Clarus 1.0: A Development Postmortem
On Friday, June 5th we released Clarus - a Mac only application designed to keep track of your pets’ lives. Clarus has had the quickest idea to released product turnaround in the history of my career as a programmer. I started work on Clarus in Feburary, officially pronounced the program “done” on the 21st of May, and spent the time between then and now sorting out non-code stuff, like the new website, localisations, updating our online store and so on.
This is partly down to how cool Core Data is in Cocoa. Thanks to Core Data and a few other technologies built in to Cocoa, the base functionality - the ability to enter details into the program and save them - was done very quickly indeed. The majority of the development time was taken with making the program look great and integrate with the rest of the system (iCal, Address Book, AppleScript, printing, etc).
The Rise and Fall Of Music Rescue
For the past four years, Music Rescue has been our only income-earning product. This is great and all, but it makes us dependant on the Pod ecosystem. More importantly, we’re dependant on a single feature that iTunes doesn’t have - the ability to import songs from an iPod back into your library. Apple half-added this feature a while back and now you can copy iTunes-purchased tracks back to your library right within iTunes.
The other thing with Music Rescue is that when someone emails or calls with a problem, they’re not just pissed - they’re super pissed because they just lost all their music and now they can’t get it back. Nine times out of ten the problem is a mis-typed license key, but sometimes it’s not, and sometimes the customer doesn’t seem to understand that it’s not our support person’s fault.
Finally, Music Rescue is coming to the end of it’s income-earning life. We’re simply running out of useful features to add to it! The list of things for 5.0 is short - support for photos and a couple of other things. We’ll remain committed to Music Rescue throughout 2010 and probably beyond, but it’s time to start bringing in other products.
The Rise Of Clarus
So, what to do? Well, at WWDC 2008 I came up with an idea - a cool iPhone application which has been in development ever since. However, since the iPhone app requires a server-side component which needed to be finished before the application could really be started, progress was slow. In January 2009, I adopted Chester from a rescue home. Immediately I noticed that there wasn’t a single good application for the Mac to keep track of the piles of paperwork for him. Clarus was born!
My Favourite Things in Clarus
Developing Clarus was a blast. It has a completely different feel to Music Rescue, which is refreshing. Music Rescue is normally a one-stop app - it presents the iPod’s contents in a way instantly recognisable to the user and recovers it back to your computer with the minimum of fuss. The typical usage time for Music Rescue is minutes to hours, depending on the size of your library.
Clarus, however, is an application that I intend to be used for years on end. Hopefully the application will grow up alongside your pets, and despite the short overall time, I’ve spent a lot of time on the little things that’ll make living with Clarus an enjoyable experience.
Guides
System 7.x and 8.x had a thing called Apple Guide that’d walk you through a task step-by-step, highlighting the controls you needed to interact with as you went. This was much better than the current system, and I loved the old system so much that I spent nearly three weeks bringing it to Mac OS X. User help is often at the bottom of a developer’s list of things to do - mainly because you need to have the application nearly completed before you can write it. As a result, it tends to be rushed or not even there at all. Clarus, however, has the normal help content you’d expect from a decent Mac app as well as these guides to walk you through specific tasks.
Others in the Mac developer community seem to really like the idea, so I ended up making the framework for doing these guides available to them for free, and have committed to making a decent guide editing program. You can find more about the guide framework here.
PDFs
This isn’t really mentioned much in the program’s documentation or feature lists simply because it’s so natural. If you have a PDF containing your pet’s insurance policy paperwork, just drag it from the Finder, Mail, or wherever onto the policy in Clarus. The PDF will be attached to the insurance policy inside Clarus and kept within the document. This works with insurance policies, vet visits, medications and contacts.
System Integration
One of the best things in Mac OS X, from a developer’s perspective, is how Apple allows you to integrate with more or less everything. For example, in Clarus:
- A pet’s contacts are stored in Address Book, so you don’t need the application open to call your vet. These will be synced to your iPhone if you desire.
- If you have “Track Pets in iCal” option switched on in Clarus’ preferences, Clarus will automatically put important stuff (with a reminder) into an iCal calendar for each pet.
- When you Quick Look a Clarus document, it’ll tell you the the closest important events for that pet. This is especially cool, since it actually reads the document and figures it out rather than just relying on the application putting that stuff in there.
- Clarus is scriptable, which instantly makes its data compatible with pretty much every other scriptable app on your computer. Want your photos in iPhoto? Easy! Your expenses in Numbers? Done! A few little scripts ship with Clarus, but expect more as I think of awesome stuff to do.
Artwork
Of course, it’s no secret that I love artwork. For Clarus’ artwork, I one again contracted Fernando Lins, and he did a superb job, and scored extra nerd points in the application icon itself (atop this entry) - see if you can spot why.
Here’s a few of the pieces of art used in Clarus, including a couple that didn’t make 1.0 but will be in 1.1 and 2.0. My personal favourite is the “Album” piece, which I think really captures the sillyness that is often present in a group of pictures of your pet!
