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.

For those who might be new to this blog, my name is Kirby Turner. I run White Peak Software, my independent software company, and have done so since November 2003. That makes White Peak Software slightly over 6 years old now.

There have been ups and downs for White Peak Software over the years but 2009 seems like the most challenging for me. For starters I have transited the company from one that offers services (aka contract programming) focused on Microsoft technologies to an iPhone company. This is a major step in my ultimate goal of eliminating service work all together so I can focus on writing and selling my own software products.

There is only a day and a half remaining in 2009. Even so, I thought now is a good time to post a year in review for 2009. My primary inspiration for this posting comes from Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator frame. While I make a good living from contract programming, it is not the ultimate goal for my company so I will focus the business stats reported below on the product side of the business only. Besides, the product side is likely more interesting to other indie developers out there.

Business Stats for the Year

Product Revenue: $15,217.57 (reflects payments received in 2009 for product sales between December 2008 and November 2009)

(Sales numbers below reflect sales between January 2009 and December 2009. For those doing the math, the sales numbers below will not add up to the product revenue total reported above.)

SMTP Diagnostics Sales: $737.10 (change from last year -24%)

Killink CSV Editor Sales: $9,089.20 (change from last year 6%)

Labor Mate Sales: $4,104.10 (change from last year 1,515%; U.S. sales only; includes sales between January 2009 and November 2009)

Web Stats for the Year

Visit: 19,943

Unique Visitors: 17,293

Pageviews: 41,381

Traffic sources: 25.55% Direct Traffic, 25.55% Referring Sites, 48.87% Search Engines (with 44.60% coming from Google)

Trial software downloads: Unfortunately I just discovered that my tracking of downloads broke at the end of April so I don’t have the stats. Bad me for not being on top of this.

What Went Right

• Marketing efforts this summer for Labor Mate helped increase sales.
• Labor Mate remained in the 100 in the Health and Fitness category for most of the year, reaching an all time high ranking of 34.
• A mention in MacBreak Weekly podcast caused a one week boost in sales.
• Got my first taste of in-app advertising thanks to Matt Martel.
• Sales for Killink CSV Editor continued to grow despite not releasing a single update the entire year.
• I reduced my technology focus on the service side of the business from a broad range related to Microsoft to a smaller set of technologies with a primary focus on the iPhone. I spent half the year doing full time iPhone development, which has been great. Unfortunately this transition involved ending relationships, some long term, with clients not interested in iPhone development, but it also meant building new relationships.

What Didn’t Go So Well

• Failed to release Killink CSV Editor version 2. I’m hugely disappointed by this. I had a number of setbacks at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009 that derailed Killink CSV Editor. I’ll spare you from the list of excuses. At the end of the day I screwed up.
• Failed to release my second iPhone app. Another setback for 2009 that effects my ultimate plans for the company.
• I had a serious time management issue for most of 2009. Life with a kid has introduced new challenges for me. For almost half of 2009 I juggled my time between taking care of the kid and working on White Peak Software. The kid won most of my time, leaving little time for the company. This time management problem meant I spent what little time I did have on the service side of the business, ignoring the product side.

Plans for 2010

• Spend more time focusing on my products. The kid starts daycare next week which will should help out on the time management, although it does mean another expense to pay out.
• Release Killink CSV Editor version 2. This is long over due.
• Release Labor Mate 2. This will be the app I originally dreamed of but never implemented.
• Release at least 2 other iPhone apps. Details coming on the new apps.
• Eliminate service work entirely by the end of 2010. This means I will be able to focus 100% of my “work” time to my products.

To say Matt Martel is a swell guy is an understatement. He is a super swell guy who does what he can to contribute to the iPhone development community, and he is somewhat a role model for me (though I doubt he knows it…yet). He started and ran a regular iPhone developer meet up group in the Boston metro area, he is willing to share his thoughts and feedback on the business of running an indie shop, and just this week he made a special offer to indie iPhone developers.

I first met Matt, and his wife Trish, in September at 360iDev Denver. Turns out Matt and Trish lived in the Boston area too. I say “lived” because they recently moved to Colorado Springs, but that’s a different story.

Matt and Trish have an indie software company called Mundue, and have published a few casual games for the iPhone and iPod touch. The most popular is reMovem, which I find to be highly addictive. Two favors of reMovem are available, a freeware ad-support version and a $1.99 paid version. The paid version comes with additional play modes which make it well worth the price.

A few days ago Matt made an offer to the indie iPhone development community that was too generous for me to pass up. He offered to include ads for apps in his popular game reMovem, the free edition. I was a little hesitant at first because I have not tried advertising Labor Mate this way before. Past experience with Google Adwords for Killink CSV Editor has turned me off of ad placement to market my products. However, I’m learning this week that might be a mistake.

In the first 24 hours the Labor Mate ad received 112 clickthroughs, and 238 total clickthroughs within the first 48 hours. Admittedly I was surprised by these numbers. First, Labor Mate is very niched app, and second, I thought “Who wants to learn more about a contraction timer while playing a game?” Boy was I wrong. 238 people found out about Labor Mate in a 48 hour time period that probably would have never known about the app. I find this to be great.

Unfortunately it’s hard for me to say if the ad has resulted in additional sells. According to Matt, “Most ads are getting an average of 1% clickthrough (CTR) which means 50-150 clicks per day. That’s really not much, and with conversion (sales) rates of 5% you might not notice any difference.” This is true. I haven’t noticed any change in the normal sales pattern for Labor Mate over the last couple of days. Still, I’m happy to know at least 238 additional people have learned about Labor Mate.

Thank you very much Matt for your generous offer to the indie iPhone development community. This little experiment has been a huge eye opener for me. Thanks for the opportunity to participate.

Now everyone go buy reMovem.

I’m making an early 2010 New Year’s Resolution. I’m going to blog more. There. I’ve said it. And in a blog posting no less. This entry will haunt me if I do not stick to this resolution.

I’ve done a horrible job at blogging since my son was born 20 months ago. This is true for all 3 of my main blog site, my personal blog, this company/tech blog, and even the blog about my son. Of course it’s not his fault. I blame Twitter.

I’ve developed a bad habit. If I can’t share it in 140 characters than I don’t share it. This is wrong on so many levels, especially since 2009 has been such an important year for White Peak Software, which I will explain in an upcoming blog.

So with that, you can expect more postings on this blog.

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.

I recently went through the process of translating Labor Mate into 8 different languages. Unfortunately the phrase “Labor Mate” doesn’t translate well into other languages such as Japanese and Germany so the translators came up with new localized app names. The problem I had though was displaying the translated app name on the iPhone’s springboard.

After a bit of experimenting I finally got the translated app name to display. Turns out the steps are fairly simple. Here are the steps I took to localize the app name:

1. Added the property LSHasLocalizedDisplayName to Info.plist and set to True (mark the checkbox). Note that Xcode might change the property name to “Application has localized display name”.
2. Add a new strings file called InfoPlist.strings.
3. Make the file InfoPlist.strings localizable.
4. Add the languages that will have a translated app name.
5. For each localized version of the InfoPlist.strings file, add the follow string key/value pair: CFBundleDisplayName = “App Name”;
6. Be sure to set “App Name” to the translated value.

That’s it.

Speaking of language translation, I hired the fine folks over at iphone-i18n.com to translate the app description, keywords, and in-app strings for Labor Mate. I met Chuck and Judith of iphone-i18n.com at 360iDev|Denver. They impressed me with their knowledge of internationalizing and localizing applications as well as their specific technical how to knowledge for the iPhone.

If you are an iPhone developer looking to translate your iPhone application into other languages then I highly recommend talking with Chuck and Judith at iphone-i18n.com.

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.

A couple of weeks ago I attended 360idev in Denver. The conference was one of the best developer conferences I have ever attended and the best one I have attended in recent years. What made this conference so good? A number of things (in no particular order):

1) The people
2) The sessions
3) The Game Jam
4) The community (aka the people)

My conference experience started Saturday night when I met up with fellow iPhone developers from the Boston area. Prior to leaving for Denver I knew 1 other iPhone developer in the area, but by the time I left I had 6 new friends all building and publishing iPhone apps. Working from home for the last 5 years can get lonely so making new friends made the trip worth while even if the conference had suck, which it did not.

The conference kicked off on Sunday with a day of hands-on lab. This was actually Day 0 of the conference since these pre-conference sessions were held the day before the official conference start. I attended the advanced debugging and hacking the iPhone sessions. Both were amazing. I learned many new ticks in the debugging session, and I was blown away by Jay Freeman who hacked the Maps app.

The bar by which all other conference sessions would be judged by me had been set on that day, and the bar was set high. Admittedly I expected the rest of the conference to not be nearly as good. Boy was I wrong.

The next 3 days were packed with extremely helpful, useful, and insightful sessions. The sessions covered everything from business and marketing related topics to hands-on tech talks on topics such as Core Data, Core Animation, game development, and more. It’s hard to say what was my favorite session given that all the sessions I attended were outstanding sans 2 sessions. Those 2 sessions were still good, just not as good as the other sessions I attended.

A true highlight of the conference for me was the Game Jam. The Game Jam was the brain child of @SnappyTouch and it was a total hit. The Game Jam was open to all, not just game developers. I’ve never done game development before but I’ve been interested in game development for quite some time now. So I attended. I joined forces with another Boston area developer. Our game ended up not being much, but that was fine. We had fun, and I totally enjoyed the experience. Just watching the other developers crank out some amazing work in the late hours of the night was a real thrill for me.

The number one lesson I got out of the Game Jam is to push myself beyond my comfort zone. I’ve been doing software development for more than half of my life and I’ve become comfortable with the type of apps I tend to write. The Game Jam reminded me of what it was like programming 20 years ago, back when I would write code just for the hell of it, when I would write tons of small programs just to learn something new or to trying something I thought was cool, and not worry if or how I could make money off the program. In some ways, you can say the Game Jam has re-kindled a lost spirit in me.

If I had to pick the one thing I liked the most about the conference I would have to say the sense of community. It has been a long time since I felt like a part of a community. This is due in part to me working from home for a number of years, but also in part to the difficulties finding a group of people who share a common interesting and passion. In ways it reminded me how I felt in the 90s attending BorCons and discovering the Delphi community. But this new iPhone developer community that I discovered at 360idev is different. Like me, almost everyone I met is an indie developer or is working for a small (2 to 5) person company. Also I was surprised, and a bit jealous, of the number of husband wife teams present at the conference.

As I said, 360idev Denver was the best developer conference I have attended in recent years. The people, the sessions, the community all helped make it a great conference. I’m not sure if I will be able to attend the next 360idev conference. I’m hoping to attend NSConference in February and I’m saving money for next year’s WWDC, which I definitely will be attending. But with luck I will hopefully make it to San Jose in April.

Wow, has it really been 3 months since my last blog post. I’ve gotta work on improving that.

Speaking of improvements, a new enhancement is finally coming to Labor Mate. The next release will finally include a chart showing the duration and frequency of contractions over the last hour. Here is an sample of what the chart will look like:

One thing to note is that intensity is not something captured by Labor Mate at the moment, so the chart will initially default the intensity level to 5. That is 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is a not so intense contraction and 10 is the OMG, GET THIS BABY OUT OF ME contraction. Here is the same chart with no intensity.

Obviously these sample screen shots are not from an iPhone or iPod touch. I decided to prototype the chart in a Mac desktop app, which is what you see pictured here.

I hope to have the updated app submitted to Apple before the end of the month. Stay tune for more.

Last week I flipped the switch on the White Peak Software website rolling out the new site design. If you are reading this in a RSS feed reader then pop over to whitepeaksoftware.com to check out the new website design. The new design was done by Michael and Jeff over at Ocupop, the same design company that designed the new Labor Mate app icon.  I highly recommend these guys.

The roll out of the new website did not go as smooth as I had hoped, but it did go well.  A lot of work was done behind the scenes so the roll out could potentially have had many more problems then it did.  The site was moved from Microsoft Windows server running IIS to a new Ubuntu (Linux) server running apache2.  This meant I needed to copy over a number of download files, pad files, xml version files, and so on.  It also meant I needed to map old URLs to new URLs so bookmarks, old links, and so on take the  visitor to the correct web page.  This caused at least 1 known hiccup for a customer who had just purchased a license for SMTP Diagnostics and was trying to download the latest version as I was rolling out the new website.

In addition to moving the site to the new server I migrated the website application from ASP.NET/C# to Python with web2py.  This is actually something I’m very excited about.  The original system was messy and adding new features to the application was not only a pain but time consuming as well.  Moving to Python and web2py allows me to reduce the amount of source code needed to run the website.  And going forward I will be able to add new content and features faster. For instance, I can finally incorporate a lost license key retrieval feature (coming soon) and I can build a better order management backend system needed to manage orders.  Good things for both you the customer and me.

The new look also meant a new look for the store front and blog sites.  The store front gave me trouble due to some limitation in the ecommerce provider’s template engine.  I’m not happy with the final results but at least the store front is functional.  And the typical site visitor will probably never notice the minor differences between the main site and the store front.

So as you can see a number of things were included in the roll out beyond just a new look.  The site was moved to a new server running a different operating system.  The code base was moved to a new programming language and platform.  And a new look was applied to the website, store front, and blog. [Note: I still need to update the support forums with the new look, but that's a topic for a different posting.]

Despite the number of things that had to happen, I felt the roll out for the new site went as well as can be expected. As I said I wish it had been a bit smoother but there could have been a lot more problems.  The lesson learned from the experience: Don’t try to do so much in a single roll out.