Labor Mate 1.6 has been approved by Apple and is now available in the App Store. This version fixes the problem with the No button displayed after touching the Reset button.

The final sales numbers are in for White Peak Software. $150 was raised by our customers as part of Indie+Relief. A big THANKS to all who participated.

Because it is such a good cause I decided to do something a little different. The original plan was to donate all proceeds from the sales on January 20. However, additional processing fees are taken out of each transaction – 30% to Apple and 15% to eSellerate. I decided I will donate the cost of the transaction fees myself.

Here is a breakdown of sales for the donation:

I rounded the grand total up to $150. The money has been donated to Doctors Without Borders as part of the emergency relief for Haiti.

Finally, I want to send a big THANKS for Justin Williams of Second Gear Software for coming up with the idea and Garrett Murray who built the Indie+Relief web site. Both individuals put a great deal of time and effort to make this event happen in just a matter of days.

I will be donating all proceeds from White Peak Software product sales on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, as part of the Indie+Relief program. The proceeds will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist with their efforts in Haiti.

How can you help?

You can help by purchasing one of our products: Labor Mate, Killink CSV Editor, or SMTP Diagnostics. Don’t have a need for one of our products? Then visit the Indie+Relief website for a list of other independent software companies participating in this Haiti relief program.

Get great software and help with efforts in Haiti at the same time.

Over the last few months I have been inspired by different iPhone developer community events including 360iDev and DrinksOnTap. So much so I have decided to start my own monthly event for Boston area iPhone developers.

The opportunity to meet fellow iPhone developers and form new friendships is very exciting to me and it motivates me to do more with White Peak Software. Working from home is a wonderful perk of being an indie developer but it can be lonely at times. Meetup events, conferences, and so on are great ways for me to feel connected. And it gives my wife a needed break from my geek talk, which she doesn’t always understand but always happily smiles and acts like she is interested.

The Boston area has a number of meetup events but it is not always possible for me to get into Boston. And let’s face it. MBTA ain’t the MTA. I missed the 10:40 pm train to Salem at the last event I attended in Cambridge. This meant waiting until the 12:10 am train. I finally got home at 1 am.

So what’s a North Shore iPhone developer who can’t always make it into Boston to do? Start a monthly gathering in the North Shore of course.

Over the New Year’s weekend I tweeted about a new group I’m creating called NSiPhoneDevs. The NS prefix is a fun play on the prefix for many of the foundation classes from Apple, but the NS prefix also stands for “North Shore”. The North Shore iPhone Developers or NSiPhoneDevs for short.

I’m still working out the details including the exact location. What I do know is the events will be held in downtown Salem, the events will be monthly, and the first event will be this spring. Stay tune for more NSiPhoneDevs news from the official website (http://nsiphonedevs.org/) or follow @NSiPhoneDevs on Twitter.

Yesterday I was having a very good day but around 5:45 pm my day got even better. I received an email from the fine folks at 360iDev that my topic “Building Web Service Powered iPhone Apps” has been selected. Yep, that’s right folks. I will be speaking at the upcoming 360iDev San Jose (April 11-14).

I’m very excited about this opportunity for a number of reasons. First and foremost, speaking at the conference gives me a chance to share what I have learned over the recents months about leveraging web services within iPhone applications. I have worked with web services in some form for over a decade now so it’s only natural that I would gravitate towards using them in iPhone applications. I also plan to blog more on the topic as I prepare my materials for the conference.

Another reason I’m excited about speaking at 360iDev this spring is I get to attend the conference. I was on the fence about going. I’m already registered for NSConference 2010 USA and I plan to attend this year’s WWDC. I actually was planning to email John at 360iDev to ask if there are plans for another event later in the year. 360iDev Denver was such an incredible experience I knew I didn’t want to go the entire year without attending at least one event. But before I got the chance to ask about another event this year I received the email accepting me as a speaker. This of course made my decision easy. Heck yeah I’m going in April!

And the final reason I’m excited about this opportunity, 360iDev events are the best. Granted I have attended only 1 and that was last fall, but it was by far the best developer conference I have attended in recent years. And definitely one of the top conferences I have ever attended. I posted my comments about 360iDev Denver back in October so I will not repeat myself here. What I will say, though, is if you are an iPhone developer then you should attend 360iDev San Jose. I guarantee you will pick up a trick or two or twelve and best of all you will get to meet other awesome iPhone developers.

On January 1, 2010, the official support groups for all White Peak Software products will moving to Google Groups. The new URLs are below:

Labor Mate
http://groups.google.com/group/whitepeaksoftware-labormate

Killink CSV Editor
http://groups.google.com/group/whitepeaksoftware-killinkcsveditor

Why the move? The old forum software I used was becoming a pain to host and keep running. Also, almost all support questions and bug reports I receive come via email and not via the support forum. In other words, the this support forum was rarely used. And frankly I do not like web forums. I prefer email.

Google Groups offers the best of both, web forums for those who prefer it and email for those who rather interact with a community via email. I know the move will be a pain for the select few who use this forum especially if don’t already have a Google Account. But the small pain outweighs the benefits of the move.

Also, I hope this move will help the online community to grow. Time will tell if that happens or not.

No support group URL for SMTP Diagnostics? Support for SMTP Diagnostics will be email only going forward. Use the contact us page to send your questions and bug reports.

I’m pleased to announce the release of Labor Mate version 1.5, which is now available in the App Store. This release fixes a few bugs but more importantly it adds support for 8 new languages. Labor Mate now supports the following languages:

Dutch
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Spanish
Swedish
Russian

Labor Mate is available for only $0.99 in the iTunes App Store.

The newest version of Labor Mate, version 1.4, is now available in the App Store. This new release includes an improved user interface as well as some bug fixes.