I finally released WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0! It’s been a long, hard road but it’s been worth it. Please check it out and tell me what you think.

Now I get to do marketing, which is probably my weakest point right now. But I’ve found its good to work on your weaknesses. :) I guess I’ll start off with VersionTracker and MacUpdate…

Things are going well with the shareware version of WebnoteHappy, tentatively named WebnoteHappy Pro. I’ve got a good group of beta testers who have been giving great feedback and suggestions on the early betas.

I’ve been pretty happy with the progress I’ve been making. I’ve found along that way that I’m optimistic, aggressive, still somewhat of a perfectionist, and able to get by on a lot less sleep. But hopefully this all results in a really nice WebnoteHappy Pro 1.0 sometime in the next month or two. Plus it has been one of the most challenging and engaging things I’ve done. And I’ve learned a lot.

I’ll be blogging about some of the features and take some snapshots to whet your appetite before then. If you want to be notified of the public beta of WebnoteHappy Pro, send me email to probeta at happyapps.com.

I just watched Spirited Away. It’s an amazing, mind-blowing Japanese animation fantasy movie. It’s about a young girl who accidentally wanders into a strange but wonderful alternate world.

It is beautifully drawn, which is a breath of fresh air in the current world of computer animation. To underscore this, at the beginning of the movie is a guy from Pixar just raving about how great this movie and the director, Hayao Miyazaki is.

I just wanted to share one of my favorite iTunes Smart Playlists. I call it “good songs i haven’t heard in a while”. If you rate your songs, it helps you find those hidden gems that you haven’t run into in a while.

It looks like this:

Match all of the following rules:

My Rating is in the range 4 stars to 5 stars

Last Played is not in the last 30 days

Genre is not Podcast

Genre is not (blank)

Limit to 25 songs selected by random

Live updating

WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0 final candidate 2 is up. Please check it out.

There’s only three minor things that changed:

1. You can press Enter in the notes text field in the main window to insert a new line.

2. You can press Esc in the add/edit webnote dialog to cancel it.

3. Updated the copyright in the About dialog.

These don’t seem like the showstoppers I was talking about, but I treat user experience as a first-class entity. So things that degrade the user experience are critical, which is why I made sure you could put in new lines in the 1.0 as well as cancel the dialog easily.

Here’s to 1.0! As always – if you find any bugs, please let me know.

I’ve been fighting a cold, but I promised myself that I’d release the final candidate release of WebnoteHappy Lite this long weekend. So hopefully we’ll have a 1.0 by the end of January. :)

Check out WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0 final candidate 1. I’m looking for showstopper bugs now, so if you find any, please report it to me.

Here’s a brief list of what’s changed. I’m working on revamping the website, which will include a full set of release notes.

1. The old bookmarklet “Add webnote” works again. I noticed that there were a few users who complained that the bookmarklet wasn’t working, so this is the backwards-compatible mode. Really you should install the new “Webnote It” bookmarklet, since it also allows you to add selected text.
2. The splitter position is persisted.
3. Tabbing is improved. You can tab through a complete cycle now.
4. Import from Safari bug fixes.
5. Removed hotkey from Window | Main Window. This will be reserved for New Smart Folder.
6. Changed copyright dates in About and in license agreement.
7. Removed expiration period.
8. Made final pass at making WNH Lite localization-ready.

Check out http://www.macrumorslive.com/web/. It’s a nice live news feed that automates automatically every minute and is AJAX-enabled.

Steve Jobs gives the keynote tomorrow at Macworld 2006. Unfortunately, I can’t be there this year, so I’ll have to watch the replay. Hopefully I’ll be there next year. But just for fun, here are my predictions for Macworld 2006:

1. Calculate – the long awaited spreadsheet app that rounds out the iWork 2006 suite, joining Pages and Keynote. This hopefully reduces the dependence on Microsoft Office and finally puts AppleWorks to rest. Bonus points if iWork 2006 supports OpenDocument.

2. Intel iBook and Intel Mac mini – this will provide a nice gentle low-cost, low-risk way for Apple and Mac users to test the Intel waters.

3. iPod nano video – the iPod nano will get video, but you’ll have to have really good eyes to watch it on the small screen. :)

4. ergonomic keyboards – ok, probably not, but this is what I’d really like. The Apple keyboards are really beautiful, but just not ergonomic enough.

5. More video content from the iTunes Music and Videos Store – not sure what. Of course I’d love to see actual movies here. But maybe just more TV shows would do the trick. This would fill the niche for people who don’t have a TiVo or just didn’t know that the show existed until afterwards.

I just got word that WebnoteHappy is the 14,000th app on HyperJeff’s OS X Apps list. Very cool and its always nice to be part of a milestone.

By the way, HyperJeff has a blog now.

Happy New Years! I’ve been feverishly working the past week on WebnoteHappy. I just uploaded a new beta of WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0b17. I had hoped to have a final candidate release by now, but good food, I mean good apps, take time to prepare. :)

Here’s what’s new:

1. The webnotes are now stored in a database. There’s several reasons for this. One of the big reasons was to work around a rare bug with certain XML sequences. On the positive side, WebnoteHappy is now faster, should use less memory and disk space and is more scalable. So it now handles thousands of webnotes better. I had planned to move to a database later on, so this is just being moved up earlier.

The webnotes are now stored in ~/Library/Application Support/WebnoteHappy/WebnoteHappy.webnotesql. Your old webnotes if you have any currently will still be around in WebnoteHappy.webnotes.

But this brings me to something I feel strongly about: you should be able to have complete control over your information. That was one of the really nice things about the XML storage – you could read it and parse it. An application shouldn’t lock up your data – you should be able to get to out if you want. So that brings us to our next two features:

2. Export to Netscape-compatible bookmark file, which happens to be in an archaic form of HTML but has been around since the beginning of time it seems. Well, at least Internet Time. Ironically, the only documentation on the Netscape Bookmark File Format can be found on an MSDN site, since Netscape DevEdge disappeared. Nevertheless, this is the format that Safari, Camino, Firefox, OmniWeb and just about every other browser on the planet exports and imports in.

Another nice thing is about this is that you can view the exported HTML in your browser.

3. Export to XBEL. This is the XML Bookmark Exchange Language, which outputs nice XML but unfortunately isn’t used by any modern browser that I know of. The primary use will probably be for backing up your webnotes. This is also much easier to parse than the HTML format.

4. Import from XBEL. You can use this to restore your webnotes from an XBEL export. Note that this doesn’t import a webnote if one already exists with the same URL, so you won’t have duplicates.

5. Control-W / Close Window now closes whatever window has the focus, not just the main window. Thanks to Brian for reporting this.

6. WebnoteHappy is ready to be localized. If you’re interested in helping out, please let me know.

7. Longer beta period. I think the previous beta periods were a bit too short. This beta will expire at the end of January 2006.

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Please try out the new import and export features. As always, please report any bugs you find. The feature list should be complete for WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0 now.