The products at CP may see a little longer of a delay than I’d like, with refreshes possibly in the February timeframe. That saddens me, but there’s no way around it, my day job is taking up far too much of my time.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to go without quality Mac software. I’m a co-founder of Barton Springs Software and we just released a beta version of our first major product, Prosperity. It’s a desktop personal finance program written exclusively for the Mac and includes the ability to connect to banks that offer OFX servers and download your transactions from them. It, of course, also allows for file imports from QIF and OFX as well as manual entry.

Feel free to get in on the beta by going to the site and signing up for the mailing list. You’ll get instructions from there.

The reason that Notae 2.1 removed the translations is that I really needed to add some UI elements and get an update out but couldn’t really wait on the translations for all the translations I’d added so far.

Now that I really look at the user base for Notae (the sites that give it news and the IPs downloading it), French- and German-speaking countries are growing in number very quickly.

For future versions of Notae, I’d like to limit the translations to just three: English, French, and German. I think that about covers everyone.

I’m going to push out a 2.2.1 later today with some small fixes, but for 2.2.2 I’d like to go to this model.

I could dance around this in so many ways but it wouldn’t be honest. Notae 2.0 is worth more than $15.

After thinking about it for a while, I think it needs to be priced in its class. That said, I want to reward those that have supported the program as far so while the price is going up, the serial numbers will not change and your version 1.x numbers will work for 2.0.

Why bother, one might ask? When you look at a car that everyone’s going crazy over and it’s priced at $12K, what’s your first thought? “Piece of crap. You gotta wonder how they’re making ‘em so cheap.” Yet, if you look at a car priced at $18K or $22K, then you give it some credit and start to actually look at it. People do the same with software. While I’m happy selling it at $15, the market is selling things with an average price of $35/40. If you look at them (especially Mori and Yojimbo) and compare to Notae 2.0 you’ll see that there’s little difference. Each of us has some give-and-take, but the core is the same. Why are they worth more? They’re not, really, and that’s one of the many reasons I made Notae: I wasn’t going to pay $39 for something I could write myself (in hindsight, this past year of my life might have been worth more than $39).

There’s been a lot of evil crap floating around “teh Intarweb” about MacZot!, Mac Heist and other shareware-highlighting deals lately, and I think that a lot of folks are talking out of their asses pretty loudly about something that isn’t that big of a deal.

This whole mess started with MacZot! a while back, which was trying to coin an idea from sites like woot.com where there’s one heavily-discounted item per day in limited numbers that everyone gets to drool over and buy if it fancies them to do so. Well, when this idea was applied to Mac applications this came to be a bit of a problem in several ways. The first is that there’s only so many Mac applications that can be sold in bulk. The rest are niche products or pure crap, so while at first the site really ran high with familiar products on the cheap, over time it really just ran out of people to market the concept to and fell into either not offering items for periods of time, re-offering old items, or offering one gem in a week of crap — at which point no one is paying attention and the sales are slow for that item.

Dragging and dropping a Core Data object between documents is a little bit of hell. The reason for this is that they aren’t NSCoding compliant and there’s no easy way to do it because initWithCoder: doesn’t let you set the managed object context to whatever the current one is. So the solution for copying, and thus for drag and drop, has been to gather a list of properties for the object and then send that over in the drag and then decode that on the other end.

Well, I found a rather quick way of doing this, and one that’s really quite easy and keeps maintenance of the data types to copy and set completely in the model (always good). Implement a method on your model object called dictionaryRepresentation and return an NSDictionary with property list types for all your data. Ensure that the keys used in the dictionary correspond to the KVC properties of your model object. To recreate the object at the other end, insert an object of the proper type into the MOC and then use the really freaking handy NSObject method setValuesForKeysWithDictionary: and pass it that dictionary. It will then iterate over it using your KVC methods and add everything back in.

A question for those that care about such things.

When you have autosave turned on, do you expect that closing the document will automatically save it without prompting?

Pro: You’ve already committed to having your data saved without your requesting it.

Con: While a document is open, there’s always undo. Once you’ve closed it, you’re stuck with what you’ve got.

Caveat: I’d rather not have to add a preference to change this behavior. It should “just work.”

Thoughts?

After spending some more time with iTunes 7.0, I’m of the feeling that this is what I’ve wanted iTunes to be all along. The new group view is easily now my favorite way to browse my media, especially my podcasts (which I can now download without killing the program, yay!).

Sadly, you can’t use the grouped art or Coverflow views from within the Podcast management section, nor can you do shuffle or repeat or anything else. There’s an easy solution: create a smart playlist where “Podcast is true” and then call it Podcasts. That’s your new iTunes-like podcast list, supporting groups and Coverflow and repeat/shuffle, etc. Much better.

While I balk at the use of the new interface elements and the flawed reasoning behind it, I must say that the interface redesign works well and I love it.

If you’re not iTunes 7-enabled, you need to get this one.