Helium Foot Software

Intersession

After three months, my first stint as a contractor is over. I'm coming up for air for 3 days and then i start my next one at the beginning of next week. The good news is that this contract is for iPhone work! The even better news for the reader of this blog is that i have three days to get Highbrow and MercuryMover releases out. Look for those soon, and look for another post here, at the very latest, by the last hour of April.

MercuryMover v2.0.3

Oh, hello there loyal reader. It's been over a month since our last meeting, how've you been? Me? Well, in addition to working on contract during the day, i've been busy getting MercuryMover v2.0.3 released. What's in it, you ask?

• Fixed incompatibility with some NVIDIA video cards on PowerMac and iMac G5 Macs.
• Fixed interface layout on smaller displays.
• Fixed window centering when the display size changes.
• When dismissing MercuryMover via its hot key, the previous frontmost application is now correctly restored.

Let's not wait this long until we chat again, shall we?

Why I am a Success and Why I will never be a Success

I had planned to spend the afternoon today working on a long overdue MercuryMover release. Instead my son and i:

• Made a music video for The Alphabet of Nations
• Made a stop motion video of two pencils in a flying V formation
• Went grocery shopping
• Went out for some very tall and chocolatey mugs of hot cocoa

At this rate, i'll never achieve the kind of success that will make me rich. Of course, this is exactly the reason why i wanted to go indie in the first place.

Plus One

A year ago, this light-ped enterprise was brand new and i looked forward to the new year with excitement and very little experience as to how to succeed as an indy. As of today, i've released v2.0 of my flagship product, as well as the first version of my second product. I'm wiser if not wise and again look forward with excitement. For my loyal reader, here is a state of the endeavor:

What Happened

The past few months have been really terrific for Helium Foot. In August, i dramatically cut down my hours at my former day job and put the surplus towards Helium Foot. I never would have been able to get MercuryMover v2.0 out the door, much less undertake the entire effort (design, development, testing, marketing and release) of my second product: Highbrow. Also, during this time, license sales went from being a source of pocket change to being a bona fide source of income for my family. I may not have arrived, but i can definitely see the station.

What's Happening

When i took this sabbatical in order to make some headway on Helium Foot, i always knew that i would still need some additional income to sustain us. License sales are steady and are an order of magnitude higher than they were a year ago. However that is much more a statement of how low they were than how high they are. As such, i've recently taken a three month web development contract. I've surprised myself with how much i'm enjoying this contract gig, but long term my heart is still with Helium Foot. The most immediate effect for my customers is that support requests will most likely be answered in the promised "one business day" instead of the "less than one hour" that i'm fond of offering. Support is still our highest priority and i expect to continue to delight my customers in that regard. While my next app is definitely on the back burner, i just put out a Highbrow fix release and am working on one for MercuryMover. Engineering is absolutely ongoing during this sabbatical sabbatical.

What's Gonna Happen

Always in motion is the future, so it's a little hard to tell but here's some of what i'm shooting for over the next year.

• Continuous minor improvements for MercuryMover and Highbrow
• One major release for each
• Continued marketing and press hacking
• A new iPhone app

What I've Learned

No retrospective would be introspective if it didn't include a statement on how we've grown. the biggest lesson that i've learned in my indydom is that It's All About Marketing, no really. I've said before that marketing starts with engineering, but the converse should be true also: engineering should start with marketing. If your perfectly designed and executed app is one that no one wants then it's not worth very much. Your interface design should be informed by the market that will want your product and the execution should be informed by what it will take to get your product to market. Marketing is of course about marketing, but so is customer support. So is blogging. So is twittering and braining or whatever other doodad web 3.11 will bring us. The modest success that i've achieved in the past year was due to refining my products into something that the market wanted and effectively getting the word out about them. I can't say how far this will take me in the next year but i'm happy with how far it's taken me thus far and am excited to find out.

Highbrow 1.0

Other than, "Highbrow 1.0 is out the door", there isn't too much to say about the release. Highbrow's development has been well chronicled. One thing that i did want to say is, thanks! Helium Foot's users have been extremely supportive and have given me some great feedback that really got Highbrow to where it is today, and will take it much further.

Do you use more than one web browser on your Mac? Download Highbrow and find out how much easier your life should be.

Highbrow 1.0 Public Beta

After a three week sprint, Highbrow 1.0 beta is away! Since the app was mostly finished a few weeks ago, i figured that this release would have come sooner. I had forgotten how much work it is to launch a new product! With a groovy new icon, a very decent help file, a nice custom Sparkle based auto-update, a pretty (though currently troublesome) disk image, a web page, a homepage redesign, a screen movie, some wordsmithing, a press release, and i'm sure a few other things that i've forgotten and we've made it to the beta release. If you ever use more than one web browser on your Mac, either at the same time, or in serial, you definitely owe it to yourself to try Highbrow. For me, all of the annoyances of using that second (and third) browser have completely disappeared now that Highbrow automatically changes my system wide default browser on the fly as i move from one browser to the next.

Do you feel some web browser frustration? Get your Mac web browser zen with Highbrow. Look for the v1.0 release on 15 December 2008.

T-shirts for Programmers

December is here and snow is on the ground, so if you're in the habit of giving gifts at this time of year, then this online shop may interest you. Andy Brice of Perfect Table Plan fame has put together an online store selling t-shirts for programmers and is donating all of the proceeds to, jaipurfoot.org and www.sightsavers.org. Andy is one of the luminaries of the indy software scene. In fact, he's so luminous that he straddles the platform divide and is a member of the indy Mac and windows communities. I count Andy as a mentor of mine in that i read his blog and he has been generous with his time, once giving me some very salient advice on how to position my product(s) in the marketplace.

Not sure what to get your programmer friends and loved ones? Please consider this opportunity to cloth them in geekiness and do something good in concert.