I was waiting for a MySQL migration to finish when I said to a friend: “mysql should have growl support to tell me when a lengthy operation is done”. 10 seconds later that became: “Even better, there should be a command like ‘time’ that would growl when whatever command you give it is done”. 3 minutes later and I finished the bash version of Growl When Done:

gwd()
{
  $*
  growlnotify “${1} is done” -m ‘…’
}


Drop that in your .bashrc or .bash_profile and you can now do things like:

gwd sleep 1
gwd some time consuming command

Assumptions: * You have growl and the command line growlnotify installed * You use bash

Update: The friend I was talking with didn’t have growlnotify installed. His google search for ‘growlnotify install’ turned up this, much more complete solution: http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/archives/2007/08/tip_use_growlno.html.

On February 19th, 2004 I registered roobasoft.com. At that time I knew I wanted it to someday be my full time job, but it was a remote dream. Today, at 2 p.m. EDT I finished my last day of employment and that dream became a reality.

What’s next? For the short term I’ll be doing contract work (already lined up) mixed with working on my own apps. Only time will tell where that goes.

My holiday project has been deploying store.roobasoft.com. It’s Andy Kim’s open source Ruby on Rails store, Potion Store. I’ve known about Potion Store since Andy first opened it to the public. Since my current PayPal standard solution was working, and sales weren’t great, I didn’t see any need to change things. However, the PayPal standard store always seemed kind of sub-par to me and I always said when I started selling a second app I would do a proper store.

A couple weeks ago I downloaded Potion Store for fun and started playing with the admin interface in a development environment. It was way better than anything I had and I wanted it. The only downside was that I would have to sign up for PayPal pro and would lose $30 each month. I justified that as motivation to do more frequent updates and release new apps. Hope it helps.

It took me 7 days of very part time work to finish deploying the store. The biggest pain was adding support for state taxes. I’m a resident of Idaho and am required to collect sales tax from anyone buying rooSwitch that also lives in Idaho. PayPal’s express checkout is not setup to handle this very well. If you’re interested in the details, I started a thread at pdncommunity. I still can’t figure out why more people aren’t talking about this issue. It makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong. (Feel free to educate me in the comments if you know what I’m doing wrong )

Apart from that little sales tax glitch, I’m happy with the results.

Happy 2008!

rooSwitch 1.2 is available now. The only feature that made it into this release is the ability to switch profiles from the dock menu. The other major improvement is a fixed hang seen on Leopard.

Here’s some quick status on the rooApps:

rooSwitch

The 1.2 release was started many months ago and took way too long to finish. I have ideas and user submitted feature requests that could either be rolled into a 1.3, but it’s more likely the next major release will be a 2.0. However, I don’t expect to see this happen before Fall 2008. This would likely be a Leopard only release and an almost complete rewrite (the are some things in 1.x that need rewriting )

rooVid

I finally abondoned hope of ever realesing a rooVid non-lite version on the 1.0 label. During WWDC 2007 I sketched out rooVid 2.0. In my mind it was three things:

• A video convertor featuring profiles (just like lite 1.0 is today)
• A video uploader (to YouTube, your .mac account, your personal website, etc)
• A video organizer

The feature I was most excited about was the organizer. Then iLife ‘08 with the new iMovie was announced and I decided to shelf rooVid 2 again. It seemed the organizer part and a lot of the upload and converting was taken care of by Apple in the new iMovie. Now, months after using iMovie ‘08 I realize I still want a better organizer and a better convertor and a better everything. I enjoy creating movies in iMovie ‘08 (I think I’m one of the only ones that likes the new interface) but the organizing and exporting leave room for rooVid.

rooVid 2 will definitely be a Leopard only app and I hope to have it available in late Spring 2008.

Misc

I know I’ve never been good at estimating when I’ll be able to finish an app or even point releases. I blame this poor scheduling on lack of time and poor time management of that limited time by me. Having a full time job, a family (Married with 2 small girls) and trying to do this work when possible can be hard, and very hard to do consistently without burning out. If all goes well things will be changing around the end of January/early February that will help me with this time issue and remove an excuse or two for me not getting things done. More news on that when it’s official.

Merry Christmas!

I have 228 feeds in NetNewsWire. I’m guessing that’s a fairly typical count. It ends up being about 30-60 new news items a day. I noticed I was reading my news in what may be a unique way and thought I’d share:

1. Turn off auto-refresh. I tell NNW when I’m ready for news.
2. Every morning I set aside 20 minutes, open NNW and fetch all.
3. During those 20 minutes I look at all the new entries and answer a question: Do I want to read or think about this more?
   1. Yes? I open the article in a new tab in NNW, in the background.
   2. No? I move on.
4. After each entry has been processed I move on with my day.
5. Throughout the day I come back and read through the tabs casually. When I’m done reading a tab, I close it.
6. Next morning I rinse and repeat.

NNW Zero: I think it’s important for me to always close all my tabs before the end of the day. I used to leave some open thinking they were important and I’d like to deal with them more later. I never do. If it’s really important, I write it down in my todo list.

Use Folders: A while back I grouped my feeds into folders. Some examples are: cocoa devs, apple, photos, life, design, … When I click on a folder to process the contents, the amount of attention I give to the contents varies from folder to folder. I’ve figured out which folders are more important to me and know which can be given less attention. I feel like this helps me process the incoming items even faster.

Feel free to leave your own tips in the comments (or links to your tips).

Here’s a video showing one of the excuses I have for it being so quiet here lately:

Video made with iStopMotion.

Note that the rock, grass and mulch you see used to not exist. Our back yard used to be a wasteland of weeds as tall as me. As seen here:

At the 1h 24m mark of Macbreak Weekly episode 51 Mr. Merlin Mann gives rooSwitch a pick of the week nod and Leo then talks up rooVid a bit. It’s always great to hear and see others talk about your work in a positive way.

Thanks guys

There are plenty of uses for rooSwitch that I will never think of. That’s why I love finding blog posts from users explaining how they’re using rooSwitch. What’s better than a blog post? A screencast!

Earlier this week, I found a user generated screencast showing off rooSwitch managing multiple profiles for Final Cut Pro. I got in touch with the author and chatted a bit about rooSwitch and asked if I could post his screencast. Not only did he let me post it, but he redid it to explain a little more of how he’s doing what he’s doing. The six minute QuickTime movie can be seen below:

rooSwitch and Final Cut Pro.mov

Since I’m not a Final Cut Pro user I would never have known this problem existed nor that it could be helped by rooSwitch.

Many thanks to Steve at Double Wide Post in NYC for the great screencast.

Tonight was Apple’s annual design award’s ceremony. rooSwitch took runner-up in the Developer Tool category!

I’m obviously pretty excited about this and am glad I made it to WWDC this year. It’s really awesome to have something I made be recognized by Apple.

On with the thanks.

I’ll start by thanking my wife and our two girls. They don’t know Cocoa (yet) nor do they use rooSwitch, they do put up with me and occasionally encourage my programming habits.

Next the peers. I had a lot of help with rooSwitch from some great peers. Specifically (in first name alphabetical order): Andy Kim, Daniel Jalkut, Luis de la Rosa and Steve Harris. I actually got to go out to dinner with 3 of those 4 tonight (all but Daniel). It was my first time meeting both Andy and Steve in person.

Now the catch-all (cause I’m sure I forgot someone (sorry)). Thanks to everyone on the rooSwitch beta mailing list and all the users that provided feedback.

OK, that’s all.

In less than 3 hours I’m hopping on a Southwest flight from Boise to Oakland. I land in Oakland at 8:05 and will be greeted by my father-in-law (thanks!) who will drive me to Moscone to get my badge and queue up for the Keynote. In-laws in the SF area are very helpful when you’re an Apple geek.

Last year I ran a sale on rooSwitch for the week of WWDC. I even had business cards that advertised the sale. I still have plenty of those cards. Instead of making new cards, I decided to run the sale again. Benefit from my laziness: http://roobasoft.com/rooSwitch?WWDC=1.