Gus – who I met at WWDC last year – has a great post on his blog titled How to Become an Independent Programmer in just 1068 days where he explains how he’s become a full-time Mac Indie gradually over the past few years.

I think it is great that the Mac community supports independent software developers and Gus is living proof of that. :)

Bonus: Check out Gus’s post-mortem on VoodooPad 2.0 that I commented on last year.

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. For me, it was pretty relaxing and it was great to see all my relatives. I rested my brain by not thinking about code, but I did talk about WebnoteHappy with some of my relatives that had heard that I was writing some software. They seemed to think it was a good idea, though alas most of them are not using Macs (yet…) I’m not planning on making a Windows version, but I’d be open to working with someone to make sure that there is some compatible format for exchanging webnotes between OS X and Windows.

Thanks to all the folks that signed up for the beta program for WebnoteHappy Pro. It is still open, so if you’re interested, let me know.

Now I thought it’d be fun to answer my answers to my beta questionnaire. After all, I eat my own dogfood by using WebnoteHappy every day.

What browser do you mainly use? What other browsers do you use?

I use Safari primarily and then go to Camino and then Firefox when I run into the rare site that doesn’t work in Safari. I have checked out OmniWeb and it seems cool. I’m also intrigued by Shiira and am going to try it out soon.

What version of OS X do you run?

10.4.3 on my main partition. I like to stay current. I also run the latest beta of OS X on another partition to check on bug fixes and new features that are coming in the future.

How many webnotes do you have in WebnoteHappy Lite?

As of right now, 3074. Mmm… dogfood.

Do you use del.icio.us? If so, what’s your username?

Yes. My username is luisdelarosa. As I’ve said previously, I’m working on adding del.icio.us support to WebnoteHappy, so I’ll likely be using del.icio.us even more in the near future.

What is your favorite movie of all time and why?

I love watching movies. I’m one of the early adopters of Netflix, starting my subscription back in 2000. I’ve rated 985 movies. So this was kind of a tough one. But one movie stood out…

The Matrix. This was the killer app that pushed me to finally buy a DVD player. It had it all: action, adventure, the mystery of what the Matrix was all about, kung fu and mind-blowing special effects. They seem to be run-of-the-mill now, but I think it was also the first movie in quite a while where you could enjoy the making of the movie as much as the real thing. I think the last one before that was the original Star Wars. I loved seeing how they storyboarded the entire movie before it was made and I try to do the same with the software that I write. Also I like the concept of being able to change the world by mastering technology, which is what Neo basically does. It’s one of the few DVDs I own and watch again and again.

I’m fighting off a cold, but that won’t stop my efforts, only slow them down a bit. I’ve got most of Smart Folders done and I’ll be rolling out the first private beta of WebnoteHappy Pro soon. So if you’re interested in helping me out by beta testing the Pro version, send me an email to probetarequest at happyapps.com and answer the following questions:

1. What browser do you mainly use? What other browsers do you use?
2. What version of OS X do you run?
3. How many webnotes do you have in WebnoteHappy Lite?
4. Do you use del.icio.us? If so, what’s your username?
5. What is your favorite movie of all time and why?

Mike Butler wrote in and said that the new build of WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0b16 was not getting the title from the webpage when he used the bookmarklet. I just did some debugging and found the problem. The old bookmarklet is not compatible with the newest build.

So everyone, please install the new bookmarklet. You can do this in WebnoteHappy Lite under File > Install bookmarklet.

Follow the instructions (basically drag the bookmarklet link to your bookmarks bar) and you’ll see a new bookmarklet called Webnote It.

This bookmarklet also has the ability to capture the selected text in a webpage and insert that as your notes in your webnote if it is new. Notice it now works in all OS X browsers. I’ve personally tested Camino 1.0b1, Firefox 1.5, and OmniWeb 5.1.2. Other browser reports are welcome! Please add them as comments to this post or email me.

This latest release of WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0b16 features improved support for Camino, Firefox, OmniWeb, and other browsers.

Camino and OmniWeb join Safari and NetNewsWire in getting hotkey support, which is the quickest way to add and edit webnotes.

Firefox and all other browsers can now use the bookmarklet seamlessly to webnote the current page. (Previously Safari always had to be open to use the bookmarklet.) The bookmarklet is now called “Webnote It” which I thought was a bit more fun than “Add webnote”.

The toolbar buttons now seem smaller due to shorter text associated with each. Also I’ve improved the product page a bit.

This public beta of WebnoteHappy Lite will expire at the end of this year. Hopefully we will have the final 1.0 by New Years!

Mike Rundle over at Business Logs wrote Either Support Safari, Or Lose Customers:

If you care about the Macintosh user base, then you should care about Safari. If you don’t care about Safari, then you’re saying you do not care about the Mac user base. It’s quite simple.

… People don’t switch to Firefox because they’re eager to get rid of the float margin bugs in IE6 or want 24-bit PNG support with alpha transparency, they switch because they hate spyware and the Fox is billed as a better alternative to IE6.

But on Mac OS X, there is no IE6. The default browser for my operating system is elegant, spyware-free, standards-compliant, quick, and easy to use. Why would a normal Mac OS X user download Firefox when Safari does what they want? Firefox on Mac OS X looks bad, doesn’t load as quickly as Safari, and has some goofy bugs. I’m not saying that Firefox is a bad browser because it’s not, it’s terrific, but on Mac OS X it just doesn’t wallop Safari the same way it wallops IE6.

Personally, it is quite frustrating to have to fire up another browser just to visit a certain website that doesn’t work in Safari. Inevitably, it is some sort of banking or paystub site, but even some Web 2.0 sites don’t support it properly. It seems to be a numbers game with these folks, but to me the important number is the number of Mac users you make happy.

Now, I’ve found that a lot of Firefox on Mac users are Switchers that have recently moved over from Windows to the Mac, so that is understandable. I think that if they were to try using Safari more, they would start to prefer it.

That being said, I’m still going to support Camino, Firefox, and OmniWeb in WebnoteHappy so people can have their choice.

And in other news… IE5 for the Mac is officially dead. [via Michael Tsai]

It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple’s Safari.

Congratulations to Brent and Sheila Simmons for winning an Eddy for NetNewsWire 2. He won one for NetNewsWire back in 2003 as well.

NetNewsWire is one of those must-have Mac apps that I use every day. I’ve got 394 feeds and counting. I am definitely way more informed nowadays. It was just too hard to sift through all those news manually. Plus, now I can take notes on news items with WebnoteHappy right from NetNewsWire.

Some said that Safari 2 might cause take over the RSS area on Mac, but actually I’ve found that Safari just made it easier to use NetNewsWire. Just click the RSS button and it takes you right to NNW to subscribe. It is too bad that Safari doesn’t have a pluggable way to add extensions, but that’s worthy of a post by itself.

In other news, my family and I had huevos rancheros this morning for breakfast. Coincidence? Anyways congratulations again to Brent and Sheila.

Jason Santa Maria wrote on his blog about Markmaking:

Ok, so I finally decided I want to start using a bookmarking tool. I have a wealth of bookmarks from the past 8 or so years that I’ve painstakingly kept organized and categorized in a variety of browsers (Safari being the latest). This works out great, except for when I need to find something which I can’t recall the name or URL of. In those instances I would love to have some extra info attached to bookmarks like tags or descriptions. It’s been on my mind all year, but the uncertainty of investing that information somewhere else (alongside the time involved in doing so) has kept me a bit guarded. And which tool would I use?

And I left a comment which I thought was worth reposting here:

I’ve got a bookmarking tool for Mac OS X in public beta right now: WebnoteHappy Lite. It is freeware and runs on 10.4 (Tiger).

It was born out of similar frustrations… I had all these bookmarks, but they were hard to use. The theory behind WebnoteHappy Lite is that when you care enough about a page to bookmark it, you probably want to write something down about it to help you remember. Just freeform, whatever you’re thinking, as a note or as you refer to it, a description. I’ve done a lot of testing with the interface and have tried to make it as easy as possible to write a note.

Later, when you want to remember all the things that related to something that’s on your mind, you type in the search field. It searches your notes, the URLs, and the titles. Since it is a native Cocoa app, the search is fast.

All the data is yours on your local system and its stored as XML, so you can get to it whenever you want.

Check it out and let me know what you think. I’m working on adding smart folder and tagging/del.icio.us support now to the Pro version.

Luis – An aspiring Mac indie

Apple and PayPal are having a promotion:

You buy an iTunes Gift Certificate for a loved one and you get free songs for yourself. Cool! The only thing you have to do is buy it through PayPal.

So if you give a $20 gift certificate, you get 10 free songs, which is like getting $9.90 worth of songs free.

If you give a $50 gift certificate, you get 25 free songs, which is like getting $24.75 worth of songs free.

del.icio.us integration is the #2 most requested feature for WebnoteHappy, right behind folders.

soren wrote on his blog:

Via amon: store bookmarks and associate notes to them.

del.icio.us integration anyone?

I’m investigating the del.icio.us API now and hopefully it won’t change too much now that Yahoo has acquired them. But even if it does, I’ll be implementing it in the future. After I do folders.

I’ve thought about either delegating all of it to Cocoalicous or having native del.icio.us support in WebnoteHappy. It’s been a struggle, because I like Buzz and Cocoalicious is cool. But after much talking to actual users and asking them what they want, I’ve decided to support it natively because they would rather use fewer apps to manage their bookmarks. But for folks who want to use both WebnoteHappy and Cocoalicious, I’ll be providing AppleScript support and will probably create some example scripts of how to post a webnote from WebnoteHappy to Cocoalicious. So you can take your pick.

BTW, I think I’ll probably change my little blurb that says
“Don’t want to share all your bookmarks with the entire world?” because I think it gives off the impression that I don’t like social bookmarks.

I do like social bookmarks. It’s just that I think that there is a place for both private and social bookmarks. You don’t want to share your bank account login with the world, even if it is just the URL. On the other hand, it is nice to see what’s popular or what everyone in the world has found on a given subject, like say powerbooks. So maybe a better blurb would be:

Manage your private and social bookmarks.

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