For anyone in that situation who relies on On The Job, it’s probably worth waiting a few of days to upgrade your OS.

As for our other apps, we don’t believe there are any show-stopper issues that should prevent you from upgrading. If you do notice any problems, be sure to let us know!

The Mac App Store offers a great way to purchase and install apps in one easy step. We’re really excited to be a part of it, and hope to have more of our applications in the store soon.

Of course On The Job is still available for purchase through our online store, and we have no plans to change that. Choice is good!

So, you may be wondering, what is Freeform? Freeform is a vector drawing application – a simple, somewhat limited, experimental first release. Think of it as Adobe Illustrator extra-lite. After using Freeform on an iPad I’m inclined to disagree with what I’ve heard from some – that the iPad will not be useful for content creation. There’s something that just feels great about drawing and manipulating shapes and curves with your fingers instead of a mouse.

Why experimental? There are a couple of reasons I’m labeling it that way. First, without having an iPad to develop on I wasn’t sure how the idea would pan out, or if the experience of creating vector graphics on an iPad would be something I’d want to spend time on. I now think that it is a worthwhile project and am very excited to move forward with it. Another “experimental” factor is the business model behind the application. The iPhone app store has turned into mainly a hit-based model, so if your application is a hit, you make money at the beginning, which usually tapers off quickly as time goes on. I’m developing Freeform with more of a traditional desktop application model in mind. This means that the price will be more than 99¢ cents, and it will be higher than the current price of $4.99 in a couple of versions. It doesn’t have as wide of an audience as some 99¢ games, and hopefully the people who end up using it will agree it’s worth more than five bucks.

While the current feature set is limited, I have a long to-do list with some features that I think will make the app significantly more functional, and useable for “real work”. If you are a designer, or anyone who has the need to create graphics, I’d be very interesting in hearing about what features the current version of Freeform is lacking that would enable you to actually be productive. Hopefully even the current version is fun enough to use that it’s worth the price!

I was lucky enough to be featured in one of these interviews. To produce the videos New Media Manitoba tapped the incredible talents of BlinkWorks – James Swirsky (@jamesswirsky) and Lisanne Pajot (@lisannepajot).

All uncomfortablness in watching a recorded version of myself aside, James and Lisanne did an amazing  job on the interviews.

The rest of the interviews – posted on the BlinkWorks site, are very much worth watching as well.

Also check out their overview of the New Media Community in Manitoba

It was a great night, and great to meet with so many local people doing cool things. Thanks to all involved!

Our online store has been updated, and we can now (finally!) accept PayPal payments directly. We wanted to be able to accept American Express payments as well, but that is still a work in progress. For now, it is possible to set up a PayPal account with your American Express and use the PayPal option on our store. The look of the store has also been cleaned up so that it’s hopefully a little easier to use.

We have also started using Tender to handle our new forums. The goal is to unify support and take some of the pressure of of our email inbox, which really isn’t ideal for tracking and handling support requests.

As I mentioned, the blog has undergone a facelift. The focus of the blog has been somewhat wandering in the past. Going forward we will attempt to narrow that, focusing on mainly Stunt software news and tips for users of our software. Comments have been disabled. We found that comments were being maily used as another area for feature requests and suggestions, or even bug reports. This was not an ideal location, as it was hard for us to track. For comments of that nature, please use the new support forums. We’ll miss those comments that were simply complimentary, but think this simplification is for the best.

So, that’s about it for now. It’s time to get back to bug fixes and new features for our applications! The amount of work that goes into the website really makes it feel like another application, and in many ways it is. Just like any app, it’s bound to have a couple of bugs, so let us know if you see anything that doesn’t seem quite right.

Additionally, the On The Job 3 update contains a handful of bug fixes, and some new features. Most importantly, new Export options have been gained allowing data stored in On The Job to be exported as plain text, or in CSV or XML format. You can look at the full change notes by clicking here.

The update to Overflow is more minor, but still contains a couple of minor bug fixes and is recommended for all users.

Enjoy!

The first update for On The Job 3 is now available. This release is nearly all bug fixes and doesn’t contain new features (csv export, for example, which is still on the way). One exception to this is that you can now properly translate the “Total” and “Total Before Tax” labels on an invoice, which will allow the invoice to be fully customized into the language or wording of your choice. It also fixes a problem that sometimes prevented taxes from showing up on an invoice.

If you’re interested in more details, take a look at the full release notes.

To grab the new version – head on over and click on the Download button!

I’m very happy to announce the immediate availability of On The Job 3.0.

Please visit the new website, download the application and check it out.

There is a lot of new stuff in this version. In fact, it was such a complete rewrite that this really feels much more like a version 1.0 release than a 3.0. I will try to find some time in the next few days to write more about the release here.

Thanks to everyone for their support and patience, I hope you enjoy the app!

First an announcement: On The Job 3 will be released in January 2009.

This project has taken much longer to get out than anticipated, for a variety of reasons. It was certainly not intentional, and has been a learning experience for us as a young company.

On The Job 3 is what I spend every day working on. We want it out more than anybody. The continued success of our company depends on it.

We have understandably been getting a lot of questions from people anticipating the release. First and foremost, beyond a release date, the questions are regarding new features. While we’re not ready to spill all of the beans yet, here are some details.

• Invoices will be more flexible, in both layout & design options, as well as what items are visible on the invoice.
• There will be functionality for tracking payments on invoices.
• Items in a Job will be able to have their own custom hourly rates.
• New support for multiple currencies.
• Full undo support.
• Automatic invoice number generation will be possible.
• Billing in quantities, and billing for mileage will now be possible.
• Individual timing sessions, including start and end times will be viewable and editable.
• Much more that I can’t wait to talk about.

A lot of these are smaller changes, but ones that have been asked for a lot. The actual engineering effort going into version 3 is actually much larger. Internally, it is nearly a complete rewrite.

I want to thank everyone for their enthusiasm and patience. The supportive emails we have been getting are great.

One last note – we will be looking for a few additional beta testers in the coming weeks. If you are interested, please send an email to onthejob-beta@stuntsoftware.com.

Update: We have enough beta testers at the moment – thank you for all of the offers!