On the Horizon

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.

Version 1.3.5 is ready for beta testing, and it includes a major change to the Summary View. I’d really like to get this release bullet-proof before I release it to the general public, so if you’re interested in playing with it, send me an email.

Version 1.3.3 was released yesterday, to fix a couple of regression bugs that crept in. The first bug was really ugly; repeats looked like they had broken. If you moved to another month and then moved back, the repeated cells would appear in the right places. Anyway, this is now fixed.

The second bug had to do with editing a cell that contained a relative reference, like ‘yesterday’ or ‘last week’. Clicking on the cell wouldn’t show the right contents in the edit field. This bug has been there for a while, so I’m surprised no one has noticed it before now.

Finally, I’ve set up a mailing list for Horizon Hints. This will be a weekly email describing some feature or trick, and you can subscribe by filling in the form here. The first hint will go out next week, and I’ll set up an archive for them shortly.

Version 1.3.2 was released yesterday. There are two major new features in 1.3.2. The first is an option in ‘Preferences’ to let you choose which day of the week you want the calendar to start on. In North America and the UK(I think) the calendar starts with Sunday, but in a lot of countries in Europe, the calendar starts with Monday. Now you have the option.

Trust me, Apple didn’t make this easy to implement. Even with all the locale settings, the list of localized day names is hard-wired to start with the local equivalent of ‘Sunday’, so I had to build a way of ’spinning’ the list so that it could start at any day of the week.

The second feature is tied to the first. The calendar now determines how many rows are needed to display the whole month, and draws five or six rows as needed. Of course, changing the start day can affect the number of rows, so the two features are intertwined. I hope they both make Horizon easier to use, and more compatible with the way you work.

Also, I’ve added an RSS feed to the front page of the site. You can subscribe to this feed with your favorite newsreader, and get the news on the latest updates.

Version 1.3.1 is available now, through the usual channels. This is a bug fix release, and incorporates a new version of the esellerate engine. The esellerate engine is used for purchase and licensing, so this is the thing that gives some users problems when trying to purchase or activate their license. I hope this new version will fix those problems, but I can’t make any promises.