My latest application Task Zebra is now up and running, it is currently available by invitation only and I’ve sent the first batch of invitations today.

I’ll write more about what Task Zebra does soon.

Do you take pictures? Of course you do, today everyone is a photographer, there’s a cameras in every cell phone and point and shoot digital cameras are cheaper and better than ever so just about everyone has a camera on him or her almost always.

But the real question is do you want to take better pictures? did you ever looked at a picture you took and it looked nothing like you wanted? Do you want control how the picture looks like and not just take whatever the camera gives you? Ever wondered how professional photographers do it?

And one final question - why am I asking this question on a blog that usually talks about productivity and technical programming techniques?

Well, it all begun just over a year ago, me and my wife were about to have a baby (our second), we were unhappy with the camera we had and my brother had a very nice DSLR (those big pro-looking cameras with interchangeable lenses) that was so much better than our camera in every conceivable way that we broke and bought a DSLR ourselves.

Right out of the box the new camera took pictures that were technically better than our old camera and was a joy to use – but the back screen, instead of showing the picture you are about to take shows an incomprehensible collection of numbers and icons (16 of them) I felt like the camera was mocking me and had to learn what all those things were.

And I did, while learning the technical side of photography I discovered two important things:

1. This is fun! From all the electronics devices I’ve bought over the years (and there are a lot of them) I’ve never enjoyed playing with any of them like this camera.
2. Photography is easy, it’s full of technical jargon and numbers that make it look complicated – but it’s not

Since then I’ve become one of the top 1% of users in a very active photo Q&A site and started a photography blog called useful photo tips – in this blogs I write in depth about specific techniques that let you control the picture you take.

Some of the techniques in the blog require a DSLR camera – but most is just as applicable to any camera and even camera phones.

So, if you want to take better pictures (and I believe that if you are reading this far you do) go over to www.UsefulPhotoTips.com and subscribe – and if you want to know anything photography related (for example how to take pictures of shiny objects) just send me a message and I’ll do the research, take test pictures and write an in depth tutorial for you.

www.UsefulPhotoTips.com is completely free, there are no ads on the site so I don’t get any money when you visit – actually I pay for the server, bandwidth and any e-mail I send if you subscribe via e-mail so my only motivation here is that I really enjoy writing photography tutorials.

See you there.

After a very long time without any new time management tips (I didn’t have time to write about time) I’ve finally added a new tip.

This tip is about improving your time estimation skills and it’s on the time management tips section of the site.

I’ve just uploaded yaTimer version 2.7 to the web site, this is a free upgrade to all customers.

This version contains some usability improvements to the reports system that I’ll write about in a future blog post.

To update open the main menu by clicking the big round button on the top left of the yaTimer main window and select “About yaTimer”, then click “Check for Updates” or download and install the latest version from the yaTimer upgrade page.

Did you ever had so much work to do you didn’t know where to begin? and, as result, did you ever forget to address the most important or urgent item in your task list because you were too busy working on other things?

This is the problem Task Zebra is built to solve, it’s a clever prioritizing and reminders system that will help you to never forget the important stuff again.

And, as a bonus, it also tracks your invoices and help you to get paid on time.

Task Zebra will be launched in the second half of January on an invitation-only basis, if you want to try it out go to TaskZebra.com and request as invitation.

Invitation will be sent on a first-come-first-served basis, request you invitation right now and you may be able to start using Task Zebra on launch day.

In the last blog post I’ve talked about what happened in 2011, in this post I’ll talk about plans for 2012, but first a disclaimer:

A year is a long time for a software company, this post outlines the current plans for the year but those plans will change as the business and technology environments change during the year

So now that we got that out of the way here are the plans for the various products:

yaTimer time tracking software and yaTimer Central

yaTimer and yaTimer Central will continue to be developed based on customer feedback, there’s already one minor update that is almost finished and will be released mid January.

I’ve moved away from the few-big-updates model and to lot of small updates – this means there will be many new version over the year, probably a small update every month or so.

Also, sometime during the year I will stat charging for updates, this does not change the official updates policy – everyone still gets a full year of free updates with every license and people who buy yaTimer as a subscription of who have a yaTimer Central subscription will receive free updates for as long as the subscription is active – but customers who are no longer entitled to free updates will have to pay.

Giraffe Upload photo backup software

Giraffe Upload is a young product – and you can really change the direction of development by sending feature suggesting and requests.

Currently the 2012 plan includes changing the Giraffe Upload UI into something much nicer and adding support for video, raw files and backing up network drives – but the plan will change based on customer feedback.

Task Zebra– Web based to-do list with scheduling, prioritization and invoice tracking

The is a completely new product – basically it’s a smart to-do list that can filter your list and show you the things you need to do now – and it let’s you record invoices right from your to-so list and track those too, so you know how much money you should get paid and who to call to collect it.

Task Zebra will enter an invitation only beta stage sometime in January (the basic functionally it already there, if I can’t get all the features I want by the end of January I will lunch it as-is).

If you want an initiation just go to the Task Zebra web site or e-mail me (I’m sure you can find the e-mail address, or just use the contact form).

Squirrel Clock – Employee attendance and time tracking

With all the work on yaTimer, Giraffe Upload and Task Zebra I had to put Squirrel Clock on hold, so I don’t plan to update it for the first half of 2012 (unless there’s a sudden increase in the number of customers – and then I’ll be happy to upgrade it).

Unnamed – Anti-procrastination software

I’ve been planning this product for a long time but it isn’t even close to being ready (can’t get to work on the anti-procrastination software) – the truth is that with all the work on the other products I really don’t know if this product will be ready in 2012.

I’ve just finished replacing the software that runs the nbdtech.com web site, so if you see any problems please tell me.

The site content and design should remain exactly the same but the new system will save me a lot of time when updating the site and is the basis for updates planned for the future.

My open source project Everything Up self test was a real time saver during the upgrade, if you run a server you have to use something like it.

The new icons have been on the yaTimer and yaTimer Central web pages for more than a week, but I didn’t have time to write about them before.

The new icons are already used almost everywhere on the web site and in the yaTimer Central application, they will appear in the yaTimer application in the next version scheduled for early January.

Again this is the time of year for summarizing the passing year and making plans for the next one.

Businesswise nothing went according to plan in 2011, some things went worse than the plan and some things were way better.

The bad parts are mostly traced to several months I was so swamped with other work I had nearly no time to work on my products, here are the 2011 plans and how they turned out:

• yaTimer time tracking software was supposed to have a major upgrade – in reality it had many releases over the year but they were small and didn’t include most of the new features I wanted.
• yaTimer Central Team and Sync tools for yaTimer was just released, it works but the graphic design of the web site and the application isn’t as good as I liked it to be – I didn’t have time to fix this.
• Squirrel Clock employee time and attendance tracking was supposed to be released in January - it was released (3 months too late) and isn’t selling very well due to the fact I didn’t have the time to promote it.
• The yaTimer Newsletter missed a few months and completely changed direction mid year.
• The blog had only one or two posts most months
• And the undisclosed future product mentioned in the plans for 2011 blog post was disclosed to be an anti-procrastination tool but it’s still at an early prototype stage (no progress on the anti-procrastination tool - funny).

But there were also some very good unplanned things that happened this year:

• Most important, I’ve stopped doing the project work that took all of my time, I’m now working only on the products
• Giraffe Upload photo backup was released this is a completely unplanned product that was born out of my need to safely backup my family pictures.
• Giraffe Upload Pro upload tool for pro photographers was also released, this is an extension to Giraffe Upload that let you do interesting things like shoot directly to the internet.
• Useful Photo Tips – my photography blog – was lunched (hey, I’m allowed to have hobbies)
• And a new program, a combination scheduling and invoice tracking tool is in the last stages of development and will be released soon.

I’m still working on the plans for 2012 so you can expect another blog post soon about what’s going to happen in the next year.

I hope you had a great 2011 and I wish you a wonderful 2012

Giraffe Upload was always intended to serve two very different audiences – the home user and the professional photographer.

The home users just want their photos safe without them even noticing the software – the software should work and stay out of the way – an example of an home user oriented feature is the backup scheduling, it is not configurable and is pre-fine-tuned to upload reasonably quickly without blocking the user’s internet connection too much.

For a pro who want to push photos from the camera directly to SmugMug (via a computer with Giraffe Upload of course) “reasonably quickly” is neither reasonable nor quick, the pro need the picture uploaded now (or at least he or she needs to know exactly when it will be uploaded – the smart algorithm designed to not slow down the user’s facebook browsing is no longer desirable).

So I’m introducing a new version of Giraffe Upload called “Giraffe Upload Pro” and it will have all the features professional photographers need – from the event photographer downloading pictures from the camera after an event to people running a direct-to-SmugMug photo booth.

The optimized for backup version is now called “Giraffe Upload Home” and it continues with the old pricing of $18/year or $4/month.

The pro version has all the featured of the home version (by default it will actually run exactly the same as the home version and you can pick and choose which of the pro features you want to enable) and will be priced at $12/month

I feel the price is justified because 1. any tool for your business that doesn’t even make or save you $12/month is not even worth considering – so if it’s not worth $12 for you it’s probably not a good match for your business and 2. the pro version costs me more to operate – it requires more server resources and costs more to develop and test (because it’s so much more complicated then the home version).

So feel free to try the new version at the Giraffe Upload site all trial account use the pro version and you can choose to keep the pro version or downgrade to the home version when your trial is over.