LittleFin Software

First Screenshots of Chronicle 4

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:26:36 -0400

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.

Updated: Sync Chronicle Reminders with MobileMe, Google

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 23:20:00 -0500

Update 2: New instructions for Google calendar on Lion!

One of the best things about Chronicle is that it syncs your upcoming bills with iCal, so you get timely reminders to pay your bills. If you have an iPhone, those reminders will even sync to it.

Even more awesome: Chronicle sync its reminders to your MobileMe or Google calendar account. This is fantastic because if you have your iPhone calendar set up with your MobileMe or Google calendar account, the reminders will be pushed automatically to your phone!

By default, Chronicle creates it’s reminders on a calendar on your local Mac. However, if you want those reminders to be on a Google or MobileMe calendar instead, that’s easy to set up.

MobileMe Instructions

Assuming you already have iCal set up to sync with your MobileMe account, here’s how to get that working with Chronicle.

Launch iCal
If you see a calendar named “Chronicle,” rename it “ChronicleOld.”
Create a new calendar on the appropriate account. Select File/New Calendar, and select the MobileMe account you want to sync with (see screenshot).
Name the new calendar “Chronicle”.

That’s it! Chronicle will write it’s reminders to the iCal calendar named “Chronicle” no matter which account it is a part of. If you don’t have any reminders left on the ChronicleOld calendar, you can safely delete it. If you do have reminders there, don’t worry. Every time you log a payment, edit a bill, or create a new bill, Chronicle will update the reminders, and add them to your new calendar. Eventually, all the reminders on ChronicleOld will go away.

Google Calendar Instructions

Instructions for Google calendar are a bit more complicated, but still not too difficult!

If you are using Snow Leopard or Lion, first create a “Chronicle” calendar in your Google calendar account online.

Snow Leopard: If you are using Snow Leopard, follow these instructions by Jonathan Mitchell to set up the calendar in iCal without setting it up as a delegate.

Lion: If you are using Lion, follow these instructions here (thanks to Chronicle user Joan for tracking these down)!

If you have any problem getting this set up, contact support@littlefin.com for help.

Three Days Later: The Mac App Store Effect

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 07:58:00 -0500

When the Mac App Store launched, I had high hopes. But nothing could have prepared me for what happened on January 6.

Our home inventory App, Compartments, had been selling at a steady, average pace—we were selling between 6 and 10 copies a day, at $24.95 each. We decided to lower the price to $9.95, in hopes of attracting a larger audience at the start of the App Store.

What happened next blew us away.

Apple liked Compartments. They featured it as a Staff Pick, and listed it prominently on their Great Mac Apps page. The effect: On January 6, our little home inventory app went from a few sales a day to an astounding 1,500 sales on the first day of availability in the App Store. Through Saturday, as you can see on the graph above, it has maintained sales over 1,000 per day (Sunday stats haven’t been posted yet).

Our other app, Chronicle, was not featured by Apple. Even with no promotion, Chronicle is still selling 80 to 100 copies a day—about 10 times its usual sales volume, and it’s on the way up (see graph). Of course, the price for Chronicle is half what it was before. But rather than hurting us, the lower price is helping us.

Thoughts for Independent Developers

Lower Prices Can Be Sustainable: We have always wanted to price our apps lower. But when we tried that in the past, we simply couldn’t get enough volume to justify it. So like other developers, we were a little nervous about the potential for a race to the bottom in the Mac App Store, even though we came in with reduced prices ourselves. The removal of purchase barriers (everyone has an Apple ID) and the huge potential audience of the Mac App Store is providing enough volume that we can offer lower prices. Of course, our apps are simple, and belong at low price points. A number of expensive apps (such as iBank, OmniFocus) seem to be doing quite well so far as well. For us, though, under $10 is working. We briefly had Chronicle at $14.95 in the App Store, but when we put it on sale for $9.95, it started grossing more.
Prepare For More Pre-Sale Questions: Although we still have a full 30-day trial available on our website, most people who come across our app never visit our website. And many people, it seems, don’t really read the product descriptions in the App Store either. I rarely, if ever, got “Can your app do this?” questions before—but now I am getting a dozen a day. One thing that seems to have helped slow that down is adding more screenshots with bits of descriptive info on them (as the Cultured Code gents did with Things).
If You Keep Selling On the Web, You Will Sell More There Too: This surprised me. The Mac App Store is sending a lot more traffic our way, a fair number of people are choosing to purchase via our website. As a result, revenues are up on our website store sales, though not nearly so dramatically.

It will be interesting to see what happens once Apple cycles Compartments off the Staff Pick list, and as the App Store picks up more users and more software. But for now, based on how Chronicle is doing, we are wildly optimistic about the future.

The Mac App Store and Our Free Upgrade Policy

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 09:30:00 -0500

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 despite the fact that paid software upgrades are one of the best sources of revenue for developers, I decided to implement a firm policy that our upgrades—no matter how many or how major—would always be free of charge.

Particularly for those who supported us prior to the Mac App Store, I would like to explain how we are keeping that promise.

Enter the Mac App Store

The Mac App Store, for us, has so far been a tremendous success. We are seeing sales volumes far above our normal rates (Compartments is currently in the top 20 paid apps overall, and selling like crazy), which has allowed us to price both of our apps lower. This makes us very happy.

The Mac App Store also includes an updating process, and makes it easy for us to deliver free updates to all of those who purchased through the Mac App Store. So, for those who purchased through the Mac App Store, updates are easy and handled through the store.

Unfortunately, those who purchased prior to the App Store’s launch cannot take advantage of updates through it. This is a limitation of the App Store. Even if the app shows as installed, if you didn’t purchase it from the App Store, you will not be able to update through the App Store (read more about this at the end of this post at Panic’s blog).

Consequently, we will continue delivering free updates to our users through the apps they currently have. The updating process is simple, built in to the apps, and can be made automatic.

Two Versions? No problem.

The versions of Chronicle and Compartments sold through our website use a popular framework called Sparkle by Andy Matuschak which makes it possible to upgrade to the latest version in seconds, without ever even leaving the app.

Frameworks like Sparkle cannot be included in the Mac App Store (and they have no reason to be there). There are also other interface elements (like the registration screen, and the “Check for Updates” menu item) that have to be removed from the Mac App Store version of our software.

So in order to continue providing upgrades to the version of our apps on the website, we need to maintain two separate versions of each app.

Fortunately, this is a lot easier than it sounds. Almost all of the necessary changes we can handle by flipping a couple switches in the code and in Xcode (for example, a property “isMacAppStoreVersion” is set to false). Since both the Mac App Store and the web version can share the same code, the process of supporting both versions is fairly simple.

So, beginning with version 1.5 of Compartments and version 3.6 of Chronicle, both the Mac App Store and web versions of our software will identical (except for Chronicle Agent, which is not included in the Mac App Store of Chronicle).

Those who purchase on our website may see updates a little before those in the App Store, as once we complete an update, it must be approved by Apple before going live.

A Big Thank You

To all of those of you who have purchased our software: thank you! Some of you purchased Chronicle or Compartments at a higher price, supporting us when we were very young and unknown. We wouldn’t even consider leaving you out of free updates. We greatly appreciate all our customers, and hope we continue to please you with great new improvements to all of our apps.

LittleFin and the Mac App Store

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 09:43:00 -0500

We are very excited to have both of our apps in the Mac App Store at launch! After a lot of thinking, we have decided on the following policies:

Chronicle and Compartments will be available in the Mac App Store and on the LittleFin website.
Both Chronicle and Compartments will continue to feature free lifetime upgrades, as always, no matter where you purchase.

Pricing Differences

There will be a few differences between Chronicle available in the Mac App Store and on LittleFin’s website. At LittleFin.com, Chronicle will continue to cost $20.95. That’s because it includes the Chronicle Agent that runs in the menu bar. The Mac App Store will not include the menu bar extension, and thus cost a lower $14.95. We will be developing a separate app called Chronicle Mini to run in the menu bar as a companion to Chronicle, and it will be available in the Mac App Store for $5.95. Current Chronicle owners will not need this app, as it’s functionality is already be included in Chronicle if you purchased it at our website.

Compartments will be available for $9.95 in the Mac App Store, as it is on our website right now. We plan to keep this discount price for a while and see how it goes.

What Should Current Customers Do?

Current customers do not need to buy the Mac App Store version of Chronicle or Compartments. We will continue to provide updates and support for the version you bought from us on our website.

UPDATE: Chronicle is on sale for $9.95 in the Mac App Store, so we are selling it for $14.95 on the website.

First screenshot of Chronicle Mini: Chronicle for your menubar....

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 14:09:00 -0400

First screenshot of Chronicle Mini: Chronicle for your menubar. Clicking on any bill takes you to the log payment screen. Hoping to launch by end of October or early November.

Evolution of A Mac App Icon

Wed, 26 May 2010 23:28:00 -0400

A good icon is a challenge—it must be detailed enough to look great large, but also be simple enough to be good-locking on the dock.

One of the last things to get finished before Compartments was released was the application icon—not because we waited until the last minute to start it, but because making a good icon takes time.

The Compartments icon was designed by Kenichi Yoshida, who does design work for Panic (makers of Coda and Transmit) as his day job. With his permission, I wanted to share the evolution of the Compartments icon—and what I learned about icon design in the process.

THE EARLY DRAFT

At the beginning, we wanted an icon that represented the ability to catalog all of the items in your home. Kenichi’s initial sketch represented his first idea—a chest of items, signifying that you could drop anything into the app, and track it.

We planned a nice, glossy wood texture, with several home-related items inside. I thought it was perfect (maybe because it brought back fond memories of my childhood toy box). But Kenichi recognized some problems before he really began: for one, sitting on the dock, the icon looked very brown—it would be difficult to see the items inside. Plus, we had just about settled on the name “Compartments” for the application, which didn’t seem to fit with a box of items randomly tossed around—it didn’t portray order.

ADDING COMPARTMENTS

Kenichi came up with a quick render of a second idea. This time, we would alter the perspective of the icon, and divide the items into little compartments—perfect. An icon must clearly represent the goals of the application, and we were on the right track with this render.

Unfortunately, I was quickly learning that something that looks great at 512x512 doesn’t always look so good small. This draft had similar problems on the dock—the items were too small to see, and the brownness still overwhelmed the icon.

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.

So it was back to the drawing board again.

A FRESH IDEA

This is when I really appreciated Kenichi—I knew I didn’t want something too close to the Bento icon, but at the same time, I had no real alternative ideas. Kenichi came to the rescue with his next idea—a house divided into Compartments.

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.

Kenichi deliberately left the bottom corner empty, to increase the artistic asymmetry of the icon.

The last few problems were small—the clock seemed to evoke the concept of “time” to me, but Compartments doesn’t deal with time, so I thought we should eliminate it. Kenichi felt like the person on top of the house might be meaningless, but I kind of liked it.

FINISHED PRODUCT AND LESSONS

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.

I was thrilled with Kenichi’s work, and learned a lot from the process. Some lessons:

A designer who both considers the feedback of the client, and has solid ideas of the direction he or she wants to go is invaluable. Kenichi often said “trust me” when he made changes. He was usually right, even when I didn’t see it his way at first. At the same time, he always considered my feedback, even if he didn’t ultimately incorporate it.

Trust your designer. Don’t reject ideas you don’t like right away. Think about it, keep an open mind. Maybe get other opinions. Several times, changes Kenichi made that I didn’t like turned out to be for the best. Rather than rejecting changes I disliked, I waited and thought over it for a day first. Often, I changed my mind. A client who knows and loves his product can easily be too demanding and rigid with project specifications.

An icon that looks good big won’t necessarily look good on the dock. Make sure you test the icon everywhere. Design specific, separate versions for the smaller sizes (16x16 and 32x32 in particular). Be sure to put your icon in a dock before signing off on it. Over-complexity can ruin a dock icon, but so can over-simplicity.

What do you think? Like how the icon turned out? Any other tips for working successfully with a designer or creating a successful dock icon?

Posted on May 26, 2010

Compartments: Screenshot of the new report window. Reports in...

Tue, 18 May 2010 01:12:00 -0400

Compartments: Screenshot of the new report window. Reports in Compartments are beautiful now, print much better, and a lot more fits on the page. Posted on May 18, 2010

What Happened to the Apple Downloads Page?

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:39:53 -0400

When Apple released the iPad, they made a subtle change to Apple.com: they replaced the downloads tab with a link to the iPad page. Which makes sense. But then, shortly after removing the prominent link to the downloads page, Apple also stopped updating the page entirely. Developers who have submitted updates (including LittleFin) since March 26 have not seen their product updated.

There has been a lot of discussion about why this has happened, and what it means for developers. Ars Technica wrote a detailed article about it, and Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater software gave his take on his blog.

I basically agree with Daniel’s point of view, so I’ll just post a couple brief observations on the impact it has had on us:

The takedown and subsequent stoppage of updates at the Apple downloads page had a noticeable impact on us—traffic to littlefin.com dropped about 15 to 20% after the page was removed from its place of prominence. Chronicle is a Staff Pick, and consistently remained one of the top 3 or 4 most popular business and finance apps at the downloads page, so a lot of traffic came from Apple. I was certainly disappointed to see the link go away (of course the page is still accessible, just not prominent like it was).

Apple is clearly focusing more heavily on the mobile side of their business right now, as I think they should—it’s doing fantastically well. Macs are still selling well, however, and I don’t think they tend to ignore the Mac development community. I believe Daniel is right—Apple is stretched really thin right now, and they will get around to updating the page again, eventually.

But even if they don’t, I wouldn’t even be in business if it wasn’t for Apple, and the wonderful tools they provide that make development so easy, so I can’t complain. Apple shows a bold ability to make dramatic changes (Classic Mac OS to OSX, PowerPC to Intel, etc.)—that’s part of what makes them so great. While some of those changes might have been tough on developers, in the end, they made for better products and a bigger potential market for us as well. I’m confident that in the direction Apple is going, and I think they’ll make the right decisions to grow the company.

Posted on April 21, 2010

Chronicle Loves Keyboard Shortcuts!

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:58:00 -0400

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.

You can even log payments for all your bills using the keyboard, without ever even leaving the overview screen if you so desire.

If you want to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts in Chronicle, or have a handy reference, just select Keyboard Shortcuts from the Help menu. You’ll get the convenient screen pictured to the right.

If you are not very familiar with mac keyboard shortcuts:

• ⌘ is the Command/Apple key.
• ⌥ is the Option/Alt key.
• ⌫ is the backspace key.

Keyboard shortcuts can make you quite a bit more productive, and they are a common feature of many Mac applications. Besides the ones listed here, there are a number of keyboard shortcuts that are common to almost all Mac applications—shortcuts to close windows, quit apps, minimize windows, copy, paste and more. You can discover a lot of these shortcuts by browsing around Chronicle’s menus. The keyboard shortcut for any action is listed to the right of the menu item.

Posted on April 11, 2010

First Screenshot of Compartments!

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:32:00 -0400

Here it is! The first screenshot of the near-finished interface for Compartments, our new home inventory app (click it to see a bigger version). We’re really excited about it. A few highlights:

Really Fast Data Entry

That Quick Add toolbar button lets you enter as many items as you want through one dialog, really fast. Quickly input everything just to keep track of where it is, and fill in the details later!

Smart Data Fields

It’s not easy to tell from this screenshot, but the data fields (date acquired, etc.), automatically hide or show depending on if you’ve entered info. There are several other fields (attachments, serial number, etc.) not visible here, because, well, the couch doesn’t have a serial number.

Smart Collections

This is really great—search for anything by name, tag, or type and then save the search as a collection. The collection is auto-updating. So if you enter a new item tagged “Book,” it will automatically appear in the smart collection when you click on it.

Lots of Little Touches

You can access virtually everything with the keyboard. We’ve went to great pains to make it really fast and easy to do just about everything. For example, when entering a new item, there is a dropdown field to select a location—but if you haven’t created the location where your item is located, you can just type a new one in. Compartments will create the location for you, and put all the items there.

Pretty Icons Everywhere

A bunch of icons to represent different types of locations (rooms, dressers, safes, etc.), plus larger icons for items to represent item types (furniture, electronics, and so on). Plus, you can sort by item-type as well.

Beta Testers Needed!

We’re looking for beta testers—the beta will be ready next week. If you’re interested, e-mail beta@littlefin.com. We’re hoping to have the app released by the end of the month.

Posted on March 25, 2010

Chronicle Tip: Set a Savings Goal

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:26:00 -0400

Did you know you can use Chronicle to set a savings goal? While it’s a little outside the realm of what you might normally use Chronicle for, it works great, and it is a really easy way to help you remember to set aside some money each month.

Here’s how it works:

Create a new bill called Savings

Set the repeat interval to however often you plan to add money to this savings account, and the amount due to how much you plan to add each time.

Save the new bill, and then load it and click on the Set a Goal button.

In the Goal window, instead of setting the target balance to $0, set the initial balance to $0, and the target to however much you would like to ultimately save ($3,000 in the screenshot). Save your new Goal.

And that’s it! Now, every time you log a “Payment” in your savings bill, your goal will update, telling you what percentage of the way you are toward your savings goal!

Keep your eyes on the blog for more tips and ideas for using Chronicle in ways you might not have thought about before.

Posted on Mon, March 22, 2010

Chronicle 3.0 Released

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

It’s finally here! Chronicle 3 is now available, and it brings with it a huge range of interface improvements, and a brand new icon, shown here. The new icon was designed by Kenichi Yoshida, who was an incredible designer to work with, and I’m very happy with how it turned out.

What we tried to do with Chronicle 3 was make it faster simpler, and more streamlined. It takes less clicks to do things in this version, and we tried to make the information you need easier to see.

Overall, I think it’s a tremendous step up from Chronicle 2.

The one disappointing issue with Chronicle 3 is that a number of the optimizations we made for speed, including the data storage method, is not available on Mac OS X Tiger. That means Chronicle 3.0 is Leopard only. However, we plan to continue to support Chronicle 2.x, and we will update it with some of the improvements we made in Chronicle 3.

Posted on December 18, 2009

Chronicle 3.0 Now In Private Beta

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

If you would be interested in testing the beta version, drop me a line at beta@littlefin.com and I will be happy to send you the download details. Depending on how testing goes, I hope to have the final 3.0 out in mid-December.

Posted on November 13, 2009

First look at the new interface of Chronicle 3.0 Posted on...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

First look at the new interface of Chronicle 3.0 Posted on November 4, 2009

Chronicle 3.0 Under Development: Testers Needed

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Version 3.0 is a pretty significant update to Chronicle. The interface is being simplified and improved, the graphics and icons are getting an overhaul, and behind the scenes, all data storage is being done in a more efficient way as well. All this means Chronicle 3.0 is going to be faster and easier to use than Chronicle 2 is. It will be a couple months before a private beta is ready, but if you’re interested in testing Chronicle 3, let me know.

Posted on August 2, 2009

Chronicle 2.2 Adds New Features

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Version 2.2 is the biggest update to Chronicle since the initial 2.0 launch. With this update, in addition to several user interface improvements, Chronicle adds goal-setting and statistics to its lineup of features. It’s available now for only $19.95. As always we want to know how you use Chronicle, and what features you would like to see. Contact us if you have any feature suggestions for Chronicle.

Posted on June 25, 2009

New Website Design!

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Finally, we’ve launched our new, cleaner, brighter web design. Our general goal was to make it a little less cluttered, but keep the basic structure. The new website design also coincides with a slight change to our brand identity. We’ve kept the fin and blue water behind it, but added the orange beach-like wave to it. Drop me a line at mike@littlefin.com if you have any feedback on our new look. The new website was coded using the beautiful Espresso from Macrabbit. If you’re looking for a development environment for coding HTML, Javascript and CSS, I recommend it.

Posted on June 24, 2009

Chronicle Selected by Apple as Staff Pick

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Apple posted Chronicle into their downloads section, and happily, they selected it as a staff pick in the business and finance category. Thousands have already downloaded Chronicle from Apple. So far, more people arrive at LittleFin from Apple than from MacUpdate and VersionTracker combined.

Posted on March 18, 2009