Importing your bookmarks into WebnoteHappy is a good way to consolidate your bookmarks into one place where you can add notes and tag them. I’ve already got import from Safari bookmarks working and if you’ve got a browser that can export to XBEL (which is almost none) then that works too. I’m working on importing from other browsers, so please email me or comment here about which ones you use so I can prioritize the work.

In the meantime, Jonathan Wight has kindly created a way to import from OmniWeb into WebnoteHappy. It is a two step process, OmniWeb -> XBEL file then XBEL file -> WebnoteHappy via File > Import from XBEL.

Jon’s quite a talented developer actually – he later followed it up with a way to import your WebLoc files or Internet Clippings into WebnoteHappy. These are those files that are generated when you drag from your browser like Safari and drop on the Desktop or in Finder. This one is quite fancy. It starts off with a Spotlight Importer for weblocs and goes into the second course via a shell script which uses mdfind2 and XSL to generate an XBEL file. Dessert is again importing the XBEL into WebnoteHappy. I have a few friends who have thousands of these weblocs littering their system so maybe this will tide them over until I get an Import from webloc files feature.

Thanks Jon! It’s great to have user contributions – that’s three in two days that I’ve blogged about and there’s at least one more I need to blog. Actually, if anyone speaks Chinese – please let me know since I need a bit of help translating. I think we’re starting to build a community around WebnoteHappy. I’m also thinking of adding some public forums but I’m still evaluating which ones to use. I guess I should also create a “Resources” link with these user contributions.

One of the things that people always intend to do but a lot of us don’t do is backup.

Here is a WebnoteHappy QuickPick for Backup 3 which works with DotMac. This is the first user contribution to WebnoteHappy, contributed by Frédéric Ballériaux.

To install:

1. Quit Backup (the app that comes with .Mac)
2. Put this QuickPick in ~/Library/Application Support/Backup/QuickPicks/ (create the directory if it doesn’t exist)
3. Start Backup
4. Create a new Custom Set and choose “WebnoteHappy items”

Enjoy!

I redesigned the blog today to make it match the rest of the site. I think this makes it look nicer and its more unique than the default Kubrick theme that I was using.

Also Morley wrote in today that he wanted to get to WebnoteHappy from the blog and it was harder than it should have been. So I put a prominent link to it as well as moving up the email feedback and the subscribe link.

If you have a WordPress blog and are looking to customize it, I’d suggest reading these documents to get a better understanding of how to do it:

Site Architecture 1.5

Stepping into Templates

Template Hierarchy

A quick follow-up to my First Impressions of the MacBook:

Note that I’m busy working on WebnoteHappy 1.1, but I’m not ready to announce what will be in it yet. But please check out WebnoteHappy and let me know what you’d like to see in future versions. :)

So first to answer andrea who asked in the comments: “I’m curious, what’s up with the button on the Macbook? It felt weirdly flexible in the store and didn’t always register a double-click. Have you noticed this?”

I went back to the Apple Store Tysons Corner last night. Its nice and convenient – whenever my wife needs to go get something, I always try take a quick detour through the Apple Store. This time I spent some quality time with the White MacBooks. I played around with the button and it clicked just fine.

Its quite possible that the first batch of MacBooks that are on display are of varying quality. I think they showed up on the day of the announcement. And you can be sure that they have been banged on and tried out thoroughly. But you won’t ever buy those models, you’ll get a later revision. If you do have a problem, Apple seems to deal with the ones I’ve had well. The extended AppleCare especially is like a big, warm fuzzy blanket compared to some of the stories my Windows friends have told me about their Big Consumer Electronics Store Laptop Warranty experiences. Hopefully Apple will make sure that the stores get the later models every so often that are fresh so that everyone will have a great experience while trying them out in-store.

Double-clicks seemed fine too. I even went into System Preferences and turned on “double-tap registers as context click” which means if you tap with two fingers, it is like doing Control-click. That’s right-click to the Switchers in the audience. That seemed to work ok. I also did the two fingers up and down drag to do vertical scrolling.

I also tried sleeping the MacBook and noticed that there still is a sleep indicator, but its way on the right, slightly to the left of the remote control IR port.

I deal with a G4 iBook occasionally and so I noticed a few differences between that and the MacBook which stand out:

1. The MacBook can do monitor spanning, the iBook only does mirroring.

2. The MacBook has F12, whereas the iBook doesn’t. This is important for activating Dashboard.

3. The MacBook has a way bigger trackpad, about the size of a MacBook Pro

So… am I getting a MacBook? Probably not. As a programmer, I really NEED a lot of screen real estate. A lot. Which is why I have a 17″ PowerBook G4. Also I’ve realized that Intel testing is actually not as difficult as I thought. Perhaps this is because I’ve built WebnoteHappy so that it only runs on Tiger and uses Cocoa + Core Data + Bindings as much as possible – that helps insulate me from platform differences. I also have a great team of beta testers – many who have Intel Macs. This makes getting an Intel machine a little less urgent. Though I would like to have faster compile times, I have to balance this out versus things like going to WWDC.

That being said, I am going to recommend a MacBook or an iMac to all my Windows friends and family – especially since they are priced well for Switchers AND they’ll be soothed by the ability to run their current software via Parallels or Boot Camp.

I’m on vacation, but I found a bit of time to release the first update to WebnoteHappy, version 1.0.1. Thanks to Flip, Mike, and Jeff for doing some testing.

What’s new in this release:

1. Fixed a crash related to AppleScript. (Specifically creating a webnote with an empty URL.)
2. Updated Install Bookmarklet page to make clear that it works with all OS X web browsers and the full version of WebnoteHappy. That page now matches the same look as the website.
3. Removed partial localizations.

Please download WebnoteHappy 1.0.1 and enjoy, everyone!

I finished the website for WebnoteHappy, my newly released bookmark manager for Mac OS X with integrated note taking and tagging, early Wednesday morning at around 2AM. Then I told some of my friends who were online via IRC and IM. At this point I had gotten about 17 hours of sleep in the past 3 days. Unfortunately, because of the adrenaline of finally releasing, I had a hard time sleeping…

I woke up at 8:37 AM – I remember this exact time because I was meaning to get up at 8AM to get an earlier start on the day. I had set an alarm but I don’t remember even pressing snooze. I do remember getting up around 6AM wondering if I should get up yet. Now I had overslept my alarm. But I think my body was telling me – hey get some sleep, you only started snoring at 4:00AM.

At this point came the active marketing portion of being a Mac indie developer. I had finished development on WebnoteHappy about two weeks earlier, with the exception of the inevitable last minute bug fixes. I think it is always better to delay the release and fix the bugs before it gets out to users.

Let me publicly thank all my beta testers here: We did it! Thanks for all the wonderful comments, testing, and advice! You can find a list of all the beta testers for WebnoteHappy in the “About WebnoteHappy” dialog box.

Now as the development was wrapping up, I started doing all the things that make an app complete like documentation and a web site. In some ways, I think this is marketing, since it is telling people about your product. I’ve come to respect marketing a great deal. It always seemed like there should be more programmers and less marketers in companies I had worked at. But I was wrong. Marketing at its very essence is telling people who can benefit from your product that it is available and can help them out, make them happy even. Its crucial to a software company – the yin to programming’s yang.

And so the marketing began – starting with VersionTracker and MacUpdate. These two sites are popular among Mac enthusiasts who like to try out new apps. Plus their UIs are quite programmer-friendly. You fill in some fields and your software is announced to the early Mac-app-adopter world. Next I submitted to Apple’s Mac OS X downloads. Also programmer-friendly, but Apple has more editorial review I think as WebnoteHappy is still not up on the OS X downloads site.

Finally I submitted to a few Mac news sites. The first being TUAW, since they were nice enough to cover WebnoteHappy Lite a while back on their own initiative. I’ve actually learned a lot since the original Lite release, which only went up on MacUpdate and was covered in some blogs. For the 1.1 release of WebnoteHappy Lite, I finally submitted to VersionTracker and revisited my listing on Macupdate, got more blog coverage, but still no submissions to news sites. This time around, for WebnoteHappy 1.0, I prepared a press release and sent it out.

I was mentally exhausted after I sent out the press release to a few sites. I’ve been trying to cram marketing into my head and I think my programmer self was fighting back. But then… Ding! I got new email in Mail.app. And it was from Kagi, my payment processor, telling me that I had just sold my first public copy of WebnoteHappy 1.0! I cannot tell you how cool that is. I got up and did a little dance / victory lap around the house, hugging my wife and kids as I passed them. Later, we all had lunch together at one of my favorite restaurants, Hard Times Cafe, where we ate some chili.

It turns out that news sites, bloggers, download sites, and search engines are all important in their own ways to letting people know that your app exists and could possibly help them. I emphasize helping people, because that’s what I want Happy Apps to be doing. I want WebnoteHappy and other future happy apps to be helping people do things that they really need to get done, like keeping track of web pages so they can get back to them later, and hopefully so well that they are delighted and happy. As a side-effect, I get to support my family and keep making apps.

Over the next few days, I got a lot of email. It was about 50/50 support and congratulations/feature requests. Fortunately I have not run into many bugs, probably due to the long private beta cycle and the efforts of the beta testers and myself. The support emails mostly pointed out shortcomings in my documentation, so I’ll be working on this. I should probably also have a screencast or two and improve the FAQ. That would probably answer most questions I get.

The congratulations emails are incredibly satisfying and many were accompanied by statements like:

First of all, “bravo” this is a must have application, and for a 1.0 version, it’s quite mature.

That is like music to a Mac indie’s ears. You toil away in obscurity (ok truthfully I’m still mostly obscure, but a little less so now) for months and months, hoping that it meets people’s needs, that someone will “get it”.

OK time to wrap it up, since this post is already easily my longest post ever. First let me say that I welcome any and all feature requests. 1.0 was just the beginning and I’m starting to plan out 1.1 and beyond. Second, please spread the word about WebnoteHappy: bookmark it on del.icio.us, write a blog entry about it, mark it in ma.gnolia, tell people in your Mac user group, digg it or whatever you can think of. I’m still new to this marketing thing. And lastly, (though maybe this should have been first), please download WebnoteHappy, try it out, and see if you find it useful.

I’ll be blogging about my Post-WebnoteHappy-1.0 Experience soon, but I wanted to share my first impressions of the MacBook while they are fresh in my mind.

I was having dinner at Tysons Corner and afterwards I stopped by the Apple Store with my wife. They had a whole table of MacBooks, 6 in all. 3 of them were the white and 3 of them were the black. Since I had never seen a black Mac laptop before, I immediately went over to check it out.

The first thing I did, after looking it over, is close the lid. Not sure why, but I think it is because the thing that amazes me about Mac laptops is the instant-on experience. Then I tried to open it. But I didn’t see the normal button that you press with the PowerBooks. So then I gently tried to open it and it seems like that it has a magnetic latch with no push button. And it was instantly on again! Good.

The keyboard did look a little strange. But it felt fine. The glossy screen is a change but doesn’t seem to make that much difference. I’m used to the non-glossy screen, but I think I could use the glossy just fine. I also picked it up and it seems pretty light (though I am used to carrying around a 17″.)

The black is actually matte – not shiny like the nano. My wife didn’t think it was “as pretty” as my current aluminum PowerBook, but I think it looks good. Maybe because I’m a guy? But then she reminded me that I haven’t seen a piece of Mac hardware that I didn’t like. :)

I downloaded WebnoteHappy to see how it ran. The MacBook is fast! Everything was just silky smooth. Kind of amazing to see so much power in such a small package. I looked later and saw that it had a 2Ghz Core Duo and 512MB RAM. Then for fun, I fired up Photo Booth. My wife was amazed – “there’s a camera in there?” And I pointed to the _tiny_ built-in iSight. It’s barely noticeable which is nice.

All in all, I really like the Black MacBook. It’s $1499 but I think it is a great value if you want a portable Mac. It is fast, loaded with features and has a bigger screen than the old iBook G4s. And if you’re unsure exactly which model to get, then study this wonderful comparison chart of MacBook and MacBook Pros. It’s available after you click “Buy now” on the MacBook page. Apple should really put it on the main product page.

It is finally done. I’ve been feverishly working on WebnoteHappy, a bookmark manager with integrated note taking and tagging for Mac OS X, for the past few months. If you were reading back on January 31st, I released WebnoteHappy Lite, which is the free version.

I took all the user feedback I got from the Lite users and used that to figure out what people really wanted from a bookmark manager. I think that has made WebnoteHappy into a much better product than I originally envisioned.

Please download WebnoteHappy and try it out. If you have a blog, please mention it and also let me know if you’d like to review WebnoteHappy.

I’m trying to revamp the Happy Apps site and I was thinking about technical Mac terms. Things like “Core Data”, “Cocoa”, “Tiger”, “Spotlight”, “Dashboard”, etc. I guess the last 3 are actually used by Apple in consumer advertising and in the Apple Stores.

That is, do people care if you write something in Cocoa? If you use Core Data? Does it make people think “that must be modern”?

Backing away from the Mac world, do people really care about “Hemi”s? Or “side air bags”? Or “5.1 surround”? Er – that is – do people understand what those mean? Or does it require commercials that clearly associate the benefits with those technical terms? Maybe that’s the secret to those Volkswagon commercials. Side air bags might seem unnecessary until you see someone get into a nasty accident and you see the benefit they give you.

I saw a few “Get a Mac” commercials on TV and watched the rest online. I kind of like these. Sure, they’re not perfect, but its hard to get across the whole “the Mac experience is a wonderful thing” in 30 seconds.

Still, it’s nice to see Apple advertising for the Mac again, showing an iMac at the end after so much iPod / iTunes advertising.

I personally like the Viruses one, especially where the PC guy says “I think I gotta crash” and falls over backwards. Good slapstick. Does it offend PC users? I don’t know about that. I think it is a good reminder that there IS a difference between Mac and PC and it isn’t just price. Its that you have to put up with all this stuff on a PC like running a virus scanner, scanning for spyware, etc.

I’d say Apple new ads are WAY more subtle than those Volkswagon super-intense I-just-got-my-car-destroyed-and-almost-died-but-I’m-OK-because-I-drive-a-Volkswagon crash-mercials. But they’re fundamentally saying the same thing: life is dangerous. Go with a product that will provide you with a better experience (even if it costs a little more.)