• A new option in General Preferences now allows users to select the default view for the Item List (by location, category, collection, or all items) when Home Inventory starts.
• Home Inventory now retains the size of the left and right navigation lists (locations and items list, reports list, and policies list) between restarts.
• Fixed a bug that resulted in an error when trying to save a PDF receipt from the Item Information Area.

Home Inventory 2.6.2 is a free update for all Home Inventory 2 users. How you get the update depends on where you purchased Home Inventory. Please do not install the update available on our website if you purchased Home Inventory through the Mac App Store. Instead, if you purchased Home Inventory from the Mac App Store, please follow these instructions to install the Home Inventory 2.6.2 update:

1. Launch the Mac App Store.
2. Click the Updates button at the top of the Mac App Store window.
3. In the list of applications with updates available, click the Update button to the right of Home Inventory.

If you purchased Home Inventory directly from us or from another source outside of the Mac App Store, you can download the latest update here:

http://binaryformations.com/homeinventory/UpdateHomeInventory2.html

We are very happy to announce that Home Inventory is now on The Inventory Institutes’s list of endorsed products. This endorsement means a lot to us because it comes from an association of home inventory professionals. These are people who know how to inventory a home properly. They know what information needs to be kept, what the reports should look like, and what methods work best when it comes to creating and maintaining an inventory. It is nice to have our efforts validated by such a group.

It wasn’t long after the first release of Home Inventory back in 2005 (it was called Stockpile at the time) that home inventory professionals started using it to conduct inventories for their clients. Though Home Inventory is a consumer-oriented application, the number of professionals using it has grown significantly over the years. Just as we do periodic interviews with people in the insurance industry to make sure our software does what it needs to do, we also consult with inventory professionals whenever we can. Their feedback has been invaluable in making Home Inventory a better piece of software for consumer and pro alike.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you no doubt know that we released a silly little app called Looky a few weeks back. Looky was conceived in laziness and forged from recycled code. It wasn’t originally called Looky, though. The working title was Look Behind You, which was, for a few brief moments, changed to See Behind You because we wanted to use this for an icon:

Obviously this wasn’t going to make it’s way past the Mac App Store review process, so we had to keep looking for a name. We finally decided upon Looky after the better part of an afternoon, although I was pulling for Career Ender Pro since I didn’t think anyone would ever hire me after we released Looky to the public. Then again, maybe I should have titled this post Career Ender Pro.

I’m a podcast fanatic. I listen to them all the time. In particular, I like enthusiast podcasts, such as the Mac ReviewCast. Even more particular (?), I like enthusiast podcasts that cover our products, as the Mac ReviewCast did with Looky in episode 277. Did host Steven Beyer like Looky? Who cares! He thought the video demo we did for it was funny and that’s what really matters. After you listen to the podcast, you can watch the video here.

Usually my whims fall somewhere between borderline stupid and outright moronic. A sense self-preservation helps me keep them in check most of the time, but since we’re in the middle of some pretty heavy development work, I decided that this time I would indulge myself. Hence, our latest app: Looky.

Looky  was born out of laziness. A few weeks ago I was sitting in my office and I didn’t want to turn around to check if my door was closed or not. Instead, I used Home Inventory’s Add Photo from iSight feature to bring up a live view from my Mac’s camera to take a quick peek behind me. Sure enough, the door was closed. I found out what I needed to know and I didn’t even have to turn around. I felt I had reached new heights in the art of laziness and I wanted to share my discovery with the world (yes, that sentence is ridiculous, but so is this app).

It just didn’t seem right to write an app that was rooted in sloth completely from scratch. That would be too industrious. Instead, I took the UI code from a project that never made it past the proof of concept stage and mixed in the camera code from an un-announced project we are currently working on and voilà: Looky.

Our silly little app was done. But Diane and I felt it needed something more, so we put together a little demo video with sock puppets and lame attempts at humor that you can watch here:

After viewing this Oscar-worthy piece of cinematic art, no doubt you would like to get a copy of Looky for yourself. It’s just 99¢ and you can grab it from the Mac App Store by clicking the button below:

Home Inventory 2.6.0

A while back I posted a poll in this blog asking everyone to pick the features they would most like to see in a future update. Support for native PDF receipts topped the list with nearly a quarter of the votes. Well, I’m happy to say this feature is now available in Home Inventory 2.6.0. Here is a complete list of features and fixes in this update:

• You can now add native PDF receipts to Home Inventory. The pages of receipts added from a PDF file are no longer converted to bitmapped images as in previous versions.
• A built-in PDF viewer lets you view and print PDF receipts. Support for viewing PDF receipts is also included in version 1.1.0 of the Home Inventory Mobile Backup companion app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.
• When adding a new item to a collection using the Home Inventory Photo Remote companion app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, the item is automatically seeded with the default category and location associated with the collection. Home Inventory Photo Remote version 1.4.1 is required for this feature.
• Fixed a bug where barcode lookups were not searching Google Products if an item could not be found on Amazon.

How you get the update depends on where you purchased Home Inventory. If you purchased Home Inventory from the Mac App Store, please follow these instructions to install the Home Inventory 2.6.0 update:

1. Launch the Mac App Store.
2. Click the Updates button at the top of the Mac App Store window.
3. In the list of applications with updates available, click the Update button to the right of Home Inventory.

If you purchased Home Inventory directly from us or from another source outside of the Mac App Store, you can download the latest update here:

http://binaryformations.com/homeinventory/UpdateHomeInventory2.html

Photo Remote 1.4.1

This update to Home Inventory Photo Remote 1.4.1 is a relatively minor one. It adds support for seeding items added to a collection with the default location and category associated with that collection. This feature requires Home Inventory 2.6.0. More substantial updates to the Photo Remote app will be coming later this year.

You can find out more about the Home Inventory Photo Remote by clicking here.

Mobile Backup 1.1.0

With the addition of native PDF receipts in Home Inventory 2.6.0, Home Inventory Mobile Backup has been updated to support viewing and emailing PDF receipts as well. You can find out more about Home Inventory Mobile Backup by clicking here.

But those There’s an app for that! commercials changed everything. That and the countless media profiles of app developers who made millions in the App Store gold rush. Even though the question is asked out of genuine interest these days, that shifty-eye-looking-for-any-excuse-to-leave thing quickly makes its return as soon as the asker realizes my answer does not involve a dump truck full of money unloading in the backyard pool because that’s the only place that will hold it all.

So with a lack of anything interesting to write for the blog this week, I’m going to bore you to the point of despair  try to give you some insight on what it’s like at the worldwide headquarters of Binary Formations. Last chance to hit the back button on your browser…

Get Up and Get Going

Imagine an alarm clock that chooses what time it goes off in the morning. You never know when it will wake you, only than it will be earlier than you want. It doesn’t have a snooze button and if you don’t get out of bed it will jump on your stomach like it’s a trampoline while repeatedly asking if it can watch cartoons. My alarm clock is my three-year-old son, Adam, and he has relegated the idea of sleeping in to the realm of fantasy. The upshot, if there is such a thing, is that I keep normal business hours.

Ask anyone who works from home about the biggest advantage over going into an office and they will almost always tell you it’s the commute. To get to work I walk down the hallway, hang a right and I’m at the door to my office. Just far enough to make it feel like I’m going somewhere without actually having to stick so much as a toe outside of my house. I’m not going to lie to you or sugarcoat it. My commute is awesome. My deepest apologies if you are stuck in traffic going to and from work each day. Keep reading, it’s not all roses.

It’s when I swing open the office door that I encounter my first obstacle to blissful productivity. Take a close look at this annotated photo of my office:

My Office

As you can see from the photo, in order to make it to my chair in front of the computer I must first pass through the Gauntlet of Distraction. This virtually infinite stretch of faux hardwood (fardwood?) flooring is lined on either side by Fun Things capable of making loud, obnoxious noises known as musical instruments. I like very much to make such noises and so it requires near monastic levels of discipline to make it through the Gauntlet of Distraction and arrive at my office chair  in time to get any work done for the day. Even after successfully completing my journey, the Fun Things beckon relentlessly throughout the day. I’m ashamed to admit it, but sometimes I give in. We all have our weaknesses.

Stay at Home Fashion

Have you ever had one of those days where you stay in your pajamas until well past noon before you even begin to contemplate the idea of taking a shower? Me too, my friend. Every single day and it’s awesome. No bland, “business casual”, khaki-pantsed uniforms. No having to shave each morning. No worrying about ironing my clothes. A bathrobe will do just fine, thank you very much. Or not.

Every now and then I delude myself with the idea that I’m going start to getting dressed as soon as I get up in order to retain a sense of normalcy. This concept rarely lasts until the next morning. After two days, at most, I’m back to my normal abnormal ways.

The part that’s not all roses is coming soon. Promise.

App Store Addiction

Over a decade ago I opened my first online stock trading account. I checked my portfolio so often throughout the day you would have thought I was a day trader, even though my holdings were rather meager. I eventually sold everything off because it turned out that I was terrible at picking stocks (I dumped my Apple shares right as the iPod was taking off because I thought they were focusing too much on what would surely turn out to be a fad that would last a year or two at most). I was happy I was no longer throwing money away and I was also glad to be rid of my addiction to checking my portfolio every hour of the day.

Well that addiction has come roaring back and it has a new name: the App Store (or Mac App Store, as it may be). What’s my app’s overall ranking? How’s it doing in its category? Are there any new reviews? How’s my competition doing? Did Apple put us in a feature again? These questions are always rattling around in my App Store-addicted head. Sometimes I find myself clicking on the Mac App Store icon just minutes after the last time I checked. It’s utterly insane. Seriously, it’s not right. I wonder if there’s a twelve-step program for this.

Fear and Paranoia

Sometimes I let a little bit of fear work its way in and I realize how fragile this situation might be. We have one product, Home Inventory, that brings in most of the money. One single app pays the mortgage and keeps our family fed. Any day a competitor could come along and take our market share from us. Or maybe we take the product in the wrong direction, let a really bad bug slip through, or get a terrible review and sales dry up. Then it’s bye-bye dream job and hello rush-hour traffic and angry boss.

For all I know someone is working on that dream-killer at this very moment. I’ll admit, it’s a big fear of mine and one I can’t afford to be consumed by. But it’s healthy to indulge in from time to time. Fear and the uninvited party guest it brings along with it, paranoia, can be serious motivators. Over the past few months, especially, I have learned to channel these into what I hope will turn out  to be some pretty good ideas that we’ll be bringing out over the course of this year.

The Actual Work Part

One of the best things about running a very small company is that I don’t really have a job description. Or rather, everything is my job description. We don’t have the luxury of having a marketing department or sales department. There is no in-house web designer or graphic artist. With the exception of an accountant we go see when its time to file our tax return, my wife and I pretty much do everything ourselves. While it can get a little nutty trying to juggle so many different tasks, it keeps things interesting and means that each day is completely different.

Take the day I’m writing this post as an example. I spent the morning working on some code for a new application we will debut later this year. This afternoon I plan on reading some documentation on a new technology we will be using, creating some templates for a marketing project my wife is working on, and fixing some bugs that were found during testing of the forthcoming Home Inventory update.

Customer Support

If you’re a smalltime app developer and don’t want your customers to hate you, customer service has to become a way of life. The very first thing I do when I sit down in front of the computer each morning is answer any support emails that may have come in overnight. I continue to answer emails throughout the day and it’s often the last thing I do before I go to bed at night.

I place a high value on responsive customer service, which means that I check my email regularly on weekends and during holidays and vacations. I’ll admit that it can be frustrating and intrusive at times, but I like hearing from our customers. It’s the only way to really find out what you’re doing right and where you’re messing it all up.

Goofing Off

When you have no boss, there is no one to yell at you or fire you for goofing off during the work day. This is where it is very important to love what you do. Fortunately, I really do enjoy my job and on those rare days that I just don’t feel like working, I have a secret weapon: we don’t have cable TV in our home. We don’t have satellite either. That’s right, all we have is over the air television and we get only a handful of channels. About half of them are PBS stations and I am firmly against watching anything educational or informative while goofing off. As compelling as the complete, five-part documentary on the history of the hammer may be for some, I would much rather stay in my office and work than nip downstairs for a little TV.

If you don’t love your job and have the complete-extended-ultra-uber-deluxe channel package all in HD with a DVR, I highly recommend not working from home. Or maybe you should. It’s one way to get rid of that job you don’t love.

Social Interaction

As a natural born computer programmer, I’m genetically predisposed toward awkward social interaction. This can be overcome, somewhat, by being around other people on a regular basis. When you do something often enough, eventually you get better at it. Musicians call this practice.

When you’re working from home, there is no practice. It doesn’t take long before basic conversational conventions, such as small talk, chit chat, and paying attention to what the other person is saying, are completely lost. Conversation devolves into thinking with your mouth open. Throw wide your jaw and whatever you’re thinking at the moment immediately transforms into its audible form and rushes to escape through the big hole that just opened in your face. This inevitably leads to saying awkward and questionably appropriate things at times where actual conversation and a bit of decorum are called for. It can be funny, though.

Eventually I expect my language skills will devolve completely due to lack of use. If, in the future, you send a support request and get back a bunch of gibberish, now you’ll know why — either that or my son is playing on my computer again.

On the plus side, I no longer have to deal with that annoying co-worker that’s always wandering into my office to chit-chat when I have work to do. Of course back when I worked in an office, that annoying co-worker was often me.

Signing Off

One thing you have to be careful of when you work from home is that work is always there. It can stalk you during your free time and, when you least expect it, pounce on you! The next thing you know it’s past midnight and you’re still working. It’s okay to let this happen every now and again, but if you don’t exert tight control over it, you can easily reach a point where work and the rest of your life are indistinguishable.

I know. I’ve been there. The funny thing is, it was at my last ‘real’ job before I went off on my own to do what I’m doing now. Working sixty-plus hour weeks, every single week, for years on end was a miserable existence and management had come to take it for granted that I would do it. Eventually I realized it was stupid to put so much effort into someone else’s dream and I stopped.

Now that I’m living my own dream, you’d think I would be working twelve hour days again, right? Hell no. I love what I do for a living, but I love spending time with my family even more. I’m not going to lie and say that I don’t occasionally sneak in a little work late at night or on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but it doesn’t happen often. One thing that helps keep the work/life balance actually in balance is eating dinner as a family at a regular time. Each and every day at 5:30 I head downstairs to either cook dinner or take care of Adam while my wife cooks. It’s quittin’ time and the work day is done. Time for my wife and I to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

We are participating in a 24-hour sale of Home Inventory for just $0.99 (US) only on the Mac App Store as part of zeroninetynine.com’s Mac App Store deal. This give customers who bought Home Inventory outside of the Mac App Store the opportunity to migrate over at the lowest possible price. Other Mac developers participating in this promotion will be making their apps available for the same discounted price, so head over to zeroninetynine.com to pickup a great deal on some high quality apps. The promotion begins on January 12th at 00:01 A.M. EST and will last for only 24 hours.

Please note: If you purchased Home Inventory outside of the Mac App Store and wish to take advantage of this offer, you will first need to remove your current copy of Home Inventory from your Applications folder. The Mac App Store will not install or update an application over a pre-existing version that was installed outside of the Mac App Store.

We have a lot in the works for 2012 and I would like to share some of it with you as well as address a few items I think you should know about.

Home Inventory

Work is underway on Home Inventory 2.6. It will be a smaller release than originally planned due to the need to support Apple’s sandboxing requirement for the Mac App Store and having to temporarily shelve iCloud support due to problems with iCloud itself (more on both of these items later in this post). Much of the work being done on Home Inventory 2.6 is in preparation for running in a protected “sandbox” under OS X Lion and putting in the underpinnings to support some other features we have planned (hooray for architectural changes with vague promises of future goodness!). That being said, we’re also going to try to get in a few of the items from the poll I posted on this blog back in November. If all goes according to plan, expect to see version 2.6 sometime in February.

Of course we have some pretty big plans for Home Inventory and its iOS companion apps beyond the version 2.6 update, but we need to keep these a secret for the time being.

Sandboxing Home Inventory

Depending on how closely you follow the minutia of the Mac App Store and the Mac development world, you may or may not be aware of Apple’s controversial requirement that all apps submitted to the Mac App Store beginning March 1, 2012 must conform to OS X Lion’s scheme for running apps in a secure “sandbox”. Getting Home Inventory ready for this is a high priority. Some developers are happy about this new requirement. Others are not. We have both feet firmly planted in the “not” camp, but it is something we need to do in order to continue to make Home Inventory available through the Mac App Store.

iCloud Support

A lot of people ask us when we’re going to add iCloud support to Home Inventory. Unfortunately I can’t give you an answer because, to be perfectly blunt, iCloud just isn’t ready for primetime yet. There are too many bugs, particularly on the Mac side. Paul Mayne, the man behind the brilliant and elegant Day One app, sums up some of the reasons in this blog post. There are other problems as well that are more specific to Home Inventory and other applications that make use of large, monolithic databases.

We still intend on adding support for iCloud once Apple has resolved these problems. As things stand now, I have no idea when this will be.

Mac App Store Migration

Another popular question that often appears in our inbox is whether there is a way for customers that purchased Home Inventory outside of the Mac App Store to migrate to the Mac App Store version without having to buy it again. Apple currently doesn’t offer a mechanism for migrating outside purchases, so this just isn’t possible at this time. In fact the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m convinced that Apple will never make a migration path available (though I’m sure now that I’ve said this they will go and do just that). Instead we’ve come up with a possible alternative that I hope we will be able to announce in this blog and in our email newsletter in the coming weeks.

A Brand New App

Diane and I have been kicking around ideas for another Mac application for a few years now. We’ve finally settled on an idea that we both like and hope to bring it to you sometime later this year. We won’t be saying too much about it publicly until we’re ready to launch, but I can tell you this: it is not related to Home Inventory in any way, shape, or form.

And Finally…

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, last year saw Binary Formations transition from a part-time hobby to a full-fledged company, albeit still a tiny one. Because of this, my wife marked the end of 2011 by quitting her day job to spend more time on Binary Formations. Diane brings a unique perspective to software development and has been invaluable in helping refine our products into something much better than I could ever create on my own. I’m thrilled our future endeavors will now have her full attention.

Once again, many, many thanks to those who have supported us in making this happen. I am excited about the year ahead and hope 2012 brings you and yours the very best.

Kevin Hamilton
Binary Formations, LLC

In the spirit of this holiday season, I wanted to post something about one of my favorite charities: Child’s Play. Child’s Play provides toys and games for hospitals and therapy facilities. Nothing tears at my heart like a sick child and providing them with toys and games to play with may not seem like much, but it helps take their minds off  the very serious challenges they face and brings a little bit of normal to a situation that is anything but.

Here’s a bit more about how Child’s Play works (taken from their website):

Child’s Play works in two ways. With the help of hospital staff, we set up gift wish lists full of video games, toys, books, and other fun stuff for kids. By clicking on a hospital location on our map, you can view that hospital’s wish list and send a gift.

Child’s Play also receives cash donations throughout the year. With those cash donations, we purchase new consoles, peripherals, games, and more for hospitals and therapy facilities. These donations allow for children to enjoy age-appropriate entertainment, interact with their peers, friends, and family, and can provide vital distraction from an otherwise generally unpleasant experience.

I realize times are tough, but if you have a little extra and Child’s Play sounds like I worthy cause to you, I encourage you to head over to http://childsplaycharity.org/donate and see if there is a hospital near you that could use some help or maybe donate to Child’s Play directly. I am also proud to announce that Binary Formations is a corporate sponsor of Child’s Play.