New: Pay by bank transfer

Thanks to our partner Fastspring who do all purchase processing on our website it is now also possible to use bank transfer for purchases on our website. This service is available in most European and Asian countries where credit cards and PayPal are not so common.

credit: fastspring.com

When choosing bank transfer on checkout you will then receive an invoice together with payment instructions (namely the account information for a bank account in your country). After having received the money fastspring will immediately send you the receipt and the license code.
It is even possible to switch your payment method after having placed your order. If you don't want to wait for bank booking times (though it's only one day in Germany) you can easily change your mind and pay your invoice with your credit card.

We think this is a great feature that will make payment much easier for a lot of people here in Europe. Actually most of our friends don't have credit cards here and even one of us (who prefers to stay unnamed) doesn't have one. (For all US readers: that is because you don't need one in Europe. You can pay anything using your bank account card. Google for  'EC', 'VPay' or 'Maestro').

By the way in case you yourself are looking for a service to process purchases (maybe you, too, are an indie developer) we can really recommend Fastspring. They have great service, low rates and it is  straightforward to set up your own store there. Actually it is quite the opposite to Apple's iTunesConnect.

Price cuts!

With the start of the new year we have made several adjustments to our product pricing.
We especially wanted to bring the prices on our website on par with those in the Mac App Store. As you might know Apple takes 30% share of sales on the App Store. But for purchases on our own website we only give 9% to our reliable partner FastSpring who processes our sales (while offering much better service than Apple).
We think it is unfair to charge customers on our website 20% more just to offer equal prices as in the AppStore. So we decided to significantly drop prices on our website as following:

• Papapapaya now is just $15.99 / €12.99  (-20%) on our website
  ($19.99 / €15.99 in the App Store)
  


• Quokka now is just $12.99 / €9.99 (-15%) on our website
  ($14.99 / €11.99 in the App Store)
  


• Tincta Pro will stay at $12.99 / €9.99 on our website
  (App Store introduction price currently is $12.99, too, but will rise with the 1.1 update, so get it now!)
  


• Walk of Fame now is $6.99 / €4.99 on our website
  (not allowed in the App Store for having "nude" images)
  


• Dragonfly now is $3.99 / €2.99 on our website
  ($4.99 in the App Store)

So if your New Year's pledges include learning a new language with Papapapaya or being more productive with Quokka and Tincta: your wishes have been heard ;-)

Also, once more we want to state here that we offer the same service and support to all our customers. No matter if you buy our software on our website or from the App Store, we will always be there for you and deliver updates to either version.

Blog update and google+

Those of you who had subscribed our newsletter already know that we have abandoned it. It takes just too much time to create newsletters on mailchimp and we think we can much better share news and special offers via this blog, twitter and google+.
As you can see we have updated our blog design and we have connected it to google+.

especially google+ is a great service making it possible to precisely control what information you share with whom. So you can easily follow us there without having to share anything with us. Whereas we can distinguish between general (public) news and updates for beta testers.
Like before in our newsletter we will continue to offer special rebate coupons on google+ to everyone who follows us there.
Check out our profile on google+

By the way you might want to read Julius personal blog on xqrc.tumblr.com/ where he describes his progress in developing an app for the Blackberry PlayBook.

Tincta Pro

Since we released the first beta versions of Tincta we received huge amounts of feedback. This has been  very motivating as almost every e-mail was very positive. But of course a lot of people combined their praise with improvement suggestions an feature requests.
All requests for basic features and speed improvements found their way into the final version of Tincta 1.0 but we wanted to create a very basic Mac editor. A free editor that everyone would have on their Macs: Programmers, web designers but also moms and school kids. Because a text editor should not only be for programming – it is also to write to do lists, grocery lists, view read me files or compose e-mails when you're offline.

That is why we decided not to put all the advanced features in Tincta but instead create a separate version for professional users who actually know what regexes are and who really need split views for their daily work.
So everybody who requested features like split views, script execution, regex search and smaller icons – thank you very much for your feedback – your features are finally there in the fresh Tincta Pro.

Both versions Tincta and Tincta Pro share the same fast and reliable core but Tincta Pro expands the features set much further providing things like:

• Split Views
• built-in File Browser 
• Regex Search
• search all open documents
• Snippet Manager
• Script execution including a customizable script library
• and a lot more to come with future versions

Of course this does not mean that development on Tincta (lite) would halt. In contrary the core features and under-the-hood stuff will be further improved to make both versions even faster and even better while the feature set of Tincta Pro will grow with every update.

Tincta - the ultimate text editor

After months of public beta testing, we are proud that today Tincta 1.0 is available from our website as well as from the Mac App Store.

You  might wonder why we build just another text editor for Mac.
But if you look close the editors that are most popular at the moment are still based on Mac OS 7 and are no longer state of the art.
Tincta was written and designed from ground up. It's a Mac OS X native applications and has all over real Mac look and feel.  We don't use any third party code or technologies (besides Mac OS X) and we keep our codebase small and clean. So we can keep Tincta fast, easy to maintain and super stable.

Tincta is a modern elegant one-window text editor that is intuitive to use on personal tasks like writing blog posts, letters or grocery lists. But it also has all functionality you need for professional web design and programming.

Tincta comes with syntax color profiles for over 70 languages and very fast and reliable coloring algorithms. Because no matter if you do websites or coding, well done syntax coloring is one of the most important features an editor must have.
Tincta's line numbering engine not only is blazingly fast but also manages line wrapping with ease and calculates every line correctly even for large files.

We know it's the little details that makes you love a text editor. So Tincta supports full drag and drop, indents selected text when you press tab, knows when an open file was changed by another application, features block selection and has an in-window live search with highlighting.

And of course Tincta has all the text editing essentials like:

• vast encodings support
• search and replace with highlighting
• change case
• show invisible characters
• page guide
• printing
• spell checker
• convert line endings
• convert tabs/spaces

Papapapaya 1.4 - iPhone syncing

We released Papapapaya 1.4 two weeks ago. Unfortunately it's still not available in the App Store while being reviewed by Apple.
Anyway we can't hold back any longer writing a blog post about this incredible release.

Along with Papapapaya 1.4 we also released Papapapaya for iPhone. And of course it would not make sense to have both if you could not sync them. So we integrated full Dropbox-Syncing into the Mac and the iPhone version.
Now you can create your lessons at home on the big screen and Quiz them in the bus or in your lunch break. Or you can quickly save that new word you just learned into your iPhone.
And when you come home, all your progress and new words already are there, silently synced.

This makes learning words an integral part of your daily life. And you don't have to do anything. Enter your dropbox username and password once and sycing works automatically. Your words will always be up to date on all your devices (you can even sync multiple Macs and iPhones if you're rich enough).

Try it out now:
Papapapaya for Mac can be downloaded from its website (free to try).
Papapapaya for iPhone is free and available in the App Store.

MacBundlePro Quokka Bundle

MacBundlePro today started a new great OS X Bundle with 9 tools that get the most out of your Mac including our clipboard manager Quokka 2.0.

The Bundle is only $19.90 (you save $160 over regular prices) and includes the full versions of:

• Quokka
• Speedy Mac
• WhatSize
• Raskin
• AppDelete
• Breeze
• MacTuneUp
• Protect Files
• Share

 The offer runs two weeks until May 13th.

You find descriptions, screenshots and demo versions of all these very helpful Apps on http://macbundlepro.com

Programmers Topic: comparing UTF-8 strings in Cocoa

A short hint to something that is not documented correctly by Apple:
Though all Apple OSes use UTF-8 or UTF-16 to store and process strings, you need to know that not all unicode chars are well-defined. For instance there are two possibilities to create a German Umlaut like ä, ö or ü. First there is a unicode code for each one, and second you can compose these from 'o' + the unicode code for two Umlaut-dots.

This is a problem when you compare strings that you did not create by yourself (like filenames), because NSString's isEqualToString: method compares bytewise so 'Blüte' is not nescessarily equal to 'Blüte' depending on the Umlaut-Composition. I'm sure there are lots of other characters in unicode with the same problem like french é, à, î et cetera.

Luckily the solution is quite easy:
use NSString's localizedCompare: method and check if it returns NSOrderedSame.

BOOL isEqual = ([oneFilename localizedCompare: otherFilename] == NSOrderedSame);

Mercurial - the easy way to revision your code

After struggling with Xcode 4 and Git yesterday I needed a fast and easy solution. On my way through blogs, tutorials and forums I've learned that there are some other options I have.

One of them is Mercurial.

But let start at the beginning.

If you are a programmer and you're working at some small projects you may think source code version control is not necessary. You probably don't want to waste time on setting up repositories and you may feel confident that having some time machine backups are enough. Wrong.

Source code version control is not only handy for teams or bigger projects. It lets you program more freely by creating sureness that whatever you do with your code you can go back to a state where it runs, it keeps your backups and source code folders clear, you can share your code with the whole world and every commit message you write documents you thoughts.

For teams it's obvious. You can share your work and can assure only working with the newest version of the projects. And having an online backup is not that bad too.

The way to go.

After my experiences I highly recommend Mecurial. It is easy to set up new repositories, plain simple to add your code to existing ones and there are some nice user interfaces for it out there. For mac users I suggest MacHG. With that tool it is really fun to version control your code. For hosting your repositories u can use bitbucket which is very inexpensive, fast and has a clean interface.

How to.

1. Register at bitbucket.
2. Download Mecurial. It comes with an installer and needs about 8.9 MB on your harddisk.
3. Download MacHG. That adds about 18 MB to your used space.

For a new local repository start MacHG and hit 'Create New Repository'. If you have an online rep you can go at the menu, click 'Repository' and then 'Add Server Repository'. It couldn't be easier.

This tutorial was very short but it is really that plain simple.

So now get back to work!

Xcode 4 and Git

Whoever tried to manage his source code with Xcodes svn integration knows it was not really handy. Now with Xcode 4 Apple implemented Git and they have learned nothing. Almost.

If your team consists of one person only and you don't have an online Git server it is not that bad. You can create a local repository when you create a new project and it is explained in the Xcode documentation if you want to add repositories to your existing ones. Also it is easy to checkout a online repository and create a local copy to work with. But that's all.

This is a shame, shame on you Apple.

What's the matter with integrate Git complete? Why can't you push your data again to your online rep? It isn't that hard to get this right and the status quo isn't very professional. Why do you even have to use the terminal?

I tried to get it working for some hours and all I got was crashes, spinning balls and a really bad mood. There are some tutorials on the Internet but they force you into using the terminal I don't like the terminal that much. In fact it frustrates me especially if I see the Xcode Organizer and know how nice it could be.

So what to do?

First you can wait for Apple to fix this. meh.

Or you can only work with local repositories. But when you're working in a team?

Second you can work with GitX and never look at the version control menu. I don't like that either (and it didn't work for me).

I found a better solution. It took me 5 minutes to get my repository online, I have a nice user interface and although Git isn't dead for me I can now wait till I have much more spare time to get Xcode doing what it should do without to waive having version control.

My solution is called Mercurial. Tomorrow you'll get more information which includes a small tutorial.