Billings customers will be interested in two significant changes we’re announcing today. We’ve listened to the feature requests, and focused on how to address the feedback, with updates and support over the long term.

First, we’re streamlining our Billings product line, and today issuing our final update to Billings, now available on our downloads page. We’ve noticed most customers want the features in Billings Pro and it no longer makes sense for us to support separate feature sets for both Billings and Billings Pro. As such, as of today’s final software update, we have discontinued selling Billings and will continue to support it through June 30, 2014.

Secondly, starting today, we streamlined and lowered our prices on Billings Pro subscription-based licensing for everyone. The licensing to host Billings Pro Self-Serve on your own server and network remains the same, and our Partner Network remains available to offer one-on-one customized training.

For most customers, it makes sense to opt for our subscription service, with data security and SSL encryption, that automatically synchronizes Billings Pro on your Macs, iPhone and iPod Touch devices. So, starting today, we offer the following subscription plan options:

Billings Pro Freelance — $5/month (was $9.95/month)
Billings Pro Professional — $10/month (was $19.95/month)
Billings Pro Yearly — $99/year (an entirely new, great value option)

All current customers will automatically receive the new, lower pricing.

Finally, for our loyal Billings and Billings Pro customers, we’re offering a special subscription rate of Billings Pro for only $69/year, available through July 31, 2013.

 Our analysis shows that the new streamlined model should provide better platform options, and a better long-term value for you. In addition, the subscription model will allow us to respond to industry changes more quickly, providing more frequent, automatic updates and the kind of ongoing support that you deserve.

If you don’t know, or aren’t sure, that this model works for you, we encourage you to at least make sure you have the final Billings update. We’ve highlighted the benefits of making the switch and included instructions to migrate on a special Billings Page.

For further questions please visit our Billings FAQ and if you need any additional information, please do not hesitate to contact us via email at info at marketcircle.com, by phone or follow us on Twitter @marketcircle.

Until next time…
AJ

Last month we mentioned that our partners at Learn Daylite produced a New Daylite Video Tutorial Featured on ScreenCastsOnline. Since then two more screencasts have been published on ScreenCastsOnline. The first video provides an Introduction to Daylite and doesn’t assume any prior knowledge of the product. The second video, Using Daylite delves into more advanced functionality and the third video, Daylite 4 for iOS teaches users how to access and update a Daylite database from their iOS devices.

All three of these tutorial videos are currently available to Premium Members of ScreenCastsOnline. The first video, Introduction to Daylite was also included in the June issue of the ScreenCastsOnline Monthly iPad magazine along with an article that Tim Stringer from Learn Daylite wrote. The other two screencasts, Using Daylite and Daylite 4 for iOS will be included in the July issue of ScreenCastsOnline Monthly.

You can watch all three tutorial videos by purchasing the June and soon to be released July 2013 issues of the magazine through the App Store for $6.99 each issue. You can also subscribe to ScreenCastsOnline Monthly to receive this iPad magazine each month, and can become a ScreenCastOnline Member for access to these and over 400 other tutorials.

These tutorial videos are great for anyone who is new to Daylite or anyone needing just a little boost in their knowledge of Daylite.

Since our last update in December, we’ve made good progress on our new cloud infrastructure. As you know, we weren’t too happy with the performance previously and how it would affect scaling. We’ve devised new solutions and ways to address those problems. We are implementing those new systems and applying rigorous tests to everything. The testing methods we are using are adding time to the implementation, but we think it is worth it. I must say, this new infrastructure stuff is very exciting! It will open up so many more possibilities for us.

As of right now, we are not prepared to announce an exact date or timeline, but rest assured that we are working very hard to ensure cloud will be something we all are truly proud of. We will post another update at the end of next quarter.

We want to clarify to our customers that the cloud solution we’re working on will not be a web-based version of Daylite. Instead, we are talking about an approach that allows customers to use the native Mac & iOS version of Daylite (and CalDAV/CardDAV clients) and removing the need for Daylite Server and its various complex administrative needs for backups, server side networking etc…

If you are awaiting the release of cloud instead of making the decision to purchase Daylite now. Don’t worry, we will prorate the amount you paid in licenses towards your cloud account once it becomes available and offer to migrate your data. You can start using Daylite today, without the fear of losing money down the road.

We appreciate your patience and will continue to provide updates and more details as the time draws closer.

Until next time…
AJ

Our partners at iOSXpert have just released an awesome new Daylite plugin to help further increase your productivity.  The ProductivityTools Plugin extends several features in Daylite to improve your workflow.

Some of the many productivity improvements include:

• The ability to duplicate appointments.
• Creating a new appointment for an existing task.
• Sending tasks and appointments through email. Includes free configurable templates for appointments and tasks that can be easily edited.

Try ProductivityTools free for 14 days by downloading here. You can also buy now by visiting the iOSXpert store and save 50% by entering the code: PRODUCTIVITY50PROCENT

For installation and setup instructions please refer to the ProductivityTools for Daylite 4- Setup video.

As you know, we are really excited about our upcoming cloud offering for Daylite. The same beautiful, native application without the worries of networking or a server, giving you the best of both worlds. We’ve been working hard at it but we’re not happy with the performance as of yet.

We’ve learnt a lot about cloud infrastructure this past year and the challenges it poses. We are applying those lessons in the app, the backend infrastructure (you won’t notice most of these) and operationally. For example, our response times to Billings Pro Cloud issues have been under an average of 10 minutes during business hours and the frequency of issues has significantly dropped with Billings Pro 1.6 (which unfortunately has not been approved for the Mac App Store yet, but is available on our site).

We’ll post another status update towards the end of the first quarter 2013.

Many people have asked if they will be able to migrate from self serve to cloud when it becomes available. The answer is a definite yes, we will provide a migration to cloud. The details of the migration will be released as the time gets closer. We’ll also apply a loyalty break for existing customers that opt to migrate to the cloud.

We are really excited about this and want to get it out asap, but we can’t rush it too much.

Until next time…
AJ

If you have been keeping tabs on our Mountain Lion compatibility page, you know that we have tried to make DMI (Daylite Mail Integration for Daylite 3) work on Mountain Lion. Unfortunately, after several attempts, we have been unable to get DMI to work on Mountain Lion. This is due to a combination of the fact that we used Apple’s ‘Distributed Objects‘ (which we architected everything around) as our communication mechanism and the fact that Apple Mail is now “Sandboxed” for security on Mountain Lion.

We’ve been using the DMI code base since Mac OS X 10.3 and have offered free updates for Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7. Unfortunately, in 10.8, that code base just doesn’t work anymore because of sandboxing.
You can see that a number of developers are being affected by sandboxing here, here and here (these refer to the Mac App Store, but the issue is the same – constraints imposed by sandboxing since Mail is sandboxed and we cannot ask for entitlement changes).

We really thought that this last technique we tried would work, but unfortunately it didn’t and we are out of options other than a major rewrite.

Fortunately, DMA (Daylite Mail Assistant for Daylite 4) is a rewrite and it works on both Lion (10.7) and Mountain Lion (10.8). We used a different integration technique that gives us more options.

I realize that this news is going to cause pain to our existing Daylite 3 users who want to upgrade to Mountain Lion and still stay on Daylite 3 (with DMI) for a while. And for that, I sincerely apologize. All I can say to these users is that you’ll need to stick to Lion (or older) and plan for your eventual upgrade to Daylite 4. Development on Daylite 4 has been agressive and I hope we can share some of these developments with you soon.

Keep in mind that Daylite 3.15.2, which will be out soon (beta available), will work fine on Mountain Lion with the exception of DMI.

If you’d like to discuss your upgrade concerns with us, please send us an email.

For better or for worse, we are all in the Apple ecosystem and Apple waits for no one and doesn’t like to carry baggage. They jettison technology that doesn’t work which allows them to move forward unlike any other before them. It causes significant difficulties for developers like us (big native apps) and our users, but in the grand scheme of things, I think it’s the right thing to do as long as they are not too aggressive.

Until next time…
AJ