. Set a task to be due January 28, 2009, 1/28/09 or even approximate values such as tomorrow or Friday. Today will automatically decipher what you enter and convert it to a proper date.

What's New In Today 1.6

Added natural language parsing for new events and tasks.
Today should be a better Spaces citizen when running in menu-bar mode. Due to a bug in Apple's Spaces implementation, be sure to restart Today if you adjust it's Spaces settings.
Updated compiler to be LLVM-GCC 4.2
Other smaller bug fixes and performance tweaks.

We hope you enjoy the new release and look forward to getting feedback from you on it.

Today is 40% off thanks to MUPromo.com (1 Day Only)

2009-01-05T14:01:00.000-08:00

To celebrate today's Phil-note, we are pleased to have a one day sale in partnership with our friends at MUPromo.com. Until 11:59 EST today you can purchase Today for the low-low price of $8.95, a 40% savings.

If one of your new years resolutions was to be more productive and organized, Today is a fantastic application to help you achieve your goals.

To get the discount, head over the MUPromo page

Mac Developer Network members can save 20% on Today!

2009-01-04T21:54:00.000-08:00

As a software developer myself, I built Today to help me easily keep track of ship dates, outside meetings and my daily life. With that in mind, I'm happy to announce that all members of the Mac Developer Network can now receive 20% off of Today just for being a member. See the members area on the site for instructions on how to claim this discount.

If you are a Mac OS X or iPhone developer, you should do yourself a favor and join the MDN to gain access to the plethora of knowledge it holds. Who knows. Maybe you will hear me on a future podcast!

2008 Year In Review

2008-12-30T23:11:00.000-08:00

As 2008 is drawing to a close, it is customary to reflect on the year that was. For Second Gear, I think 2008 will be marked as a year of transitions. There were many highs and a few lows, and overall I'd say that 2008 was a success. Some of the highlights included:

The transition from consulting to sales: At the beginning of 2008, we stopped accepting new clients to instead focus on the development of new products for the Mac, including...
The release of Today: Today was built to scratch an itch I had for a small, easy to access way to see my daily schedule. It's launch in April of 2008 was a massive success and was received with high praise. During the rest of 2008, we released Today 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.5 with a few smaller releases in between.
Bringing Check Off into the fold: Before Second Gear, I had an application called Check Off that I released under my own personal name. It made little sense to keep two separate presences in the Mac development community, so Check Off was folded into the Second Gear brand. I'm working on a major update to the application that I'm hoping to release in 2009.
F#ckingNDA: The dark horse of 2008 was the iPhone NDA. If you're wondering why there are currently no applications in AppStore from us, it's mostly because of the NDA that prevented iPhone developers from discussing the development of iPhone applications with one another. The IconFactory's Craig Hockenberry coined the phrase F#CKING NDA to describe the frustrations developers felt. The meme picked up, and on a whim we setup a Web site at f#ckingnda.com which garnered quite a bit of press. The NDA is gone and so is the Web site, but I like to think that it had a little bit to do with helping get the NDA lifted. If not, it at least gave other developers a place to find other frustrated iPhone Devs.

It wouldn't be a reflective post without a few predictions and thoughts for what is coming in 2009. You can be sure that there will be more releases of Today. Presently, we're working to address accessibility issues and add an AppleScript dictionary for all those scripting fiends out there. There will also be an updated Check Off released sometime that we hope will knock your socks off. As for the iPhone? We're working on something right now...stay tuned!

Porchlight Service Shutting Down

2008-11-30T06:07:00.000-08:00

After much deliberation, we've decided to shut down Porchlight as of January 9, 2009. There are a variety of reasons for doing this, but it boils down to resources and focus. Running a Web service is a full-time gig and Porchlight never has really found an audience like we hoped. The shifting economy has caused us to make some hard decisions and shutting down this service is one of them.

The other major point is that Second Gear's focus as a company has shifted in the two and a half years since we launched the service. We're a Mac and iPhone development company, so maintaining a Web service just doesn't fit in the cards these days.

We tried unsuccessfully to find a suitor to take over Porchlight, so this seems to be the end of the road.

If you are a Porchlight user, we don't want you to lose your data, so please to export your contents out before January 9, 2009. To do this:

Login to your Porchlight account
Go to Account Settings
Click on "Export all projects and bugs in XML"

The XML output should contain all of your project data so you can take it with you to another service or archive it for your own internal use.

Thanks for supporting Porchlight over the years. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Today 1.5: Alarms, Growl, Notifications, Oh My!

2008-11-17T02:15:00.000-08:00

After a bit of a delay, we're pleased to announce that Today 1.5 is now available. Today 1.5 is our biggest update since 1.0 was released back in the spring. We've added three of the biggest features that users have requested. The first is support for creating and adding alarms to new events and tasks you create in Today.

The new alarms panel lets you define any variety of predefined alarms. We include a few commonly used types (5 minutes before, 30 minutes before for example). We've also added support for showing past-due notifications on any task that has lapsed its due date.

The final feature is for the power-users out there who are as big of fans of the Growl notification framework as me. When you perform a few actions in Today, there will now be notifications posted to Growl to give you an extra visual cue that the operation completed successfully.

Today 1.5 is a free update to all Today users, so please do try it out and let us know what you think.

Join the Second Gear Mailing List

2008-11-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time coming, but we have finally setup a mailing list to keep our customers and fans up to date on the latest happenings with our products. The list will be low volume and will focus on announcing new product releases, offering a few tips & tricks and offering a few discounts every now and then.

Just so you know, we will never sell your email address to any third party and it will only be used by Second Gear to send you newsletter messages. We hate spam and will never contribute to the problem.

You can find the signup form in the sidebar of this weblog and the Today and Check Off

Today 1.3.2 Released

2008-10-28T03:11:00.000-07:00

Today 1.3.1 (and an unfortunate 1.3.2) have been released. The major change is a fix that will resolve an issue with the time change over the weekend not causing the date browser to be off by a day for the next week or so.

Grab the update via Sparkle or at the Today Web site

Give us some feedback

2008-10-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

If you've gotten support from us for Today or Check Off in the past few months, you've probably realized that we are using a service called GetSatisfaction.com to host it all. The service is great for small businesses because it allows passionate users help other users out in addition to me offering support each day.

Besides support, it's also a great way to suggest new features for existing Second Gear applications or to just suggest we create a new application. With that in mind, we've added a new feature to the Second Gear site. if you look on the left corner of any content page, you'll notice a tab that reads "Feedback." Popping that open allows you to make a suggestion for our products that will be sent directly to us and also posted on Satisfaction for other users to vote up or down.

I use these suggestions to shape the future direction of Check Off and Today, so be sure to make your suggestions.

Today is 20% off through October

2008-10-06T22:37:00.000-07:00

We are hard at work in the Second Gear labs building Today 1.5, a major update to our flagship application. It's taking a bit longer than we imagined, so we decided to do something special for our customers this month.

We're offering Today for 20% off through the month of October. You can now pick up a license for Today for the all-time low price of $12. If you've been itching to purchase Today, there has never been a better time. Even better, if you're already a Today user and know someone who would also benefit from the app, you can pass on these great savings.

Today is a powerful, easy to use event and task management application for Mac OS X Leopard. Built on top of the same data engine as Apple's iCal and Mail programs, Today lets you quickly see what events and tasks are on today’s agenda with the click of a button.

Purchase your license.

Today users should update to 10.5.5

2008-09-15T07:38:00.000-07:00

If you are a user of Today, I would highly recommend updating to Mac OS X 10.5.5 as it has many fixes to the CalendarStore framework. CalendarStore powers the database behind Today. The biggest bug that is known to be fixed involves detached, recurring events not being displayed properly. This now looks to be resolved.

You can update to 10.5.5 by going to the Apple menu and selecting "Software Update."

Our Toolbox: TextExpander

2008-09-09T23:19:00.000-07:00

One of the indispensable tools we use at Second Gear HQ is a utility application called TextExpander from our friends at SmileOnMyMac. TextExpander works by listening to your typing and expanding abbreviations you type in into longer-form snippets of text.

This really helps out for dealing with common support issues. For instance, I have a snippet with a link to a direct download of the latest version of Today. I type 'dltd' into an email and TextExpander will automatically expand it into a full-fledged URL.

The AppleScript support is also an awesome timesaver. When pasting long URLs around the Web, I like to shrink them using bit.ly. There is a script that will automatically take the link on your clipboard and convert it to a bit.ly-fied URL.

TextExpander is $29.95 and well worth the price if you are a keyboard cowboy like myself.

Get a free license for Today!

2008-09-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

Update: This promotion has expired.

We want to help get the word out about Today. There's a world of people out there that don't presently know about Today and we want to help introduce them to the application. These people are your friends, family and blog readers.

For the month of September, we're offering a free personal license for Today to anyone that writes a review of Today on their weblog or in their user group newsletter. When you review Today, try to highlight what the best features of the application are and also offer us some suggestions on what could be improved going forward to make Today even better.

When you've published your review, send us a link or a copy of the newsletter to support@secondgearllc.com with the subject Today Review and we'll send you your free license. At the end of the month, we'll showcase all of the reviews here on Downshift.

Say Hello to the New Second Gear

2008-08-10T01:44:00.000-07:00

Ever since we released Today a few months ago, I have wanted to take the time and give the Second Gear Web site a fresh coat of paint. The old site, while still good looking to me, had a focus on building custom software solutions for clients. We have not been accepting new clients in the past seven months, so it didn't make much sense to highlight this former aspect of our business.

While most of the content is the same, we slapped a fresh, modern look on the site that we hope will scale well into the future as more Second Gear products are introduced over the coming months.

With the new Second Gear site we wanted to put the focus on our products and interacting with customers. My favorite feature of the new site is the integrated support. We're big fans of Get Satisfaction and use it exclusively for handling the support for our products, but the major tradeoff was having to send our customers to a third-party site. The Satisfaction folks recently introduced the ability to use their API to integrate your Satisfaction forum natively onto your own site and we're happy to be using it.

The site is still not perfect and there are some things that still need to be updated (most notably the Store, but we'll be working on tweaking those things over the next weeks.

We hope you enjoy the new site.