Phospho makes a difference!

So the first month’s results from Phospho have come in, and I’m happy to report that we’ve raised $600.00 for charity (I rounded up).

The first month’s recipient is the Himalayan Cataract Project, a charity that works to help prevent and cure blindness among the people who live in the Himalaya. They’re based in Kathmandu, Nepal.

I’ve sent off the donation to the good people there. Thank you so much for your support, and tell your friends about Phospho!

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Uranus

I’m happy to announce a new application for the iPhone/iPod Touch – Uranus!

It’s an astronomy program for your handheld device loaded with over 100,000 objects – stars, deep sky objects, planets, the Sun and Moon, you name it.  I uses the built-in GPS of your iPhone or iPod Touch to display the sky where you happen to be.  You can move around, zoom in and out and get info on everything in the sky using simple gestures, and you can use the accelerometer to ‘fly’ around the sky.  It’s available on the App Store right now.

This is the first release, I will be adding more features in future updates. I’ve already uploaded an update to the App Store that vastly improves performance and lets you choose your location manually. Apple seems to be sitting on updates for a long time, I’m not sure why. So bear with me during this first month of the App Store while Apple works out all of the issues.

iPhone SDK = Cannonball Run

Right so Apple finally released their long-awaited iPhone SDK last week. Some thoughts:

1. The typing sound you are hearing is the sound of 10,000 new Sudoku apps being furiously built for the iPhone. Can’t wait.

2. To get your software on the iPhone, you need to register with Apple to get a license… and there’s a list of things that iPhone apps can’t do, and how they are supposed to look… and they demoed the ability to remotely wipe off applications from across the network… these things are related, I think.

3. I don’t know of anyone who has received their iPhone developer license yet. So hold off on #1 for now.

4. The iPhone apps are all to be distributed through Apple’s ‘AppStore’. Note that it’s not the ‘iPhoneAppStore’, or the ‘TouchAppStore’, just ‘AppStore’. So in Mac OS X 10.6 Ocelot plan to see desktop apps distributed this way.

I could go on about particulars of the SDK, but I’m not sure what is under NDA specifically, so I’ll stop there.

In all, a great announcement. It feels a lot like the movie The Cannonball Run where all the new iPhone developers have now begun the cross-country race to the opening of the ‘AppStore’ in June. Now I just need a priest’s outfit and a red Ferrari and I’ll be all set…

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Spanish, Italian and Japanese

HarlequinRed BarchettaGodzilla
Booxter is now localized in Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. 

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Flexible dates in Booxter

In the previous version of Booxter, whenever there was a place to enter a date, you always had to enter the day, month and the year.  I never liked that restriction, since there are many cases where you might know, say, the year but not the specific day for a given date.  So if you knew that you had purchased a book in 2003 or read a book in 1987, in order to capture those dates, you needed to fill in fake days or months in order for Booxter to accept them (like 1/1/2003 or something like that).

So in Booxter 2, I fixed this using flexible dates:

      

Flexible dates are dates where you are free to specify just the part of the date of which you are certain.  So if you want to specify just the year, or the year/month, or the year/month/day, you can.By default most dates use year/month/day format, but you can change that using the date format button located under any date to set it to whatever you like.  Comic book publication dates default to month/year, since that is the standard way to track them, but it can be changed as well.

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MacSanta

Ho ho ho!

It’s MacSanta time again! You can enjoy great deals on superb Mac software just in time for the holidays. Every day through December 24th there will be different featured apps, and Booxter is featured on Saturday, December 8th! Enter the coupon code MACSANTA07 when purchasing on December 8th and get 20% off a license for Booxter!

Check the list of extended deals in case you missed a day and use the MACSANTA07TEN coupon code to save 10% through December 24th.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

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Dutch localization

Booxter 2.0 has now been localized into Dutch.

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German localization

Booxter 2.0 has now been localized into German.

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Leopard

Ok, I have just released version 2.0.3 of Booxter, and it officially runs on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (as well as Tiger of course). There were a number of things to fix, mostly UI related in order to ensure Leopard compatibility. There are some general bug fixes as well, they are listed in the software update panel.

It’s available now, you can use Booxter’s software update feature to upgrade.

Thank you everyone for your feedback. Onward and upward!

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Nice Review

Jean-Christophe Courte has written a very thoughtful and informative review of Booxter (in French) at http://www.urbanbike.com/index.php/site/booxter-2/. He covers a lot of the new features and has some great screen shots, so please take a look.

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