Category: Gaucho Software (Page 5 of 8)

Conversion Rates

June 9, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Rogue Amoeba put out this challenge for other Mac software developers to share their conversion rates. These numbers for Gaucho Software are for the month of March, which is the most recent month with an average amount of activity.

	Seasonality	Dash Monitors	XRG
Downloads:	X	3.5X	3.7X
Sales:	Y	0.3Y	N/A
Conversion Rate:	6.9%	0.5%	N/A

The conversion rate here for Seasonality is a little bit high. I checked a couple of other months and the rate was a more modest 4-5%. Looking at these numbers, it looks like the best way to increase my sales is to either get more people to try Seasonality, or to improve Dash Monitors enough to increase it’s conversion rate.

One interesting note is that even though XRG hasn’t been updated since the beginning of 2005, it is still my most downloaded product. Of course, this changes during a month with a Seasonality or Dash Monitors release. For example, so far this month with the release of version 1.3, Seasonality has been downloaded 3.5 times more often than XRG.

Seasonality 1.3

June 2, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

After 5 or so months of work Seasonality 1.3 is finally ready. Version 1.3 is a Universal Binary, and it runs much nicer on Intel Macs than 1.2 had previously. I’ve also made several code optimizations, so even if you don’t have an Intel Mac you will observe a noticeable speed increase, especially while working with the satellite image and graphs.

There are plenty of new features this time around. The biggest one is a new Weather Journal. You can create a journal entry for each day and Seasonality will automatically keep track of high/low temperatures and sunrise/sunset times for that day. Then add your own text or photos to the entry. It uses a standard NSTextView, so all the typical text editor properties are available. Thanks go out to whoever worked on NSTextView at Apple/NeXT for making it so easy. 😉

There’s also a new graph interface that’s pretty cool. I received a lot of requests to be able to show more than 2 graphs at once, so this new interface will allow users to show all 6 graphs at the same time.

Another big new feature is the new radar overlay imagery. Technically, the radar images are the same as they were before, but instead of being restricted to just showing radar imagery in the vicinity of your configured locations, now Seasonality will automatically fetch radar images for wherever you happen to be browsing in the U.S., Guam and Puerto Rico. A large piece of the code to support the new radar images is a new image overlay class I created. This will make it much easier to add additional image overlays at a later point in time, and even allow users to add their own image overlays eventually. I’m hoping to find suitable radar overlays for other parts of the world, another often-requested feature.

I’ve added a couple of tips to the General Seasonality Forum. Be sure to check them out and while you’re there, feel free to post some feedback. 🙂

Large Scale Weather

May 12, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

If you live in the Midwest, you are probably pretty familiar with all the rain we’ve been getting the past few days. The low pressure system that has formed is one of the largest I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s centered just over Lake Michigan, and you can see clouds extending well up into Canada all the way down the east coast to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Yesterday it bottomed out just about 40 miles West of Mt. Pleasant. We had a 983mb pressure reading, which is the lowest pressure we’ve had here since before I started writing Seasonality. 🙂 The interesting thing about this system is that it’s not really moving much at all. Typically, low pressure systems will form to the West of us, and just move on through within a day or two. This one will probably hang around for 5-6 days. It’s centered over Lake Michigan right now, is expected to move down into Illinois and Ohio over the next day or two, and then perhaps come up North again. It’s forecasted to be dropping rain on and off here through the beginning of next week.

Here’s a screenshot of the storm in Seasonality. This shot also shows one of the cool new features I’ve added in version 1.3, a full radar image overlay. The National Weather Service started offering a high resolution US map with a composite of all the radar images. Now Seasonality uses that to generate a map, so it makes long-distance viewing much nicer with respect to precipitation. I just wish this feature could extend into Canada to show the rest of this storm (US radar sites reach just north of the US-Canada border as you can see in this image), or the rest of the world for that matter. Seasonality 1.3 is coming along slower than originally expected, but it has several new features. Expect an announcement around the end of this month.

MacBook Pro Temperature Sensors

April 20, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Just as an update of my MacBook Pro situation…I picked up a 2Ghz MacBook Pro at the Apple Store in Grand Rapids yesterday. So far, this model is an order of magnitude better than my last machine. Only a single noise problem still exists, and it is so much lower in volume that I don’t think it will be an issue at all. Furthermore, physically the machine feels like it’s built better. The trackpad button feels a lot nicer, and it takes more effort to move the screen on it’s hinge, which results in a much nicer feel. I’m a happy customer. 🙂

I came across a somewhat unfortunate hint when looking at the recently posted Developer Note of the MacBook Pro machines on Apple’s site. It looks like Apple no longer controls thermal profiles from the OS, so it’s unlikely that apps like XRG or Dash Monitors will ever be able to capture temperatures or fan speeds on these models. Here’s a quote from the Developer Note:

System Management Controller The MacBook Pro uses an advanced system management controller (SMC) to manage thermal and power conditions, while keeping the acoustic noise to a minimum. The SMC is fully independent of the operating system.

Making the SMC completely independent of the OS is a very good thing. Without OS independence, thermal drivers for Windows XP, Linux, or any other OS you want to run on Intel machines would have to be written. This code can be fairly difficult to write, so really the SMC will make things much easier in that respect.

However, it would be nice if Apple provided a way to monitor what the SMC is doing…let the SMC do it’s job, but give me a way to find out how my machine is feeling.

Update: James Conolly and Cryptonome (from the source, InCrew) both mentioned SpeedIt in the comments, which made the news a few days after I wrote this post. I have yet to look into the full details of the implementation, but it looks like there might be MacBook Pro temperature monitor support in XRG afterall. While it probably wouldn’t make sense to include SpeedIt directly with XRG, if a user has SpeedIt installed, it should be fairly easy for XRG to pick up the temperatures and display them. Yet another feature to add to the next release. Thanks go out to the InCrew folks for making this possible.

Seasonality 1.2

January 25, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Most of you have probably noticed that Seasonality 1.2 was posted today. I’m pretty excited about the announcement. While this release didn’t take nearly as long to develop as version 1.1 did, it was still a significant undertaking. The beta-testing stage alone has been over a month. So I’m both excited, and in a sense relieved that the hard part has now passed. 🙂

Today has been a pretty typical release day. I’ve spent most of my time in Mail.app and Safari, submitting the update to different news sites and responding to user feedback. I’ve been trying to target French news sites because obviously with a French translation my market just got a lot larger in that country. So far the release is going really well. The server’s been keeping up with the load without any slowdowns or problems there. Speaking of load, this will probably end up being the most traffic ever served in a single day for Gaucho Software. Since around 8:45am when the announcement hit the first news sites, the web server has hosted over 8GB of traffic. Data rates averaged over 450KB/sec for the entire hour from 1-2pm this afternoon. I wish I could see what the peak traffic values were.

Again, I want to thank Ronald Leroux and Philippe Martin for working on the French translation. I can’t even guess how many hours they must have spent on it, and it turned out great. I also want to thank all the beta testers for giving me feedback this time around. I know there were a couple of changes requested that didn’t make it into this release, but I’m hoping to have them ready for the next one. 🙂

Gaucho Software News Feeds

January 23, 2006 / mike / 3 Comments

Ever since the beginning of Gaucho Software’s web presence, the index web page has displayed general news items about software updates and other miscellaneous items. I decided it was time to offer an RSS news feed to make it easier for users to keep up with what Gaucho Software is doing. A few weeks ago, I came across an excellent RSS generator called Feeder created by Steve Harris through his software company, Reinvented Software. Feeder finally gave me an easy way to create RSS feeds and post them on my website. So here it is, the Gaucho Software news feed:

Gaucho Software News Feed

A general Gaucho Software news feed is great and all, but each individual app has their own news items. I’m planning to create feeds for each of them starting with Seasonality, which has an update coming soon…

Seasonality News Feed

I’ll be adding feeds for Dash Monitors and XRG when I work on porting them to Intel in the coming months. In the mean time, any app updates for either of them will be posted to the Gaucho Software news feed.

Upcoming Seasonality Release and Survey

January 18, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

The release of Seasonality 1.2 is coming up pretty quick. I’m taking care of the last changes and it should be ready to go sometime next week. This version has a ton of bug fixes and a couple of new features as well. The biggest change is localization support, and I’m happy to announce that Seasonality 1.2 will be released with a French language translation. A lot of time from both a programming perspective and a language translating perspective (thanks Ronald and Philippe!) went into this effort, and I’m pretty happy with the results. Look for other translations to be included in future versions. If you are interested in doing a translation, get in touch with me.

Since the Seasonality release is close, I thought I would take advantage of the extra web traffic by posting a Seasonality Survey. I’m hoping to get a lot of user feedback to guide my development path for version 1.3 and beyond. If you have a few minutes, please take the Seasonality survey.

MacBook Pro

January 11, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Well, I’ve placed my order for a new MacBook Pro (with the 1.67Ghz Core Duo). I ordered the base configuration (512MB RAM, 80GB drive), and will be purchasing another gig of RAM separately. I don’t understand why Apple charges so much for their memory upgrades… Now all I have to do is try to forget about it until it’s supposed to ship, sometime in February. I’m horrible at the waiting game. 🙂

While my current Powerbook is already 4 years old (and only a 667 Mhz G4), I didn’t really need a new laptop right now. 95% of the time I use my G5 at home for development, and I can put up with a slow machine on the road since I don’t travel too much. The main reason I’m purchasing this one is to port Gaucho Software apps over to the Intel architecture. Overall, I think the switch to Intel was a smart move for Apple. Probably the biggest drawback of a switch from Power to Intel is leaving Altivec behind. This will be sorely missed by developers of graphics and mathematical-related research applications where SSE3 just doesn’t cut it. I’m still anxious to see how Seasonality performs after I port it, since it uses the Accelerate framework for doing image manipulation while generating the satellite image. Apple claims that they have already optimized the Accelerate framework for SSE3, so I’m interested to see how well it works.

On the plus side, Apple is gaining a platform that is more focused on laptops. The idea that I’ll be using a dual-processor laptop sometime next month is amazing to me. I never realized how much benefit having an additional CPU was until I got my G5. It’s really a huge gain to have a spare processor at your disposal while you are working, and it will be pretty cool to have this capability in a laptop. This brings mobile platforms one step closer to becoming a desktop replacement.

The other big advantage to switching to Intel is that Apple no longer has to put pressure on IBM to innovate on the Power architecture to keep up or surpass processors available for Wintel. The G5 is a great chip, and my Mac really does feel a lot faster than current PCs do, but IBM’s development was pretty slow when it comes to bumping the CPU Mhz. To take two and a half years for only a 700mhz speed improvement is just too long these days. Of course the dual core G5s are a great benefit, and really those Quad G5s Apple is offering right now are incredible machines, but I have to ask, where is the G5 platform going from here?

Returning to the MacBook Pro…it looks like a good upgrade from my point of view. Yes, the name sucks. I’m almost waiting for a company to come out with some kind of “Powerbook Pro” sticker to put on top of the MacBook Pro label beneath the LCD. And will the LCD really be as bright as the Cinema displays like Apple says it is? If so, I would be pretty happy, my Cinema display is so bright that for the first time I actually have to turn down the brightness while using a monitor. Having that extra brightness while using the MacBook outside will help immensely. How about battery life? Nowhere on Apple’s site do they mention it, but I would suspect it to be somewhere around 3.5 hours. Lots of questions I’m looking forward to finding definitive answers for sometime in February…

Update: Apple updated my order status. Estimated shipment is on or before February 15th.

Al Fasoldt on Seasonality…

January 8, 2006 / mike / 2 Comments

Check out this excellent review by Al Fasoldt in The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)…

I’m a big fan of good weather-reporting software for years but never thought I’d find nirvana so easily. No weather program I’ve ever tried, for Windows, Linux or OS X, comes within a light year of Seasonality.

2005 Software Gift Ideas

December 12, 2005 / mike / 0 Comments

What a great gift idea! Seasonality was featured on the TidBITS 2005 Software Gift Ideas:

We have been surprised and pleased by a wonderful weather reporting program, Seasonality, by Gaucho Software. It’s $25 for a single license and $30 dollars for the family. We keep the locations of others in our family in the list.

Thanks! Seasonality 1.2 is coming along, but I’ve gotten slightly sidetracked with everything going on this holiday season.