Recently I have seen an increase in the number of spam comments that make it past the spam filters I run on this site. This has become annoying so I decided to turn off comments by default. Sorry to those who might have real value to add as a comment.

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’m exploring a new iPhone app idea and I need your help. I’m looking for parents who use day care services to answer this short survey. The feedback will help me decide what features to included as well as whether I should pursue the app idea.

In a nutshell, the app idea is a daycare cost calculator. The app will help parents calculate daycare costs and is ideal for parents who pay different amounts each month.

User feedback in iTunes for Labor Mate is typically good. Most user rate Labor Mate with 4 and 5 stars. But every now and then a bad review comes in. A bad review is expected from time to time. After all the app isn’t for everyone. Still, there are times when I’m confused by user feedback. Take for example this feedback from Whidbey Island Filkin-in-Law:

“This works great for false labor; I used it every night for a week – sometimes for three hours at a time and I thought it would be neat to mail the info to our midwife. However, when my labor actually started and my water broke two days ago, I thought of this AP and how it would be the last thing I’d do @ 3 min apart & how my review might say: if you’re using this, it is false labor…”

I admit I would not expect my wife to use Labor Mate while she is having contractions. That’s why I tell people Labor Mate is typically used by the expecting mom’s birthing partner, be it her husband, boyfriend, life partner, a friend, and so on. A mom-to-be has too much going on to worry about timing contractions. Let someone else do it. (Though there is nothing wrong with a single mom timing her own contractions. Everyone’s experience is different.)

So while I agree with Whidbey Island Filkin-in-Law that the last thing a woman would want to do when contractions are 3 minutes apart is to touch a start and stop button on an iPhone, I don’t understand the 1-star rating. Whidbey Island Filkin-in-Law used the app every night for a week up to 3 hours at a time. She obviously found value in the app and yet she rated it with a single star.

Reviews like this one aways leave me scratching my head and wondering.

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.

Earlier today I mentioned being selected as a speaker at 360iDev San Jose in April. But before I fly out to San Jose, I fly down to Atlanta for NSConference. I’m looking forward to attending this event. For those wondering about NSConference, check out this promo video.

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.

Labor Mate was originally release in October 2008. My expectations for it were low. If it sold 100 units in the first year then I would consider it a success. But my expectation were exceeded. Labor Mate sold 4997 units in the first year, and it has sold 9201 units in all as of yesterday.

In January 2009 Labor Mate broke into the Top 100 for the Health and Fitness category in the U.S. store. It stayed in the Top 100 daily for nearly 11 straight months peaking at number 34 in the U.S. store. Labor Mate has also been in the Top 100 for the Health and Fitness category in a number of other stores including the U.K., Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, and Italy among others. All of this changed in mid-November. Labor Mate’s fall from grace had started.

A couple of things happened in November bumping Labor Mate out of the Top 100 in its category. First, it received a couple of ridiculous, negative comments in iTunes. I’m not sure of the real impact but the slide from the Top 100 started at the time of the comments. Second and only a day or two later, BabyBump made the What’s Hot list. I believe it is this second point that has taken the biggest toll on Labor Mate’s Top 100 streak.

BabyBump was released in October 2009, just over a year since the initial release of Labor Mate. BabyBump includes features that I have long planned for Labor Mate but have yet to implement. And honestly it looks better than Labor Mate in my opinion. Creative design has always been a weak skill set of mine.

At the end of the day, BabyBump did it better. This was a major wakeup call for me. I let Labor Mate, the one time market leader in its space, grow stale. I had a top ranking and it was mine to lose. And lose it I did.

A major mistake I made in 2009 was to focus most of my attention on contract work and not enough time on my own company. This lack of focus was a setback but also a major kick in my ass. Unfortunately it took Labor Mate’s fall from grace to light the fire under me (and in me). I have learned from this lesson and will do better going forward. For starters, I have since hired a part-time designer as the “Creative Director” for White Peak Software and the first project we worked on together looks great. It will be in the app store soon.

So what about Labor Mate? Is Labor Mate dead? No, far from it. Just a few weeks before the fall from grace, version 1.5 of Labor Mate was approved. This release added support for 8 additional languages, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian. So while sales in the U.S. have dropped, sales worldwide have improved and Labor Mate continues to sell an average of 31 units per day worldwide. So despite not being in the Top 100 of the Health and Fitness category in the U.S., sales remain steady. Also, I have big plans for Labor Mate 2, which I will start working on soon.

One of the hardest challenges I face right now is growing my independent software business while taking care of my 21 month son. Like many other dads out there, my wife works. But what is not typical is my wife is a flight attendant. When she works she is gone for 3, sometimes 4 days in a row, leaving me to fly solo with the kid.

Over the last 21 months we have tried a number of things to help me find time to work on and for White Peak Software. Some attempts have been more successful than others, but in the end I still struggle to find quality work time.

Taking care of the kid myself and work while he sleeps.

This was a disaster. Taking care of a kid all day is exhausting, and with the wife away I not only had to use the time when the kid was sleeping to catch up on my own sleep, but I needed to clean up around the house, cook myself lunch and dinner, and so on. This meant I didn’t start work until 10 pm or so on most days. And this was at the time when the kid was waking during the night. I was doing good if I got 3 hours of work and 3 hours of sleep in a day.

Daytime babysitters to the rescue.

I definitely needed help so we tried babysitters. This past summer we had 2 sitters that were awesome. Best of all the kid really liked both of them. The sitters would watch the kid for approximately 6 hours a day. This definitely helped. I used that time to shower, eat breakfast and lunch, and work. Unfortunately it still left me with only about 4 hours of quality work time per day. I could have logged more hours by working nights but honestly after months of going solo with the kid while the wife was away I needed the sleep. So I stopped working as much at night and used the time to catch up on sleep and re-energize.

All good things come to an end.

The two sitters we had during the summer were awesome, as I already said. They set the bar for how to judge all other sitters, and the bar was set high. Unfortunately for us, but good for them, each sitter got “real” jobs. The babysitting thing was only during college years and not a career choice.

One thing that helped with these babysitters is that we used a set schedule for each week. One sitter was always here on Tuesday and Thursday and the other was here Monday and Wednesday, and sometimes Friday. The set schedule made it more predicable for me regarding when I could work. The problem was my wife’s work schedule isn’t predicable, so this meant there were times we paid for a babysitter even though we didn’t need her. When my wife isn’t working a trip, she is more than happy to spend the day with the kid.

This lead us to try using babysitters on a flexible schedule. We might need a sitter on Monday and Tuesday of one week, and Wednesday Thursday of the following. This was problematic because even babysitters like to have some structure in their work life.

Finding sitters who could be flexible was challenging, and there was even a period of time when we didn’t have a sitter at all. I was once again watching the kid all day and trying to squeeze in as much work as possible at night. It was very exhausting.

What’s next? Daycare.

Since the flexible babysitting thing didn’t work out, and since we don’t need to have a babysitter at the house all the time, we have decided to give daycare a try. Daycare provides the benefit of having set days when the kid will be in daycare (we’re doing part time, 3 days a week for now). This means once again my work time is predicable again. And if we decide not to put him in for a day, it’s doesn’t cost us as much. The daily cost for daycare is about half what we pay for a babysitter. So on days when we don’t need someone else looking after the kid it will not cost us as much as it did when we used a babysitter.

We still may use a babysitter during the day from time to time, and lucky for me, the daycare will allow us to switch around the 3 days from time to time. So I’m hopeful this next attempt at finding me time to work will be good for both me and my wife. Time will tell. The kid starts daycare tomorrow.