On the Horizon

I decided to let the fuss die down a bit, so the week after the iPhone launch I phoned around until I found a Rogers outlet that had iPhones in stock. I drove down, waited a few minutes in line, and gave the salesperson my phone number.

He pulled up my existing Rogers account, looked at the screen, and said, “You’re not eligible.”

“Wha?”

“You got a new handset last September. You’re not eligible for a hardware upgrade yet.”

“I don’t want a hardware upgrade. I want to buy an iPhone, and put it on my existing plan. And pay more for the data plan.”

“Well, you can’t. I can’t sell it to you.”

“That’s crazy. You’re saying you won’t sell me the phone? Isn’t there some sort of penalty I can pay to get the hardware?”

“Nope. I can’t sell it to you. There’s nothing I can do.”

I went home, and called Rogers “Customer Service”. The first call ended abruptly as the agent put me on hold and I got disconnected. The second agent repeated what I heard in the store and said that the only thing I could do would be to cancel my existing contract, pay the $200 early termination fee, and start over from scratch. Oh, and lose my existing cell phone number in the process.

Now, I’ve been a Rogers customer for almost seven years. Any other business that had you as a paying customer for that long would be failing over themselves to keep your business. Anyone serious about customer retention would have offered existing customers first dibs on the iPhone. But not Rogers. They seem much more interested in signing new customers than keeping old ones.

I’ve had better treatment from credit card companies. Now that’s saying something.

I’ve joined with a number of other Mac Indie developers to sponsor the Daring Fireball blog for the next week.The press release is here. As part of the sponsorship, we’re each offering 20% off our respective products with the coupon code ‘DF2008′. If you don’t already have a license for Horizon now would be a good time to pick one up, and make sure to check out the other applications, too.

I had an amazing time at WWDC, and met a ton of great people. Here’s a list of some of them, in no particular order:

John Gruber

Daniel Jalkut

Wil Shipley

Jacqui Cheng

Clint Ecker

Kevin Hocter

Scotty

Andy Matuschak

Jeff Biggus

Mike Lee

Ash Ponders

Brian Webster

Mike Ash

Cathy Shive

Brian Criscuolo

The Guys at Karelia

and

Sanjay Samani

I’m heading down to the Apple World-Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) the second week of June. I plan on spending the days in Apple seminars and labs; learning as much as I can from the Apple engineers there. The objectives are to figure out the best way to build Horizon for the iPhone, and pick up enough about Mac development to take Horizon to the next level.

In the evenings I plan on hitting as many gatherings as possible; to shmooz and learn new and better ways to market the program. To that end I’ve started compiling the WWDC party list on Google Calendar. You can subscribe to it, or download the iCal version to your Mac or iPhone.

Here’s the link.

Please let me know of any other gatherings, and I’ll add them to the calendar.

Last week, I was interviewed for the macnn podcast. You can find a link to the podcast here, it’s the 4th from the top. Victor Marks of macnn interviewed me about Horizon; how it works, how I developed it, and where it’s going. I hope this provides some insight into the program. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

Horizon 1.4.1 is now available. I’ve fixed a few bugs, improved the ‘undo’ code, and added the ability to import from CSV. The CSV function will import files with four or five columns; the ‘category group’ column is optional. You can either put in a header row, or follow the layout described in the Help file, or both.

As always, I’d love to hear feedback on this new feature; what works for you and what doesn’t, so that I can continue to improve the program.

I released version 1.4 of Horizon this morning. The category groups now work as advertised and expected, but Apple sure didn’t make it easy. I had to pull a lot of magic tricks to make things look simple.

Anyway, it’s out, so grab a copy and tell your friends.

I’m adding a major new feature for version 1.4: category groups. Here’s a peek at how it works. You will be able to create groups, and add categories to them, like this:

With the group expanded, the Summary View looks like this:

If you have a lot of categories, and you’re not interested in the details at the moment, you can collapse the group:

and the Summary View will summarize the group for you:

Once again, I’m looking for beta testers. Because this update changes the structure of the data files, you will have to back up your data (but you do that anyway, don’t you?) and keep a copy of Horizon 1.3.5 around, just to be safe. If you’re interested in testing this version, drop me an email at the contact address and let me know. I’ll send you the link to the beta version. Thanks to everyone who helped test last time, and thanks in advance to everyone who can help with this version.

Version 1.3.5 is available now, either through the Sparkle Update or the download link.. This version adds two date fields to the Summary View. You can use these fields to set the beginning and ending dates for the summary, so you are no longer confined to viewing a single month. This should make it easier to do budgeting and forecasting with Horizon.

The second piece of news is that, for today only, Horizon is available at 20% off the usual price of $29.95 U.S. As part of the MacSanta campaign, you can use the coupon code ‘MACSANTA07′ in the built-in store to get the discount. You might want to visit the MacSanta store as well, to see the other great software deals.

I’ve been using iMovie to assemble the screencasts and the intro movie in the ‘Welcome’ panel. I haven’t tried the new version yet; I’ve been sticking with iMovie-HD most because I’m more familiar with it, and I like having a time line. The problem is, iMovie is rotten at doing slideshows. There are two slideshows in the intro movie; one at the beginning and one at the end.

The problem is that, although the slideshow looks fine in iMovie, it somehow gets messed up on the export to QuickTime. I finally found a solution that involved almost all of the iLife suite. I assemble all the images I need in an iPhoto album, and import my narration track into iTunes. Then I create a slideshow in iPhoto, and add the narration track as the ‘music’ from iTunes. I set the slideshow to run for the duration of the audio track, and disable the ‘Ken Burns’ effect. (Apple, or more precisely, Steve Jobs, must love that ‘Ken Burns’ effect. It’s set as the default in iPhoto and iMovie-HD.) Finally, I export the slideshow to QuickTime, and add it to my iMovie project.

Although it seems like a lot of steps, it’s actually rather quick, and gives you more precise timing. I really must learn the new iMovie sometime soon, though.