Tyler Hall

2009 is nearly over and I’m thankful to say it’s been a great year. I’m lucky enough to have a fantastic day job that lets me run this little software business on the side. And, somehow, in twelve short months I’ve managed to release two new products — Incoming and Nottingham. Three if you count VirtualHostX 2.0.

Each one has benefitted greatly from all the suggestions and comments (both good and bad) I’ve gotten from you, my users. For that, I say thank-you! And, as a small treat, I’d like to offer a half-off coupon.

Between now and the end of the year, send me a note with a suggestion for how to make one of my apps better and I’ll send you in return a coupon for 50% off. It’s that easy. You can email me your suggestions or send it via Twitter. Either way, it’s a selfish way for me to get some great feedback and for you to get one last end of the year deal.

This holiday, while family and friends ate good food and played Super Mario Bros. Wii, I found myself holed up in my office working on a small passion project called Nottingham. (Ok, I ate some food, too.) I wrote briefly about Nottingham last week, but wanted to take a few minutes to go into a bit more detail as it’s grown up a lot these last few days.

Above all things, Nottingham is a clone of the classic Mac application Notational Velocity. And I’m serious when I say that — I didn’t start out to write an app like NV, I started out with the intention of literally copying what they had created and then improving upon it. To merit creating such a similar app, my improvements had to be worthwhile. I started out with four goals.

First, it had to have a cleaner, more Mac-like UI. Notational Velocity’s current interface is purely functional. It’s efficient and stays out of your way. Unfortunately, it’s ugly, too. It no longer fits in with the UI polish users expect in 2009. I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I did make some common sense changes that make the interface friendlier. I replaced the current search box with a native Mac search field and removed any unnecessary padding around the UI elements. I gave the note field a legal pad treatment (inspired by The Hit List), enabled rich text editing, and replaced the “Date Created” column with a more useful “Date Modified” one. Also, since the goal of Nottingham (and NV) is to be totally keyboard navigable, I put a lot of thought into which shortcut keys I kept and which ones I altered. One of those changes was making the up and down arrow keys behave more naturally as they move through the list of notes and into / out of the search field.

Your data is precious. That’s why the second major focus of Nottingham was enabling sync support to keep your notes safe. I went two routes with this. First, I made Nottingham sync with MobileMe. This not only keeps your data backed up in Apple’s cloud, but it makes it available to you on all of your Macs. Unfortunately, MobileMe is a $99/year service that not everyone has, which is why Nottingham offers a second option to sync with Cloud Factory’s awesome Simplenote service. This gives you access to your notes from any computer via their web interface and on-the-go access with their kick-ass iPhone application. Any changes you make on your Mac will by synced over the air to your phone and vice-versa.

Finally, to give you access to your notes even when Nottingham isn’t open, I enabled Spotlight indexing. This makes it a snap to find what you’re looking for no matter where you are on your Mac.

And that’s about it. Nottingham is still very much a work in progress, but I think you’ll find it’s already stable and useful enough for everyday use. It’s quickly become a staple icon in my Dock. If, during your use, you find any bugs (which I’m sure there are) or have suggestions for improving it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

You can download the latest version of Nottingham here.

Happy Black Friday, everyone!

In celebration of the first shopping day of the holiday season, both VirtualHostX and Incoming! are on sale for $10 today only! That’s over 50% off.

To take advantage of this sale, just click the “Buy Now” buttons. Your discount will be automatically applied at checkout.

About a month ago (apparently late to the game) I discovered Notational Velocity — a slick little notepad for Mac. I really liked the idea of it — lightweight and totally keyboard navigable — but the UI and implementation bugged me. So I did what any good Mac developer does — I reinvented the wheel and wrote a clone I call Nottingham.

For right now it’s a straight-up rip of Notational Velocity. To its developers I say thanks for the inspiration :-) In the coming weeks I’m hoping to add my own bit of flair to the app, including MobileMe syncing, real Spotlight integration, and (for iPhone users) syncing with Simplenote.

If you’re curious and would like to give Nottingham a try, download it here.

As always, feedback is welcome. I’d love to know what features other users would like to see added.

As part of the One Finger Discount going on throughout Mac-software-land, both Incoming! and VirtualHostX are 20% off their normal prices between now and next Friday. You can pickup a copy (or two!) of VirtualHostX for $14 — and Incoming! is available for $24.

So it’s been almost two months since I last posted. I’ve had a lot going on, but mainly it’s because I’ve been hard at work pushing out beta releases of Incoming! — my Twitter search client — and gearing up for the big one-point-oh release. It’s been three months since the first public preview, and today I’m happy to announce 1.0 is officially available.

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.

One of the major new features of VirtualHostX 2.0 is the ability to share your virtual hosts over the local network. Its implementation has caused some confusion among users (my fault), so I wanted to take a few minutes to explain how local sharing works and how to use it.

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.

Just a quick note letting everyone know that both VirtualHostX 2.0 and Incoming! are compatible with Snow Leopard. I’ve been testing them against 10.6 for most of the summer and all the issues I noticed have been fixed. That said, please email me if you do run into any problems – fixing them will be my top priority.

Just a heads up, tomorrow (Thursday 8/19) VirtualHostX 2.0 is being featured on MacUpdate Promo. This is a one day only sale for an extremely awesome price. You’ll have to check out the site tomorrow to see the deal. It’ll be a great opportunity to grab a couple licenses for the rest of your office or small business.

Two years ago, shortly after I released VirtualHostX 1.0, I wrote about Appcaster – a web dashboard for Mac developers I built that manages my application updates, payment processing, etc. With the release of VHX 2.0 and Incoming!, I decided it was time to rewrite Appcaster as the original code was hurried and hastily patched over the last few years.

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.)