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.Read more

I’m calling it. I’m tired of preparing. No new bugs filed in two weeks and all the old ones deferred or fixed. The only thing left was the help book and while I got a start on it, my brain is fried.

It’s here, it’s done. Come and get it. It’s a free upgrade to you 1.x users and it should come down the auto-update pipe on your next launch. You’ll be prompted to convert your documents, so save the new one with a new name somewhere and use it from there. Otherwise, you’re golden.

You’ll notice a redesigned Notae product page, too. I want to thank the guys on the MacSB list and IRC channel for their ideas and help with that. I appreciate it a lot.

Oh, and if you haven’t bought a license, it just went up to $29. Tough. Well, okay, not so tough. Until 1/31/07 you can use the coupon LAUNCHSPECIAL at checkout to get 50% off (the old price). It’s a transition, so I’m being nice.

Update: Also, I’ve modified the volume license. If you get a second copy, the price drops to $20 each. It drops pretty fast and as you get to the point where you’re outfitting an office or lab it’ll hit rock-bottom at $10/seat in bulk.Read more

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).Read more

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.Read more

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?