AIM: Got to get me some realtime chat.

BA Flights: It’s always a pain trying to find a place to sit down and wait where you can keep tabs on the status board for your delayed flight, hopefully this app will solve that.

Evernote: I’ve recently started using Evernote for all my archiving of web purchase receipts and various other scraps of information and pictures that I need to keep at hand. This app should be a great addition to the already excellent Mac desktop and web based Evernote clients.

Exposure: I’m not much of a flickr user, but I keep meaning to start using it properly, maybe having this app at hand would help me get started.

NetNewsWire: I love NetNewsWire, I use it every day to keep tabs on the World at large. With all the NewsGator feed status and clippings sync goodness it promises, this app could easily be my most used on my iPhone.

PayPal: Quick and easy access to PayPal seems like a good idea to me, especially as this version is made by PayPal, so I don’t feel like I might be getting spoofed or something.

Pownce: I follow a few peeps on Pownce, so this could be a neat app to have, once the notifications functionality is released by Apple.

Remote: This should be great, looking forward to testing it out.

Truphone: In the absence of a Skype client, this looks like it could save a few quid on long distance calls, certainly while abroad.

Twitterrific: While I’m a twhirl user on the desktop for all my twitter needs, I’m sure Twitterrific on the iPhone would be just the job.

Apps missing from above screenshot:

Aria Touch: This could be an interesting app for a FogBugz user like myself, it’s just a shame that it hasn’t shown up on the iTunes App Store yet. But as I expect it isn’t free, I couldn’t download it just yet anyway, seeing as I don’t have an iPhone it would be a waste of money!

Things: I’ve started using Things for managing my general to-do lists, it’s a great Mac desktop app and I’d love to give the iPhone version a spin, if I had an iPhone 3G!

Why do I not have an iPhone 3G just yet? Because:

a) O2 isn’t releasing it’s Pay & Go tariff until “later this year”. I simply don’t use the “phone” part of my phone anywhere near enough to warrant paying £30 per month, but if the rumoured Pay & Go deal includes 6 months free 3G data and wi-fi hotspot usage, followed by £10 per month after that, I’d be all over it.

b) O2 has run out of iPhones!

Oh well, hopefully O2 will get a few boat loads of new stock and release the Pay & Go contract option soon, then I can spend my money!

Aaron Ballman recently blogged about how they are now capturing any exceptions thrown in the REALbasic IDE to be submitted as bug reports to their FogBugz install. Turns out that they are using RBScoutSubmit, with just a couple of modifications.

Aaron was kind enough to tell me about the couple of improvements that they’ve made, I’ll see about adding them to RBScoutSubmit along with a couple more improvements I’ve thought about as soon as I get some time.

If you’re looking for some simple open source (MIT licensed) classes that enable submitting crash logs from your REALbasic application to your FogBugz bug tracker, please check out the rbscoutsubmit project.

There’s a download available of the latest version, and as with most Google Code projects you can check out the source with Subversion.

There’s also a discussion group and read-only commit log list hosted on Google Groups too.

If you’re looking for an open source (MIT licensed) module that enables verification of UNIX crypt style passwords, please check out the rbunixcrypt project.

There’s a download available of the latest version, and as with most Google Code projects you can check out the source with Subversion.

There’s also a discussion group and read-only commit log list hosted on Google Groups too.

Go read all about Flex 3, AIR and how you can build wonderful desktop AIR apps with Flex.

And if you’re a masochist, read about building AIR apps with HTML/CSS or Flash.

I love all the side bar stuff they’ve got on the Flex and AIR product pages, they’re really reaching out to developers that are interested in Flex and AIR and would like to integrate with other technologies, such as ColdFusion (natch), Java, .NET, PHP or Ruby.

Personally I’m having a blast reading through Peter Armstrong’s Flexible Rails book. I’ve long thought Ruby on Rails great at connecting to the database and very powerful at exposing the data model cleanly with wonderful ways to validate data, and best of all, easily migrate the schema as the application evolves. Flex on the front end brings a full rich internet experience without the JavaScript/AJAX headache.

I’ve just paid for and downloaded my FlexBuilder 3 Professional upgrade, time to play (well, after I’ve been to work, come home, spent some time with Abi, put her to bed, had dinner with Mandy, and done a few chores that is)!

Seeing as my microISV endeavor is currently on hold, I figured the old “So, now I’m an ISV…” didn’t cut it any longer, even though technically I still have one foot in the game, and have even had a very good month of sales since I put CaseDetective on hold. How weird is that?

What does the new tag line mean exactly? I’m a software developer for one thing, but I’m also developing as a person in so many other ways. When I look at how Abi is developing day by day (in the last two weeks she’s gone from barely commando crawling to super fast crawling, blink and she’s gone, pulling herself up to stand against chairs and other props, and in the last couple of days she’s even taken to climbing the stairs, supervised of course) it reminds me of all the little things that I experience and learn daily that contribute to my own personal development, we never stop developing.

Also, I grew tired of the heavily graphical and very Mac like theme on the ianmjones.net website, it was fairly slow to load, which irked me quite a bit. I’m now using a much nippier theme from Brian Gardener. It’s a far simpler theme, which frankly is much more my style, I like the clean uncluttered look, and although I prefer navigation etc to be on the right hand side, I’ll live with it on the left as I’m way too lazy to got to the bother of switching it as I have before.

“In pursuit of simplicity”, maybe that should have been my new tag line!

This year, it’s been doubly disastrous for CaseDetective, not only has development time been non-existent and support reduced as usual, but I’ve had time to reflect on CaseDetective’s future, and more importantly on it’s place in my life.

I’ve come to the (long overdue) decision that development on CaseDetective is to be put on hold, I’m not going to work on CaseDetective or any other significant development project in my spare time for the foreseeable future.

For a long time I’ve struggled to balance time with my family and friends, personal interests and health, (money making) consulting work and CaseDetective, something has to give.

My family is everything to me, I love my wife and daughter and the last two weeks have enforced my long standing regret at having to spend a considerable amount of my (and my family’s) free time supporting and developing CaseDetective. There’s also a knock-on effect to the rest of my family and friends, who don’t get anywhere near the attention they deserve, neglecting them makes me sad.

I’ve also completely neglected my health in the last few months too. The year started well as I lost a good bit of weight and improved my fitness through running and watching my diet, but running has gone out the window as time got squeezed out by more CaseDetective support and development of version 2.0. I’m feeling very unfit, and am at my heaviest in ten years. I need to make time for running and biking again. I used to love mountain biking in my early twenties, getting up early on a Sunday morning and going for a 25-50 mile ride up and down hills coming home covered in mud was bliss. I want to have the health and time to enjoy physical activities again.

Reading and sleeping, I want to do more!!!

I think CaseDetective has also impinged on my mind so much that on occasions it may have had an impact on my consulting work. Sometimes I’m so wrapped up in something I’m doing with CaseDetective that I feel I’m not giving my real job it’s deserved attention. That is unacceptable, and with my current contract being a pretty intense project with an aggressive time scale, I can’t afford to slip up because my mind is elsewhere.

Many people would have put a stop to development of CaseDetective a long time ago just because of the terrible return on investment. CaseDetective has been in development since September 2004, with a few hiatuses along the way, let’s say that’s 156 weeks (3 years) worth. With a conservative estimate of 8 hours development/support time per week (it was actually full time for about 6 months), that is 1,248 hours. Let’s take a reduced consulting fee of £25 per hour for a grand total of £31,200 worth of my time spent on developing CaseDetective. Seeing as CaseDetective has had a net revenue (according to eSellerate) of approx. £1,885 ($3,771.47), it really doesn’t stack up well, and that’s not even taking into consideration expenditure on tools and hosting etc.

One of the major problems I have with CaseDetective though, is that I no longer have any need for it myself. Most of the functionality I need for bug, feature and inquiry tracking is in FogBugz, and I rarely want to report on the data held in FogBugz any longer. So you can imagine that my enthusiasm for developing and improving CaseDetective is somewhat diminished. I still believe CaseDetective could be a great product, and one that I would use if I added some of the features I have planned, but to get it where I want it would take considerable development time. At the moment, I’m simply not willing to commit so much of my free time to make it happen.

So development of CaseDetective is on hold. Support for existing customers will continue for the time being (at least six months), but I’m going to take down the majority of the CaseDetective website and stop taking any further sales.

There is a slim chance that development could resume if I find myself at a loose end without full time employment so I’m not thinking about selling or otherwise releasing the CaseDetective source code.

If there is anyone out there with a product that could help CaseDetective customers continue to extract CSV files and/or PDF reports from FogBugz without having to know any SQL, please drop me a line and I’ll pass your details onto my customer base. If there is a free license or “competitive upgrade” license available, all the better.

Thank you to all the great people in the MicroISV/BoS community that have supported me with kind words of encouragement and advise throughout my time developing CaseDetective, you helped me immensely.

A big thank you must go out to everyone at Fog Creek, especially Michael H. Pryor, without your help I couldn’t have got as far as I did.

Also, thanks to all my customers, thank you for showing your support for CaseDetective in the best possible way, by buying a license! And thank you for being such nice people if we had any communication.

And finally, thank you to my wife Mandy, for putting up with my countless hours working on CaseDetective and supporting me all the way. I love you so much.

Changes In CaseDetective 1.3.4

Released 2007-12-13

• Bug Fix: Error while creating indexs on the Attachment, Cases or CaseEvents table.

• In some rare cases CaseDetective could not create indexes on it’s cache database due to non-unique data in a primary key, this has now been fixed.

• In order to fix the problem across all supported database types, CaseDetective now requires MySQL 5.0+ as opposed to MySQL 4.0+. MS Access and SQL Server 2000+ are still supported as usual.

• Updated tools and some third party libraries for better Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) compatibility.

• CaseDetective now supports changes made to the FogBugz 6.0 database schema for permissions, non-administrators can now see their cases!

• Some changes were made to better support permissions, summary filters now correctly miss projects etc that a user does not have permission to see in FogBugz (4, 5 & 6).

PLEASE NOTE: This does not mean CaseDetective fully supports FogBugz 6.0, it just means you may be able to use the “classic” filters in FogBugz 6.0 with CaseDetective 1.3.x, you will not be able to use the new search based filters introduced with FogBugz 6.0. Full support for FogBugz 6.0 and it’s new search based filters will arrive in CaseDetective 2.0 and CaseDetective On Demand by early 2008.

As always, CaseDetective 1.3.4 for FogBugz is available from the download page.

I’m working on CaseDetective 1.3.4, but it’s a little trickier than I thought due to what SQL syntax is and isn’t supported across different versions of Access, SQL Server and MySQL.

It may take a couple of days to fully test an alternative way of fixing the bug that was supposed to have been taken care of by CaseDetective 1.3.3.

Thank goodness I upload the website for each version to a brand new directory and switch a symbolic link from old to new. So to revert to 1.3.2 simply consisted of logging onto my web server and switching the symbolic link from new to old.

CaseDetective 1.3.3 has been released with just one iccle fix.

In very rare conditions CaseDetective would fail to get either attachments, cases or case events due to a “duplicate values in unique index” error.

There was a little bit of Cartesian (black) magic happening, now vanquished!

If you’ve not had the problem then chances are you’ll not need this update, but if you do need it you can grab it from CaseDetective’s download page.