Interviews

Business productivity on the iPhone: Daylite Touch

On June 23rd an announcement was made at the Marketcircle Blog which revealed that an iPhone companion to their business productivity application, Daylite, was being developed. The news has been greeted with great enthusiasm from current Daylite users, and we got a chance to talk to Marketcircle’s president, AJ, about their mobile development plans.

First, for those not familiar with Daylite, it’s what AJ refers to as a Business Productivity Manager. “It’s more than a PIM,” AJ stated, “it’s more than groupware. Our premise is something called a Productivity Pyramid. The bottom layer is tasks, notes, files, meetings, urls, et cetera. The second layer is people: contacts, your companies and users. The top layer is what we call objectives, which is projects and opportunities.” Daylite is geared towards helping small business — ranging from one to fifty people — move forward.

Very recently, Marketcircle released a new version of Daylite which integrates with the iWork suite. Daylite can also integrate with Mail.app and supports Sync Services for iCal and Address Book syncing.

The developers at Marketcircle were receiving constant requests for mobile applications for Palm, Blackberry, etc. AJ says that, at that point, the richness of data provided by Daylite didn’t sync well with the available platforms. “And no offense to those platforms,” he went on, “but they’re quite ugly.” All of that was “until we got the iPhone.”
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ScreenSteps 2.1 released, interview with Blue Mango

Screensteps, the software documentation generator we’ve come to love, has reached an official 2.1 status and has been released into the wild. Well, as wild as software documentation gets, anyway. This gem is a favorite and I’m personally very psyched about the new upload-to-blog feature, which has come a long way since we first announced it in the beta. The other 74 enhancements, changes and fixes can be found in the release notes.

You’d expect software in this genre to be well documented … you won’t be disappointed. In addition to the extensive, ScreenSteps-generated online manual, there are new screencasts available on the updated website. You can also grab a 30-day trial of ScreenSteps Pro on the download page. The Standard version is priced at $39.95 and the Pro version comes in at $59.95 (feature comparison).

I happened to have a chance to sit down with Trevor and Greg, creators of ScreenSteps, at WWDC. It’s quite by coincidence that I managed to finish editing and uploading the video right before they let me know about the 2.1 release. Our chat is after the jump.

[Viddler Link|QuickTime version]
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WWDC’08: Jeff Mancuso (Magnetk)

ExpanDrive made a pretty good stir when it was released. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an application that allows remote SFTP servers to be mounted (using MacFUSE) and used seamlessly as part of the filesystem. We’ve been following it as it develops and I wanted a chance to talk to its developers about what’s up next.

I caught up with Jeff Mancuso of Magnetk last week and did just that. I found out where Amazon S3 plans are at, and what ExpanDrive has to offer Flickr, Facebook and other web applications. The video (after the jump) is very nicely lit, too, just for you.

[Viddler Link|QuickTime Version]
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(Post) WWDC ‘08: Vara Software

I missed my chance to meet up with Vara Software at WWDC, which I was lamenting even before they went and won two Apple Design Awards, including Best Mac OS X Leopard Application. I called Paul Carnine, Vara’s founder and one of its developers, to talk about the achievement, Vara Software in general, and their increasingly impressive software lineup.

The software winning all of the acclaim right now is ScreenFlow, which we excitedly covered when it was initially released. With the last several releases it’s become increasingly polished and continues to be one of the best screencasting applications on the Mac market. It’s possibly the only application in it’s category to rightfully bill itself as a complete “studio.” Apparently Apple appreciates this one as much as I do. Read the rest of this entry

Popularity: 14% [?]

WWDC ‘08: Agile Web Solutions (1Password)

Dave and Roustem from Agile Web Solutions, authors of the form-filling powerhouse known as 1Password, were happy to talk about WWDC, Mac development and the future of 1Password and its upcoming iPhone counterpart. We’ve taken quite a few notes as 1Password has developed, and while I love the iPhone bookmarklet, I’m excited to see work being done on a native app!

There were laughs, tears and some pronounced (and lovable) Canadian colloquialisms. And that’s just in the 10 minutes that survived the editing. Video after the jump.

[Viddler Link | QuickTime Version]
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Popularity: 11% [?]