So as you could guess, the biggest news here at roobasoft HQ is that Concentrate has officially shipped. So far, it’s been very successful (compared to other apps I’ve launched). I wrote a bit more about it on the Concentrate blog here.

The most enjoyable part of the release has been watching people talk about it on Twitter. This has meant a lot. Folks seem to get the idea and see how it can help them pretty quickly, and that’s very important. It means a lot when people recommend it so willingly.

To watch twitter real time I’ve been using a new Mac app, Incoming!, to search for the terms: getconcentrating, #Concentrate, Concentrate app and Concentrate OS X. Incoming! has a lot of potential, but its quite buggy in its current beta form. Hopefully it will all be cleaned up soon. Should be a great tool. Update Aug. 16th: 0.89 of Incoming! just came out and fixes both of my reported issues. If you need to keep an eye on twitter I’d definitely check Incoming! out, it’s looking great.

It’s also been enjoyable to get fantastic feedback from users. From that feedback I’ve been able to prioritize features and have scheduled what will be in Concentrate’s 1.1 and 1.2 releases.

I have a few blog posts I want to write. I’m hoping mentioning them here will help make me feel accountable and actually write them. Here are the ideas:

1. Avoiding procrastination with next actions
2. roobasoft v2.0’s secret weapon: A project coach
3. Taking the time to pay attention to details

OK, that should keep me busy until the next v2.0 post, which surely will be late. In fact, how ’bout I just say there won’t be another until October 1st. Done. It’s in my calendar. So, you know, it has a fighting chance of happening now.

[1] Yes, I set a goal I had no realistic expectation to meet)

[2] That may sound pessimistic, but trust me, it’s optimism for me.

• Full support for Adobe AIR apps
• Locked profiles Did you just spend 40 minutes setting up your data *just* how you want it to reproduce a certain condition? Are you releasing a new version and need to test upgrading from v1 repeatedly? Set up your data just how you want it and then lock it. Now every time you switch to that profile it will be just how it was when you locked it.
  
• Ability take a preference or other data file from someone and drop it on a profile and have rooSwitch know to include it as part of that profile
• Cleaned up Preference Pane
  
• Updated 512×512 icon
• New, darker color theme to match Leopard.
  
• New website thanks to Erika Greco
• 3 new screencasts with likely more on the way
• Fixed a few minor switching bugs

I’m really happy to have this release out there. I think it adds some cool features for developers and just cleans up rooSwitch a good bit. I’m also really happy to have a new website.

Download 1.5 and if you have any feedback on it or the website please drop them in the comments here or send them my way.

WhenIsThat.net doesn’t support a lot of zones or cities yet, but I’ll teach it as time goes on. If this is something that plagues you, give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

Count It Off is my new web and iPhone app for simple calorie counting and weight tracking.

I’ve been trying to not be as large as I am for a few years now. I’ve tried a handful of ways to diet and have recently concluded that calorie counting is the best solution for me (everyone’s different). I started by using a Google Docs spreadsheet, but that got old fast. Then I tried a couple web apps and they all tried too hard. I didn’t want them to attempt to tell me how many calories were in my breakfast. I wanted to calculate it once, record it with a useful name, and then log it by that name the next time I ate it. It was during WWDC 2008 that the idea for Count It Off, a calorie counter for the iPhone, came together.

The week after WWDC (Jun 16th-ish, 2008) I was flying to Spain to visit the MakaluMedia guys who I’ve been (and still am) doing contract work for. The extra long flight from San Francisco to Spain gave me plenty of time to think about Count It Off. Here are the sketches along with some commentary and the final 1.0 screens:

Food Log

This is the first page the user sees when they open the app. A good bit changed here in 1.0. I didn’t like the Today: 1100 calories header that I sketched out. I played with a few ideas and settled on a Today – XXXX left header along with a progress bar as the first cell in the ‘today’ entries. I also summed up previous days’ consumption and apply a green check mark if you were within 200 calories of your goal. This makes it easy to see how good/bad you’ve been.

Weight Log

The weight page in 1.0 is a simple log that shows how many lbs or kg are left to lose before reaching your goal. This is an area I want to improve on.

New Food Item

The odometer style picker I sketched wasn’t going to work. The number pad entry is much better. In the sketch, you might have noticed that I was going to allow users to capture images of the food they are eating. This isn’t in 1.0 because I’m not really convinced it’s useful. I just wanted to have a reason to use the camera on the phone.

New Log Entry

The “Pick | New” segmented control was also a bad idea. The assumption with Count It Off is that you eat a lot of the same foods over and over. So by default it brings up the searchable ‘pick food’ view shown above:

Progress

This progress page doesn’t exist in 1.0 but it is something I still want to do.

Somewhat surprisingly, the sketches from June are pretty similar to version 1.0 of the iPhone application. Those sketches have a few good ideas that didn’t make it into the first version and some bad ideas that didn’t make it in.

Now, those sketches are four months old and I didn’t submit the application to the App Store until Nov. 8th, 2008. Did it take me over four months to build this app? Nope. I played with the iPhone SDK for a few nights back in June, but then things got busy and I shelved the idea when I got home. Then in early October I unexpectadly found some free time (that’s another story ). On October 14th I was still larger than I wanted to be, so I decided to make Count It Off a reality.

I first completed the web app and expecting to announce that before the IPhone version (they sync of course). But before I got the web version to a point where I liked it enough to talk about it, the iPhone version was well under way. I resisted announcing these either project until they were both ready. That day is today!

I’ll blog more about this journey later this week and will let you know when the iPhone app is available in the store.

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!

We keep our home pretty cool during the winter. Since I work out of the house all day[1], I’m frequently bundled up with a hat and stuff. The one thing I can’t really cover well has been my hands. I needs to type. It’s what I do. To combat my whining about my cold hands, my wife threw together[2] these somewhat fingerless mittens. It’s not clear in the picture, but there’s a hole for the pinky as well as the thumb. The first beta was more of a flap with a thumb hole. That didn’t really help much. The v1.0 model (pictured) is great. Having it loosely wrap around my fingers worked really well. I can type just as well with these on as with off.

My wife seems to really enjoy making stuff. If you want a pair of these custom made fingerless mitten thingys, send me an email @ bcooke@roobasoft.com.

[1] – I have a day job, but I work remotely
[2] – She taught herself how to crochet a couple months ago and now cranks out all kinds of stuff

• You can now enter your traineo username / password (no longer relies on Safari cookies)
• The gauge is much more reliable and the NaN issue should be resolved.

It was fun working with the traineo folks at such a rapid pace (I posted the original widget on Saturday and they provided an API on Monday). Many thanks to them for supporting this.

Download version 1.1 now.

Let me know if you have any problems / suggestions.

Update: The traineo guys provided an API and I updated the widget. See: TraineoWeight.wdgt Updated

Like most Americans I’d prefer to be less fat. To help me with that goal I’ve been logging my weight on traineo.com. They offer plenty more than just weight tracking, but I haven’t gotten into all that quite yet. Anyway, it seemed silly to log into a web page just to enter my weight each day (who has the time for that! </lazy>). So I pinged the traineo folks and got this in reply:

I’m afraid that at the moment we don’t have an open API, although we are planning to release one in the not-too-distant future.

<snip>

If you want to input your weight remotely, this is possible, but not something we actively advertise, as it’s currently not really ready for public consumption.

If you were to visit http://they.made.it.sound/like/i/shouldnt/share while logged in (i.e. you have a cookie saved in your browser (they don’t go stale for a long time)), your weight would be submitted.

To which I said (to myself): “C Is for cookie, that’s good enough for me!”.

When I found myself awake at 3am[1]. I knew just what to do:

1) Fire up Dashcode
2) Author a widget based on a template Apple provided[2] using 1997 methods of screen scraping[3].
3) Publish widget with minimal testing
4) Hope traineo doesn’t change their response HTML

This took ~3 hours of my time[4] and surely has bugs and will surely break when traineo changes their response. I provide this “as is”. With that:

Enjoy! TraineoWeight.wdgt.zip Make sure you log into your traineo account with Safari first.

[1] our 3 year old likes to wake me up and make me tuck her back in (it’s not that bad really – I’m sure I’ll miss it when it stops).
[2] I can’t make pretty things. But I can copy pretty things!
[3] .substring() – I fought the DOM parser for too long and finally reverted to .substring(). Yes, this is a hack and this widget *will* break someday…possibly soon.
[4] I would have never tried this without Dashcode. It’s pretty slick. Two thumbs up.
[5] Wait…there wasn’t a [5]. Well, if you want access to the Dashcode project let me know and I’ll put up an svn repo. Feel free to take the widget and do with it what you will.

After I finished my sales and downloads peppers (these were very roobasoft specific) I wanted to write something I could share. Enter, roobasoft’s, iusethis pepper. It’s very simple. It displays the “use this” count from osx.iusethis.com using iusethis’s javascript include-isms.

Grab it here.

The preference for the ‘iusethis’ pepper lets you specify which apps you want to watch, comma separated.

I threw this together pretty quickly. Let me know in the comments if it has issues.

A four minute screencast is available here.

There’s more information on the lite versions web page. Please give it a go and send me feedback.

Enjoy!