[RobertChin retain];

I saw recently on macupdate that apparently as a developer I have been “on hiatus.” I would like to assure the internet that I have in fact not been absent, but that I would prefer to spend my time working on software than writing blog posts. In fact there have been updates to all of my applications, but most times I have not bothered to write about them. Although never mentioned here on this blog, I am the author of Wikipanion — the popular Wikipedia and wiki browsing software on iOS. A lot of my time has been spent maintaining and building that piece of software, but of course my older apps hold a special place in my mind. When I first wrote apps like Active Timer I was still a college student where my time did not have much value since everything I made was free. But as you know iOS developers are now quite in demand. Anyway Active Timer now costs money since the only model where it receives regular updates is one in which it can pay its own bills. I hope that the new features including “freezing timers” (splitting the existing time off and create a new timer) and project folders will be enough to entice you to purchase.

A friend Johan Basberg now does design work for Active Timer. We have a lot of great plans, but these can only come to fruition with your help. Thanks.

Additionally I have posted a limited demo of Active Timer. It is feature complete and unlimited in time, mostly give you helpful notices to purchase the full version after you have used it for awhile.

I know it’s been a long time since we’ve updated NicePlayer, but it has been getting progressively more difficult to use with each new OS X update. Never the less I still use NicePlayer all of the time, and so that is why today I’m releasing the latest update to work better with Mavericks. Please let me know if you experience and crashes or really bad issues. I probably won’t have time to add any major features, but at least you can continue to use NicePlayer as you always have.

Download NicePlayer Mavericks Edition (0.98-rc)

After years of quiet work, I would like to announce Active Timer 2.0 which contains numerous enhancements:

• Grouped timers allow you to see only a subset of timers
• Timer freezing stops the current time on a timer and any new activity in that frozen application or window appears as a new entry, useful for project completion or billing purposes
• Menu mode allows you to select whether to run active timer hidden in the menu bar or with a dock icon.
• Automatically launch Active Timer at startup
• Color based labelling
• Searching
• “Sandboxed” for security

Now available in the app store. Let me know in the comments if there are feature you would like to see.