A couple weeks ago I downloaded Potion Store for fun and started playing with the admin interface in a development environment. It was way better than anything I had and I wanted it. The only downside was that I would have to sign up for PayPal pro and would lose $30 each month. I justified that as motivation to do more frequent updates and release new apps. Hope it helps.

It took me 7 days of very part time work to finish deploying the store. The biggest pain was adding support for state taxes. I’m a resident of Idaho and am required to collect sales tax from anyone buying rooSwitch that also lives in Idaho. PayPal’s express checkout is not setup to handle this very well. If you’re interested in the details, I started a thread at pdncommunity. I still can’t figure out why more people aren’t talking about this issue. It makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong. (Feel free to educate me in the comments if you know what I’m doing wrong )

Apart from that little sales tax glitch, I’m happy with the results.

Happy 2008!

Here’s some quick status on the rooApps:

rooSwitch

The 1.2 release was started many months ago and took way too long to finish. I have ideas and user submitted feature requests that could either be rolled into a 1.3, but it’s more likely the next major release will be a 2.0. However, I don’t expect to see this happen before Fall 2008. This would likely be a Leopard only release and an almost complete rewrite (the are some things in 1.x that need rewriting )

rooVid

I finally abondoned hope of ever realesing a rooVid non-lite version on the 1.0 label. During WWDC 2007 I sketched out rooVid 2.0. In my mind it was three things:

• A video convertor featuring profiles (just like lite 1.0 is today)
• A video uploader (to YouTube, your .mac account, your personal website, etc)
• A video organizer

The feature I was most excited about was the organizer. Then iLife ‘08 with the new iMovie was announced and I decided to shelf rooVid 2 again. It seemed the organizer part and a lot of the upload and converting was taken care of by Apple in the new iMovie. Now, months after using iMovie ‘08 I realize I still want a better organizer and a better convertor and a better everything. I enjoy creating movies in iMovie ‘08 (I think I’m one of the only ones that likes the new interface) but the organizing and exporting leave room for rooVid.

rooVid 2 will definitely be a Leopard only app and I hope to have it available in late Spring 2008.

Misc

I know I’ve never been good at estimating when I’ll be able to finish an app or even point releases. I blame this poor scheduling on lack of time and poor time management of that limited time by me. Having a full time job, a family (Married with 2 small girls) and trying to do this work when possible can be hard, and very hard to do consistently without burning out. If all goes well things will be changing around the end of January/early February that will help me with this time issue and remove an excuse or two for me not getting things done. More news on that when it’s official.

Merry Christmas!

Thanks guys

Earlier this week, I found a user generated screencast showing off rooSwitch managing multiple profiles for Final Cut Pro. I got in touch with the author and chatted a bit about rooSwitch and asked if I could post his screencast. Not only did he let me post it, but he redid it to explain a little more of how he’s doing what he’s doing. The six minute QuickTime movie can be seen below:

rooSwitch and Final Cut Pro.mov

Since I’m not a Final Cut Pro user I would never have known this problem existed nor that it could be helped by rooSwitch.

Many thanks to Steve at Double Wide Post in NYC for the great screencast.

I’m obviously pretty excited about this and am glad I made it to WWDC this year. It’s really awesome to have something I made be recognized by Apple.

On with the thanks.

I’ll start by thanking my wife and our two girls. They don’t know Cocoa (yet) nor do they use rooSwitch, they do put up with me and occasionally encourage my programming habits.

Next the peers. I had a lot of help with rooSwitch from some great peers. Specifically (in first name alphabetical order): Andy Kim, Daniel Jalkut, Luis de la Rosa and Steve Harris. I actually got to go out to dinner with 3 of those 4 tonight (all but Daniel). It was my first time meeting both Andy and Steve in person.

Now the catch-all (cause I’m sure I forgot someone (sorry)). Thanks to everyone on the rooSwitch beta mailing list and all the users that provided feedback.

OK, that’s all.

Last year I ran a sale on rooSwitch for the week of WWDC. I even had business cards that advertised the sale. I still have plenty of those cards. Instead of making new cards, I decided to run the sale again. Benefit from my laziness: http://roobasoft.com/rooSwitch?WWDC=1.

MacSanta is:

Thanks to MacSanta, you can save 20% off applications from all 77 companies below! Just use coupon code MACSANTA to save through December 25th.

The number 77 is probably higher by the time you read this. Apps are being added daily.

Since I didn’t have a way to accept coupons, I wasn’t going to participate (read: I’m lazy). Fortunately I got an appropriate nudge from a friend and I took care of that: Save 20% on rooSwitch

Don’t forget to give the full list a look. Enjoy!

Credit and thanks go to the Rogue Amoeba guys for setting this up.

note: In order to get this to work, you should rename your main library from ~/Music/iTunes to anything else. I suggest ~/Music/iTunes5000. Doing this will cause the main library to be hidden from rooSwitch. Now reopen iTunes holding down option and choose the iTunes5000 Library. There’s another way to do this mentioned in the forum posting, but it’s a lot more involved.

Once you’ve hidden the music files from rooSwitch create a new profile, or duplicate the current one and switch to it. Quit iTunes and re-open it holding down the option key. Create a new library wherever you want. Now when you switch between the two profiles you’ll be switching between the two libraries and rooSwitch won’t be moving any data.

Why doesn’t brokosz just hold down option on every iTunes launch and not bother with rooSwitch? Cause remembering to hold down option and then fumbling around to find the library you want is a pain. Using rooSwitch brokosz can have friendly named profiles and have rooSwitch quit and relaunch iTunes.

Right now I’m using this such that I have all the podcasts I listen to in their own iTunes Library. I’m doing this because I’ve found 4GB+ of podcasts before and I’m hoping they’re easier to keep an eye on / contain this way.

This same method should work for iPhoto, but I’ve yet to test it (I will soon).
update 2006.09.30: Just confirmed that the same procedure works great for managing multiple iPhoto libraries as well.

A four minute screencast is available here.

There’s more information on the lite versions web page. Please give it a go and send me feedback.

Enjoy!