Blog

Introducing Daylite on iTunes

I’m excited to announce that Marni Melrose, one of our top partners who has been with us since…forever, has brought her Daylite training videos to iTunes. Users can subscribe to the podcast to be kept current on her latest tips and tricks.

Since leaving Apple in 2002 to become a Macintosh Consultant, Marni has helped more than 640+ clients worldwide, thanks to working closely with Apple Stores, Apple’s Small & Medium Business Group & Marketcircle. She is currently an Apple Certified Help Desk Specialist, Apple Certified Technical Coordinator and a Master Certified Daylite Partner.

Check out Marni’s blog for more details.

Back to business,

Ryan

Daylite makes a HUGE Impact

I came across this today and figured I’d post this on our blog. Thanks to whomever wrote it (unfortunately the site isn’t in english so I couldn’t read everything on the page or find any contact info.). He mentions Daylite 3.1 which leads me to believe it’s an older post…I wonder what he’d think of Daylite 3.7?

Daylite is the software that has had the biggest positive impact on my work (keeping me organized, actually enabling me to manage and keep track of tasks, enabling quick access to information of all kinds related to people, orgs, projects etc and all of their relationships and history)–or more precisely, Daylite Productivity Suite which is Daylite plus a module that enables links with Apple Mail. It is by far the best tool I have seen for intuitively and systematically managing non-linear information–and lots of it, and being able to look at it all different kinds of ways. It helps to have a good overview before plunging in, but one can start simply and keep discovering more tricks over time. Daylite’s developers keep introducing more functionality that shows they are really thinking–and responding to users’ experiences.

For the rest of the article, click here (about halfway down the page).

Back to work!

Ryan

New Success Story…energized!

Brain Toniq

I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Ohlgren myself at this years Macworld in San Francisco, California. What a lifesaver he was! After little to no sleep after a long night of preparation, Scott was there to save us all in the morning as we began the show. Little did we know our booth was in the best location of them all - right beside the free energy drink booth!

Scott came over to let us know how happy he was to meet us, as he had recently become an avid Daylite user. Every time I turned around there was a new case of Brain Toniq, the world’s first organic, botanical-based, non-caffeinated energy drink waiting for us. I was pleasantly surprised to have a few cans of Brain Toniq without feeling the usual side effects of energy drinks (no sugar rush, stomach or headache, bad aftertaste). For the rest of the week the Marketcircle team was kept alert, thanks to Scott. We even placed the drinks around our booth for our visitors. Since Scott loved us so much he gave us a case to hide in our storage compartment, which we made good use of after his freebies had vanished (which, if I may add, disappeared in the blink of an eye)!

Check out the entire success story here.

Time for a drink!

Ryan Cash

iPhone is coming to Canada?

So apparently the iPhone is finally coming to Canada. We’ve heard of this kinda talk before, so until I see it, I won’t believe it.

The only thing we have to go on is a cryptic quote from Ted Rogers (Rogers is the only GSM provider in Canada and thus the only one that can even offer us the iPhone - thank the CRTC for that gaffe).

There are no specific details, so we have no clue as to what kind of plans will be available.

You see, it doesn’t really matter anymore because we can get the iPhone fully functional in Canada as it stands. It’s a little bit of a pain to get going, but it works.

For example, my plan gives me about 500 anytime minutes, free evenings and 1 GB of Data for about $110 per month (Aly got us the plans and he is on vacation right now, so I may have some facts wrong). While it’s more expensive than the AT&T plan in the U.S. (especially with the current exchange rate), it’s not too bad. None of us here have hit that 1GB ceiling yet.

Even though I have EDGE, I tend to do most of my surfing and email when I’m on a WiFi network - because it is so much faster.

Fingers crossed - let’s see where this goes.

Until next time…
AJ

Daylite 3.7.3 and Delivery 1.1 Released

Daylite Delivery

A while back, I had posted about how Apple was proactive about security - contrary to what some people think.

Apple’s security police told us that we had to sandbox the database engine used for Daylite or Daylite would not be allowed to run on Leopard period. Well, Daylite Delivery got hit too. The original Daylite Delivery worked pretty good on Tiger and the initial release of Leopard as a “headless” daemon. As of Mac OS X 10.5.1, Apple shut down the avenue we used to talk to the WindowServer (needed for rendering those beautiful PDF reports) due to security concerns and a violation of how the process stack works (which is now enforced on Leopard).

We had a choice to make - do we kill Daylite Delivery or spend a whole lot of time and effort to rewrite it?

The thing is - Delivery is pretty damn cool. We don’t have to waste time running reports (never mind being lazy to run them in the first place), we just get them as PDF’s via email (nicely viewable on the iPhone too!). And unlike other much more expensive systems out there, you can design your own reports (or have one of our report certified partners create custom ones for you), if one of the 50 built-in reports doesn’t do the right thing for you.

As a business, Delivery really helps to keep things in perspective. It’s becoming pretty vital to our business and we figured it’s going to be become pretty vital for our customers as well, so we bit the bullet, re-invested and re-wrote it as a standalone application.

Turns out, that the standalone application is a good thing. We’ve reset the trial period, so if you’ve tried before, download it and try it again. Release notes are here.

Daylite

Daylite 3.7.3 is an important release for those of you who use offline databases. We’ve significantly sped up the “sync with online database” feature. In some cases we’ve seen 10x speed improvement and other cases, we’ve seen about a 5x speed increase. It’s hard to give specific figures because every network, database size, record composition is different. Our beta testers have been very happy with the improvement.

Some of our customers have huge databases - in some cases the compressed backup is as high as 15GB in size! Think of all the email attachments a 10 or 15 person company can accumulate in a short period of time. So we’ve added the ability to either strip out or archive attachments to a volume, which you can later access via AFP (Apple File Share).

As usual, we’ve made other improvements to Daylite - so please take a look at the release notes. Download Daylite 3.7.3 (without Mail integration) here or
Download Daylite Suite 3.7.3 (with Mail integration) here.

Until next time…
AJ

Mac vs. PC in ABA Law Magazine

One of our clients brought an article to our attention that was featured in the flagship magazine of the American Bar Association (ABA Journal). The article features the opinion of two lawyers using opposing systems to manage their law offices, Mac vs. PC. This immediately sparked our interest as we’ve recently released a database template for the law industry.

Since we all know the clear winner in this race, I thought I’d quickly highlight the mention of Daylite in this article:

MAC: CASE MANAGEMENT

Daylite from Marketcircle Inc. is a fully customizable case management package that handles your contacts, calendars, tasks/to-do’s, notes and more. Daylite allows you to link various types of documents (spreadsheets, PDFs, JPEGs) to specific client files, and then organize and even open those files from within Daylite. You can schedule and delegate appointments, create lists, print reports and send e-mails ”all from within Daylite. It is fully networkable so you can connect to it locally, through your office network or over the Internet. You can even create offline databases, modify them on the road and later synchronize them with the main database.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Stay tuned!

Ryan Cash

Without further ado…

I’d like to introduce Ryan Cash. Ryan has been with us for a while now and some of you have interacted with him in the past. He’ll be helping us maintain the blog for the next 3 months or so.

Now that I have 2 great kids (4 year old boy and 6 month old daughter) plus all the nifty things we have planned for you, it’s been a bit difficult for me to keep the blog up to date. You will however, continue to see posts from me periodically.

Until next time…
AJ

Daylite Required!

I was pleasantly surprised today when I was pointed to a job posting that says the job requires Daylite!

You will be required to use Daylite…

You can see the whole Speakeasy job posting here (the page will probably change once the job has been filled).

We’re feeling pretty good about it, and we are working hard to make Daylite even more essential to small businesses.

Until next time…
AJ

Daylite 3.7.2 available now with Microsoft Word 2008 Compatibility

We have a new Daylite release for you. This one includes a few commonly requested enhancements including:

1. Appointment detail view in the lower right of the calendar. Now you no longer have to open the appointment card to see all the details.
2. Appointment scrolling in the month view. Now you no longer have to go to the day view to see those extra appointments that don’t fit in a day in the month view. You can scroll now to see them all. Scroll wheel and trackpad gestures also supported.
3. We’ve significantly improved the resources aspect of the calendar. You can now include Resources (projector, boardroom, etc…) in smart calendars or command-select them along with users in the Users and Resources disclosure.
4. You can merge letters with Word 2008 and Excel 2008. Thanks to some improvements in Word 2008, we’ve been able to eek out some good speed improvements.
5. Thanks to a bunch of people on our forums and the MacLaw group, we’ve been able to put together and include a database template for the legal industry.

There is more to this release, but I’ll let you read the details in the release notes rather than rehashing them here.

DMI has also been updated to 2.1.2 to address a minor resizing bug on Leopard.

Download Daylite here and the suite (Daylite & DMI) here.

Until next time…
AJ

iPhone SDK event - first reactions

Whoa! I totally didn’t expect the level of Exchange and enterprise integration Apple is going to provide. I may have to scale back my anti-enterprise rhetoric.

I also didn’t expect them to license or get ActiveSync. I would have for sure thought that Microsoft would have said “no, we don’t want you to kill our Windows Mobile platform”. Microsoft must have come to the realization that Windows Mobile is dead and took this opportunity to inflict some harm to RIM at the same time. If the iPhone is going to do push email, push calendar and push contacts and have an SDK, who the heck is going to buy a Windows Mobile phone??

The SDK looks to be phenomenal! I mean wow! I knew it would be Xcode based with the API and docs, but what I did not expect was Interface Builder support and a real iPhone Simulator (there is no need for our beloved iPhoney anymore. It served its purpose and helped get all those web apps ready for the iPhone). There are going to be a lot of cool new apps by the end of this year and I’m excited to see what those are.

The App Store and the distribution model is really cool, but I would have liked a slightly lower cost of sale fee. I think something along the lines of 20 or 22% would have been more to my liking. If we look at our credit card and hosting fees for Daylite and Billings, we are nowhere near that, I mean nowhere near (thanks to volume). After a while, there will be so many apps up there that, we developers, will have to spend a lot more marketing dollars to stand out amongst the crowd and that will add up.

The other fascinating this is iFund by venture capitalists KPCB. We’ve always wondered why Apple didn’t a venture capital arm that helped Mac developers. Well now we have a fund specifically targeted towards the iPhone. It says a lot about the iPhone’s (and iPod Touch’s) potential. It’s going to make the “classic” iPod look like pocket change.

Things are getting interesting…

Until next time…
AJ