Paul Mayne blogs here since 2003.

Apple sold developers on their new sync solution when iCloud was announced to developers five months ago at WWDC. Beta APIs were released to give 3rd party developers a head start to integrate and add this new solution in time for the public launch.

On October 5th, Apple invited developers to submit iCloud-enabled Lion and iOS apps. Mac OS 10.7.2 and iOS 5 were released to the public two weeks ago on October 12.

With thousands of app developers and apps that could benefit from a free, cross-platform sync, you’d think several applications would use this great new feature. How many non-Apple Mac apps have taken advantage of the new iCloud sync? I only see one in the Mac App Store, SingleText has managed to integrate iCloud in time for launch, though based on it’s poor reviews, doesn’t even work.

For the past 7 weeks iCloud integration has been the top priority for Day One. We’ve been heads-down focused on making it happen in time for the public iCloud launch day. It was an uphill battle dealing with unproven APIs, sparse documentation, few snippets that didn’t even work properly.

After several work arounds we’ve had it working for over a week. When it’s working it’s truly magical, the sync happens in the background, it’s fast and seamless as advertised. Unfortunately, we cannot submit the update. Data gets lost in certain scenarios and when your data is gone it’s gone. There’s no incremental versioning or backups accessible online like Dropbox. When dealing with users precious data, saving data is the most important factor. Even if it’s an unlikely use case, if it’s not 100% safe, we can’t risk it.

Apple has failed to offer proper documentation, support and fixes. The betas were full of known (logged) bugs and before we knew it, October rolled around and it was live in the same beta state we’d been using. There have even been reports of data loss happening in Apple’s own iCloud enabled apps. We’ve logged several bugs and filed a DTS request and heard nothing. We have to assume Apple is aware of these issues and are quietly working on an update release.

Overall I think iCloud has a lot of potential, but was launched prematurely for 3rd party applications. In the meantime we are implementing the new Dropbox v1 API to update our current Dropbox sync solution, which is awesome.

— October 26th, 2011

If you know me, you know that my recent project called Day One, a journal application for the Mac App Store, has been consuming my time and energy lately. My blog has been abandoned for a couple months, but I’d like to keep it somewhat current for as long as I can, so here I am putting down a few thoughts on my new app.

Day One is an idea I’ve had for a long time now in some form or another. At one point several years ago I started to design and develop a simple journal application using Flash and AIR. It never really went far as I was consumed by a full-time job. Also, before the advent of Apple’s app stores, the barrier to entry for marketing and selling an application were pretty steep, and even then you may or may not get much visibility.

When Steve Jobs announced the Mac App Store my wheels didn’t stop spinning until I had committed myself to an idea that I would see to fruition. I quickly landed on “Simple Journal” an easy way to write and log small entries about your life with a reminder system. Over the next couple months I put in as much time as I could afford in wire-framing and designing the initial look and feel.

The entire process took longer than expected, I didn’t even come close to making the debut of the Mac App Store, but in the end it all came together perfectly. Initially the plan was to launch the iPhone app months after the Mac app, but it turned out, the iPhone app launched one week before the Mac App.

About a week after submitting the app to Apple, Day One was approved and live on the store it was featured as the #1 app under New and Noteworthy (which is possibly the best possible spot on the entire app store)! Nuts.

It’s been almost three weeks since the launch and in addition to the first feature, the app made it up to #10 in the overall Top Paid Apps, Featured in the “What’s Hot”, and is currently featured as the top Showcase app on the front page and was also give a custom app page treatment. In-freakin-sane.

All the sales and features are great, but the most gratifying part is the feedback I’ve been receiving from the users. They really get it, love it and are using it to write about and remember their lives as they never had before now. It’s awesome.

Now I’m looking forward to improving and adding to this great foundation of an awesome app. And create a killer iPad app!

— March 29th, 2011

It’s coming up on 1-year since I started working on my own, full-time freelance, design consulting whatever you want to call it. Best year ever. Sure working from home every day has a few drawbacks, like interaction with others, creative collaborations and such, but the benefits for me personally are so great. No commute is priceless.

I’ve been able to stay as busy as I wanted through all of 2010 with client work. Mostly UI design projects, a couple small Flash projects and a couple iPhone apps. My #1 goal this year was to create my own iPad / iPhone app, which I did. Fruit Memory was a lot of fun to make and has done fairly well for such a simple game. The other goal was to slow down client work for the last couple months of the year and focus on a new app. This too was a success as I spent most of December working on my next app to be released initially in the Mac App Store, it’s called DayOne.

DayOne is basically a simple journal application with features that will encourage and remind the user to post more often. It’s also a fantastic task or idea logging tool. The app will be complete in a couple weeks and posted to the App Store at the end of January. I will post more in-depth information about what this app does as it gets closer to release.

2011 is here and I’ve officially started my own company, Bloom (officially Bloom Built, LLC). I’m back to doing client work, and so far I’ve been lucky to get such great clients and projects that I’m genuinely interested in. But my long term goal isn’t client work. This year I’m going to continue to refine and develop applications and services of my own for as much time as my personal business budget allows. In the hopes that eventually I can create something that is self sustaining and will allow me to support and refine my own products full-time.

Here’s to 2011!

— January 10th, 2011

Thanks to Pummelvision, a great little service created by Jake Lodwick, I am able to see every photo I’ve posted to Flickr over the past 6 years in only 4 minutes. Really cool idea and great music that flows perfectly.

Jump over to Vimeo to see it in HD.

Speaking of Flickr, there’s a reason they don’t innovate and create stuff like this themselves. It’s because they are owned by Yahoo. Even still, they are the best photo sharing site out there and I’ve invested a lot in adding my own photos to the site. It’s only a matter of time until a Flickr killer arrives and allows you to transfer all your photos to it’s service. Who want’s to build it with me? Until then, I just renewed my Pro membership for another year.

p.s. The frame above is not of me being charged with possession of a controlled substance. It’s after I sprained my ankle walking from the beach in Haiti. I’ve never had so many people care about my personal well being. These guys were ready to operate while my family stood around laughing at me. It’ hurt!

— December 27th, 2010

I’ve been an avid user and fan of Delicious since February of 2005. Delicious is a free social bookmarking service, used to save URL’s to webpages with title, description and tags for easy recall and identification. I’ve saved multiple bookmarks to Delicious daily and I’m currently at 4176 bookmarks.

I don’t bookmark every article I read, but the ones I find interesting or think I may want to reference later. For me, recall is the beauty of the service, a simple search or click of a tag and it’s easy to find what you are looking for, typically more relevant than a Google search. The other nice feature is the social aspect of sharing and viewing friends bookmarks.

I was surprised and unsure when Del.icio.us was purchased by Yahoo a few years back. I was hopeful it would improve and advance the service, which it did in some ways, but very slowly. It’s still a solid service, but it could be so much more if the group were not tied down by the bureaucracy that’s typical of joining a large corporation.

Last week Yahoo had a round of layoffs including the entire Delicious team. They have since announced they are not shutting down the service, but looking for a place to manage it outside of Yahoo. Regardless of what they are looking to do with the service I was open to other options.

Hearing great reviews and recommendations for Pinboard, a service similar to Delicious, I decided to give it a try. Pinboard is similar yet quite different. Most noticeably, it’s run by a very small team and it’s not free. There’s an initial one-time fee to join, which increases for each new user that signs up for the service. They also offer an additional service that archives the pages you bookmark, so you can reference them even if the page disappears. I’m not interested in that feature, but it’s nice for some users.

I signed up for Pinboard for $6.91 and imported all my Delicious bookmarks. Super simple and includes all tags, dates, even private bookmarks just as they were on Delicious. They actually use the exact same APIs.

So far it’s been hammered with all the new users, but I like the concept and a few of the different features. Design-wise, it’s a little less refined than Delicious, but that hasn’t bothered me. The one thing I miss is the nice Chrome extension provided by Delicious. There’s a Pinboard extension, but it’s pretty basic. The other is the social aspect, currently it’s difficult to discover your friends on the service and there’s no way to even see which users are following your feed, you can only see the count.

Time will tell if it will be a long term home for my cloud-based bookmarks, but for now I’m happy with it.

My Pinboard feed: http://pinboard.in/u:paulm

— December 19th, 2010