So you’ve taken a nice buddy icon of yourself with your iSight in iChat. Now where did iChat stick that picture?

Answer: Home > Library > Images > iChat Recent Pictures

Thanks to Matthew Wanderer and his iChat FAQ for this answer.

Billable 1.1 is now out, made by my friend Mike Zornek of Clickable Bliss. For those of you not familiar with Billable, its a Mac app to keep track of your billable hours and create invoices. Its got a feature I’ve been waiting for: invoice numbers. I requested this feature and I’m glad to see it in the first update. I guess I’m just a perfectionist, but I like to have my invoice #s be uniform at Happy Apps. Yes, I do consulting when I’m not working on WebnoteHappy. It helps pay the bills. :)

Anyways, you can have invoice #s be by the client or you can have global invoice #s (which is what I use, this just means that if you won’t have duplicate invoice #s even if you have multiple clients.)

BTW Mike’s made a great screencast too if you want to see the new features in the 1.1 release.

My buddy Rob who makes the cool YouTube app TubeSock was watching the college football (aka BCS) championship last night. He saw this ad from Cingular that might just show the iPod Phone.

A question came up in the Mac small business list and I’ve seen it asked several times over the years. I’ve had this question myself: do you have to charge sales tax for downloaded software like WebnoteHappy? The short answer: it depends.

From what I’ve read (and I’m no tax attorney either but I try to keep up on tax rulings), it really depends on where you actually sell from. I currently sell all my software through Kagi, who is selling from California, one of the states that doesn’t charge sales tax for prewritten software that is downloaded electronically. Note that there is one huge exception for Kagi – they are registered in Europe and collect VAT for all European customers.

Note that prewritten software is a key distinction. This is basically software that you write once and sell again and again.

So how do you find out if you need to charge sales tax?

Vertex Inc’s Tax Cybrary of Internet Tax is a good place to start. Look up your state and the part that says “Information/Software Purchased via Downloading from the Internet.”

Its a little more complicated than that though, because courts can issue rulings that can supercede these tax laws.

For example, I live in Virginia and a ruling in April 2005 clarified that if you sell prewritten software and you don’t ship anything (CD, docs, anything) and keep a record that the user is not entitled to anything physical (CD, docs, etc) then you don’t have to charge taxes on it because it is not tangible.

So – bottom line – if you’re not going through a reseller like Kagi or eSellerate, check with an attorney in your area.

Well WebnoteHappy got on the “nice” list with MacSanta and so now along with many other great Independent Mac Developer software titles, it is now 20% off until Christmas Day. Just enter the coupon code “MACSANTA” when you check out and enjoy the savings!

To save you a little bit of math, the WebnoteHappy single user license is now $19.96 after the discount (regularly $24.95).

Even better, the WebnoteHappy family license is now $23.96 (regularly $29.95).

Thanks to the guys at Rogue Amoeba for putting this together!

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You’re still reading this post? OK well since you stuck around, let me tell you a little bit about my experience with Kagi and getting set up so I could even take part in MacSanta. You see, Kagi has an old way of doing things and a new way of doing things when setting up an online store. I had things down in the old way since the new way is still technically in beta. But one of the new things that you can do is do coupons.

So I had to do a wholesale upgrade of my entire store, including re-adding products (they aren’t visible in the new store) and re-implementing the detail portion in XHTML (to make sure that the ordering of the products is consistent). Fortunately, Kagi has good phone support so my man Ferdinand helped me out in transitioning from the old to the new. Note that the old online store redirects to the new one – you need to contact Kagi to do that.

On the positive side, the new store is easier to use – you simply press the “Add to cart” button for the type of license that you want. Before, you had to fill in the quantity field – this did actually result in a few errors which is not good for business. You can check out the new Happy Apps online store (and feel free to use the MACSANTA coupon code while you’re there. Hint: it’s on the second page.)

Have you ever seen that Geico commercial? The one with the movie announcer guy where he goes “Payback, this time it’s for real.”

That’s sort of how I feel about going Indie (which I wrote up a bit on my other blog.) That’s correct – you heard right, I went Indie! So now I’m living The Life. I had tried it out earlier during my vacations and enjoyed it. And this time, it’s for real.

Today Happy Apps is participating in a charity event for Child’s Play, which helps sick kids in the hospital out by providing them with toys and games to enjoy. It’s not just me, but several members of the Mac Indie Developer community is participating. (Thanks for putting this together, Mike!) The deal is – you buy our software, we donate the sales to Child’s Play to help sick kids. But this is only for today, December 7th.

There’s lots of good software besides WebnoteHappy. Among my personal favorites: Pukka, Billable, VoodooPad, SlingShot, FlexTime (see my review of FlexTime), and the just released LifeBoat. There’s lots more too – the full list of participating apps is on the ironcoder site.

So pick up some cool Mac software for yourself and make a kid happy. :)

I got a new 20″ Intel iMac last week. It’s a 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo and its crazy fast compared to my old PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz. As you may know if you’re a loyal reader of this blog that I like svnmark (compiling subversion) because it is a benchmark that directly shows how much productivity gains you might be able to get if you upgraded your Mac. I mean its nice to see how many frames per second you might get in World of Warcraft, but really – you want to see if more cores / more gigahertz gives you faster compiles.

OK – so what’s the svnmark score for Intel iMac 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo?

1m46.405s or about 106 seconds

That puts it behind the 2.66 and 3.0 Mac Pros which run at 62 and 54 seconds respectively. But its right around where the Quad G5 was – 99 seconds.
It beats the previous 20″ iMac Core Duo 2.0Ghz (117 seconds) by about 9%.

But the big kicker? It beats my old PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz (655 seconds) by 84%! Or as Apple might say, the iMac 20″ 2.16Ghz is 6x faster than the 17″ PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz. Now that’s productivity!

The guys at Rogue Sheep must have heard my pleas and those of other Mac developers like me who lament the lack of controls in Interface Builder that match the “implicit-HIG” that current Apple applications exhibit.

Back in my WWDC (2006) Guesses, I wrote:

But instead of trying to look into industry trends, here’s just what I myself would like to see… new UI widgets, like:
The entire bar that has the “+” button, the gear popup button and grabber that appears in Mail.app.

Well at WWDC, I asked around and got nada. Looks like I was on my own again. Which is sort of a shame, since this set of controls has been reinvented more times than the wheel or something like that. I should put together a little gallery of them. But now Rogue Sheep comes to the rescue with their RSControls.

Here’s a little screenshot of them:

I’ll probably be leveraging these in the next version of WebnoteHappy. Thanks Rogue Sheep!

The third potion from Potion Factory is out in beta form – Tangerine. I helped beta test this cool little gem. Its beautiful like Podcast Maker and Voice Candy. It also fills a need I didn’t realize could be filled.

I had created a playlist in iTunes a while back called “Fast Beats” where I hand-picked a few songs. If you’ve read earlier entries on my blog, you’ll know that I use music to elevate my mood and get me into “the zone.” There’s quite a few selections from New Order’s Substance 1987 CD. :) So this is a great playlist, but it took some time to put together and it doesn’t really have much variety.

Tangerine does this automatically by analyzing your iTunes library for beats per minute (BPM) and beat intensity, then lets you pick your BPM range and another factors and then creates a playlist for you. I definitely got more variety but still my fast beats.

Design – Tangerine has an iTunes-esque look, which is appropriate since it is intended to work closely with iTunes. It has a novel Timeline View which shows which songs it has picked for you, with higher BPM songs being taller and longer songs being wider. The toolbar is at the bottom, which is different but looks appropriate for the app. There’s also novel range choosers in the New Playlist sheet to choose BPM and Beat Intensity ranges which are nice because they show you the number but also graphically where it is in the range. Its nice to see the Potion Factory guys following the HIG but innovating when they need to.