First Screenshots of Chronicle 4
Chronicle 4 is almost ready, evidenced by the fact that I am finally posting screenshots of the new version. Almost everything is functioning properly, and as you can see, the interface is quite updated. There’s a ton that can’t be seen from these screenshots, but a couple highlights:
The Bill Detail Screen
- Coolest change is the new “Last 12 Months” view on the Payment History graph. Instead of seeing only this year or only last year, you can see a mashup of the last 12 months (this year is in blue).
- Bill icons are now bigger, sidebar is redone, most all icons and graphics redone.
The Overview Screen
- Most obvious change: calendar view! Bills due are highlighted on the calendar, and hovering over a date tells you which bill is due.
- Not so obvious: you can switch the months forward and backward, and the amount due and amount you paid auto-update, so you can see overall how much you paid in any month, not just the current month.
- Also not obvious from screenshot: you can turn the income option off if you don’t care to track your income in Chronicle.
- Another really cool thing: tagging and filtering. At the top of the overview, you can see a little filter menu, which you can use to Show All Bills, or just show bills with a certain tag. This makes it really easy to separate your business and personal bills, for example, or divide bills up by payment type, by person, or whatever.
As I said, there’s a whole lot else new as well. Everything is refined and updated, and much of the code driving is rewritten to be a lot faster. The code is now on a better foundation for future updates.
Chronicle 4 will be going into beta testing soon—hopefully next week, or perhaps the week after at the latest. If you would like to test Chronicle 4 (current user or not), send an e-mail to beta@littlefin.com and I’ll add you to the beta testing list.
Create a new calendar on the appropriate account. Select File/New Calendar, and select the MobileMe account you want to sync with (see screenshot).
When I launched LittleFin in 2008, one of the things I was sure about was that I wanted LittleFin to always offer free upgrades. As a user, there were few things more exciting to me than getting free updates with new features.
So, we attempted to fix these problems by ditching the lid, and altering the perspective a little more. Kenichi tossed some initial items in this render, to get a better idea of how it would look. We were on the right track with everything looking ordered, but now we had another problem—the icon looked too similar to the Bento icon.
A couple important things clicked into place with this revision: the icon conceptually represented the purpose of the app better than ever: cataloging and organizing items into your home into various “compartments.” Plus, by using two distinct tones of brown, and significant shadows inside the compartments, the one-tone brownness of the app seemed significantly reduced on the dock. Finally, the items were more prominent then before, and in a more natural perspective. 
I think the finished icon turned out fantastic. In the end, Kenichi conceded on the clock, and I gave up on the person on top. The final changes we made included removing the clock and person icons, little tweaks to the items, and some additional subdividing of the compartments inside the house. Simple, yet effective, and good looking. The bigger it is, the more you can see the detail, but it looks great even at tiny sizes.
Did you know that Chronicle loves keyboard shortcuts? Just about anything you can do with the mouse in Chronicle, you can do with a keyboard shortcut as well.
