While Billings 3 is a very nice invoicing solution, the lack of multi-user support has been a long-standing limitation. Alykhan “AJ” Jetha, CEO of Marketcircle, confided that users have been clamoring for Billings Pro for some time:

We felt that we could offer a better alternative for the Mac centric business than what was out there, plus the requests from Billings 3 users have been overwhelming. For example, there is one customer that runs over $8 million a year in business through Billings 3. There are others that have equally impressive numbers. Those customers needed a multi-user option.

Billings Pro has all the features of Billings 3 plus some new tricks for the multi-user setup.

Billings Pro Server

The server component of Billings Pro is very familiar to anyone that has used Daylite Server. Synchronization between the Mac desktop client and the server occurs in the background about every five minutes. Billings Pro Server also allows for anywhere connectivity with Billings Pro Touch, a new iOS app that should be out soon (additional license required).

Switchboard is a new feature that automates the configuration of automatic port forwarding on supported routers and also provides a DynDNS-like service for connecting back to the server over the Internet even if you don’t have a static IP address for your Mac. The result is a system that’s much easier to set up on a normal Mac with a standard Internet connection. You simply register with Switchboard, and Billings Pro takes care of the rest in the background. I’m told that this feature will eventually make its way into Daylite Server.

Billings Pro Client

The client application is visually consistent with Billings 3, with the addition of a few new invoice templates. Multi-user support means that you can configure an approval workflow to allow project managers to review and approve time and expenses before someone else sends the final invoice. The client application will work offline with a local copy of the database and sync changes back and forth to the server.

Billings Pro Touch

The Billings Pro Touch iPhone app will also sync with Billings Pro Server, and lets you enter time and expenses (including mileage) on the road. You can also check the status of client invoices and payments and even enter payments using the Credit Card Terminal app (sold separately in the App Store). Billings Pro Touch has been submitted to the App Store, but is not yet approved for purchase.

Timecard

Timecard is a new web-based time entry solution. Workers can connect back to Billings Pro Server from any modern web browser and enter time against their projects. When you start a timer in the web browser, the server keeps track of the open timer so that you can switch away and back on a mobile device and not lose your timer. This is a great solution for workers who don’t need the full features of Billings or Billings Touch.

Pricing

Billings Pro starts at $199.95 per user. There are bundles to save some money when you get multiple user licenses and Billings Pro Touch with Premium Support. If you want to add an additional worker for a short-term project and do not need  a permanent user license, monthly licenses are also available at $24.95 per user per month. A full setup for 10 users would cost about $2,350. Many shops will not need a license for each and every person but perhaps just for managers that approve invoices, the person who sends the invoices out and collects payments, and the leadership team that wants access to current client reports.

Apple announced the winners of the 2009 Apple Design Awards last night at a special ceremony hosted by John Geleynse, director of Software Technology Evangelism, and Shann Pruden, senior director for Developer Relations. These awards are an annual affair to recognize “technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement in iPhone and Mac software development.”

The depth and breadth of submissions has been accelerating, as interest in the Mac and iPhone has picked up over the last few years. As a point of comparison, the iPhone awards last year were handed out to early pre-release apps because the App Store had not even launched yet. There were about 1,700 web apps in Apple’s online directory, and this year there are over 4,000 web apps and more than 50,000 native apps available in the iTunes App Store.

Rather than being split out into categories for best game, best user experience, best application, and so on as has been the practice in past years, this year’s awards were simply organized into Mac and iPhone showcases. Here are the 2009 winners.

iPhone Developer Showcase

MLB.com At Bat 2009 from MLB.com

Postage from Rogue Sheep

Topple 2 from ngmoco:)

Tweetie from atebits

Mac OS X Leopard Developer Showcase

Billings from Marketcircle Inc.

BoinxTV from Boinx Software

Things from Cultured Code

Versions from Sofa

Student Awards

Wooden Labyrinth 3D from Elias Pietil

Fontcase from Pieter Omvlee

iPhone OS 3.0

AccuTerra Beta from AccuTerra

This last entry is pretty interesting. We saw lots of exciting and innovative apps in the WWDC Keynote on Monday that take advantage of the new features of iPhone OS 3.0, but AccuTerra was not presented there. The technologies utilized in this new hike tracking app are pretty extensive, though. I’m definitely looking forward to checking this out when it becomes available.

For more information about this year’s winners, here are some articles from TheAppleBlog that mention a few of them…

Weekly App Store Picks: March 14, 2009 (Topple 2)

Tweetie for Mac Update: Now With Video Tweeting

Billings 3 Brings Welcome Updates, Fresh Design

BoinxTV: Broadcasting for the rest of us

BoinxTV Now Shipping

Task Management With Things

12 Subversion Apps for OS X

Keep Your Fonts Together With Fontcase

Fonts 201: Font Management Apps for the Mac

Task Management With Things

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If you’re into serious business productivity, then the folks at Marketcircle will become your new best friends. As of this week, there is a new version of Daylite that will enable even higher productivity. We’ve written about Daylite before, so this article will discuss what is new, not a complete re-hash of the application.

With version 3.9 of Daylite, small businesses users will have collaboration tools comparative to Microsoft Exchange: multi-user access to calendars, contacts, and tasks. In addition, they will also have multi-user access to opportunities (sales and more) as well as projects. In environments of 50 or less people, setting up Exchange or a comparable enterprise-class solution is cost prohibitive.

What’s New

With Daylite version 3.9, Marketcircle provides a product that simplifies the deployment and management of this business productivity and collaboration suite. Let’s review what is new:

• Daylite Touch
• Daylite Server
• Daylite 3.9
• Billings 3.0.4

Daylite Touch

I’ve written about Daylite Touch before — back in January. The big news is that Daylite Touch is now available in the Apple App Store.

As discussed in my earlier review, the biggest impact of Daylite Touch is the ability to sync the Daylite data to the iPhone and complete so many business critical tasks while mobile, including:

• Group scheduling
• Task Management & Delegation
• Objectives (Opportunity and Project) Management & Delegation
• And much more

Daylite Touch Home Screen

Daylite Server

With the release of Daylite 3.9, Marketcircle has changed the underlying architecture of the application to make it easier to manage. Essentially, they migrated from the OpenBase database system and replaced it with PostgreSQL. Why is that significant? Fundamentally, here are the benefits:

• Enables the ability to create a separate server infrastructure for Daylite Touch.
• Simplifies the management of Daylite software licenses — all licenses are now managed in the server application and not in Daylite itself.
• Re-architecting the offline database functionally for improved robustness and management.

Translation: a more reliable application with a simple management console for a multi-user environment. Bottom line: a huge win for the customer. Let’s take a look at the new Daylite Server Admin application.

Daylite Server Admin

This new application enables users to quickly set up a shared Daylite database for all users of the organization. What is great about this new application is that on the general pane, you get a quick overview of the health of your server, additional information about how many users, the last time you had a backup, and if you are running a Daylite Touch Server.

The following panes let you manage each database, how often you back up, how you share the database across the network, and licensing management.

Daylite Server Admin Tool – General Pane

If you choose to run Daylite Touch, this part of the Daylite Server Admin application lets you view registered iPhones as well as review logs and if necessary, remotely wipe the data from the iPhone.

Daylite Server Admin Tool – Daylite Touch Server Pane

Daylite 3.9
Daylite itself also received some additional features:

• Support for the new database format (PostgreSQL) and server infrastructure.
• Improved support for Apple Sync Services.
• For workgroups, licensing management is available via the Daylite Server Admin application.
• Updated task smart lists (see below) that now reflect an even stronger link to the Getting Things Done method, as well as maintaining cohesion with Daylite Touch.
• A new login with auto-discovery of the database.

New Task Management

Billings 3.0.4

Billings, Marketcircle’s incredibly easy-to-use time management and invoicing application, also received a small version bump with the following enhancements:

• Daylite 3.9 compatibility
• The timer now has a resolution of 1 second (used to be a minimum of 1 minute)
• Ability to edit start and end times for each log entry
• A new report: “Payments received – grouped by client”
• A bulk edit fix so any currency formatted values are applied without tabbing out of the field

Billings 3.0.4 – Payments received – grouped by client Report

Connectors + Daylite Delivery
Each of the following connectors plus Daylite Delivery were all updated to support the new PostgreSQL database infrastructure.

• MYOB AccountEdge
• LightSpeed
• FileMaker
• Moneyworks

So what does this all mean?

For those already using Daylite, this is a major upgrade with a significant amount of new functionality. Most of that functionality (sans Daylite Touch) is not end user-specific. Though this might not be a bad thing, as learning all-new user interfaces for a release does have a training cost. For Administrators of Daylite, this new release is a sheer pleasure, as management has become significantly better.

Here are the details of the 3.9 upgrade:

Pricing

• Daylite 3.9 is a free upgrade for all registered users of 3.x. It includes Daylite Server, Daylite Touch Server and the new Daylite Server Admin application.
• Daylite Touch is a free download from the App Store. It will cost $49.99/year per user. Yes, this is subscription pricing. For clarity, the subscription is not automatically renewed (giving the user choice if they want to continue using Daylite Touch).
• Billings 3.0.4 is a free upgrade for registered users of version 3.x.
• Each connector and Daylite Delivery upgrades are all free.

Marketcircle Support

An item of note is that Marketcircle will stop all support for Daylite versions 3.8 and below effective June 30, 2009. The purpose behind this is to have their customers move to 3.9 so that they can all be on the new PostgreSQL back end.

According to Marketcircle CEO Alykhan Jetha, their highest support costs are with OpenBase. Thus, providing a free upgrade to 3.9 is a good incentive for their users, especially given the long-term benefits of PostgreSQL and the new Daylite Server plus Daylite Touch functionality.

Conclusion

If you are a sole proprietor or a small business (with about 50 users), then Marketcircle’s offering may make you think twice about what solutions you’re using to manage your business productivity.

With this new release, which enables your crucial business information on an iPhone, you ought to consider migrating to the Marketcircle offering. If you already own the product, then upgrade now as the benefits will only improve your business.

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Smule

The team at Smule, the people who brought us Ocarina, Sonic Lighter, and Zephyr, were featured in the briefing with Apple yesterday. They demoed a new app that will take advantage of the peer-to-peer API’s in the iPhone 3.0 SDK.

Yeah, we offered a sneak peak of our new product, Leaf Trombone: World Stage, the first massive multi-player social music game (that’s a mouthful sir). We demonstrated a duet over their new Peer-to-peer API. In effect, this allows to devices to discover and pair, regardless of wifi/cell, etc. The discovery capability is quite neat. And the bandwidth is pretty darn good.

Ge and David performed “Phantom of the Opera” as a duet over bluetooth on two iPhones, which everyone can now enjoy by streaming the presentation. Of course, we haven’t seen all the magic that has become possible with the iPhone 3.0 SDK.

We have held back some of the more significant components of the leaf trombone for when we launch the product…

Iconfactory

Craig Hockenberry is a principal at Iconfactory, the collective of creative minds that brought us App Store favorites Twitterific and Frenzic. When asked about his reaction to today’s announcements, Craig was most impressed by the forward momentum of the iPhone platform.

“The thing that’s most positive in my mind is that today showed us how serious Apple is about this platform. They are not resting on their laurels: this release includes major enhancements for users and developers alike. “

Gedeon Maheux, another princiapl at Iconfactory, expressed his excitement and concerns about the new SDK.

We’re very excited about the potential opportunities that 3.0 represents, but there are also the possibility of pitfalls such as creating “content-free” apps that need paid upgrades to really deliver.

When asked about other changes, Craig felt that it was going to take some time to see how the App Store in-app payment mechanism would affect their current and future products. When pushed for further reaction, no single feature seemed to elicit enough excitement to bring out the CHOCKLOCK today, but expect some ALL CAPS tweets once developer.apple.com is back up and Craig can get his fleshy palms on the 3.0 SDK.

GroceryIQ

Jason Boehle is the co-founder of Free State Labs and one of the developers behind GroceryIQ. The company has since been acquired by Coupons, Inc. and development continues on the next version of the GroceryIQ app which will include syncing shopping lists between phones.

The most significant new feature announced today for Grocery iQ is push notifications. For example, you can know when your significant other adds an item to your shopping list. We are working on phone-to-phone sync right now, and push notifications will make that feature more useful.

While Jason is relieved that cut, copy and paste and MMS have finally found their way to the iPhone, like many others, he was most impressed with the bright future for the platform.

The 3.0 software is hugely important for the iPhone platform, as it shows Apple is continuing to innovate and blur the boundaries between phone and computer. iPhone developers should be very excited, as Apple is allowing more access to the hardware and software inside the device, and is providing us with much better ways to monetize our apps over time.

Marketcircle

Alykhan Jetha (better known as AJ) is the CEO of Marketcircle, the Mac business software company. They are working to bring their Daylite productivity management solution to the iPhone with the imminent release of Daylite Touch. Marketcircle is keen on the push notification service for Daylite Touch.

I also think that cut & paste and Spotlight will make the iPhone or iPod even more productive for a lot of people. We are looking forward to see how apps like ours can participate in Spotlight as well as how the whole thing works.

Still, there were some disappointments too.

I was hoping for background processes, or even periodic background processes, but no luck with that. I think that for a lot of apps, being able to run in the background every 30 minutes (or X hours) when the user is not using the device as opposed to always running would significantly reduce the battery problem. These things wouldn’t have to run for long. For example our typical sync takes less than 20 seconds.

Double Encore

Dan Burcaw, CEO of iPhone development consultancy Double Encore, was one of the early movers in the iPhone market and led the team behind the Brightkite iPhone app. Dan was also on hand for Apple’s announcements and was still riding the Apple high after he left 1 Infinite Loop and spoke with me on the way to the airport.

This definitely keeps the ball rolling. It was going to be hard for competitors to catch the iPhone and the App Store anyways, but I think Apple said, “We need to be flexible so we can keep this snowball rolling.” Everyone I talked to, my peers, other companies, are saying, “this thing just got better in a lot of ways.” Sure, Apple addressed the specific things that people wanted to change, but this is a really solid, broad release.

Since Dan was in the briefing, I was curious about the announcement that got the most attention from those present.

<laughing> You know, the Apple people kept asking that question too. I’m not sure, but as soon as the video goes up, look for this… When the ESPN app gets a push notification, the alert sound is the ESPN jingle. Da-da-da. That was cool. iPhone 3.0 gives people new ways to extend their brand. The new business models are going to allow companies to extend their brand to the iPhone in a big way too. All these changes to the SDK will bring the big boys into the game that had been sitting on the sidelines, now that they can use their branding in a bigger, richer way.

If you haven’t thought about building an iPhone app, you might want to look into it. This thing is going to be a runaway train by the time 3.0 hits.

A Runaway Train

The strong consensus among all the developers that I spoke with is that the 3.0 announcements have renewed their confidence in the iPhone platform. With 30 million devices out there (iPhone and iPod touch) and the momentum of the app store, existing developers are probably more excited about the iPhone than ever. If I could share one insight, it would be to keep an eye on what happens with the new accessory communication options. I heard several rumblings that this opens up a whole new round of innovation for the iPhone.

While no one picked any one single software feature, API, or Core service as the Next Big Thing, everyone was thrilled with the breadth and depth of the changes to the SDK. A theme developed that these developers felt like the wide range of features announced today made a strong statement about Apple’s commitment to the future of the iPhone platform. A future that, frankly, I’m pretty excited to watch unfold as well.

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Wednesday at Macworld Expo marked a distinct change from the hectic activity around the keynote and the open of the show floor. The big news today was the announcement of the Best of Show awards from Macworld. The products recognized this year are…

Best of Macworld 2009

• iPhoto ’09
• Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
• Things
• Ecamm Network BT-1 Bluetooth Web Cam
• Filemaker Pro 10
• HP MediaSmart Server
• Livescribe Pulse Smartpen
• Daylite Touch
• Sling Media SlingPlayer for iPhone

Our Impressions

iPhoto ’09 is a great upgrade and worthy of the attention, despite the appearance of Google’s Picassa for Mac as a possible competitor. We love Things around here, and quite a few of us actually use it to try and stay on top of, well, things. We introduced you to the Ecamm Bluetooth Web Cam on Monday. Filemaker Pro 10 is a nice update. I talked to a few developers today that are looking forward to the new scripting features, but the UI overhaul is just something that’s long overdue. Daylite Touch really redefines what an iPhone app is capable of doing. We had a chance to talk with Marketcircle yesterday and will share our impressions of using the app soon. One thing I can let slip now, this is definitely not going to be a $.99 app store purchase. Daylite Touch is a full-featured app that rivals what you can do with a desktop app and you should expect it to be priced accordingly.

The Rest of the Best

The HP MediaSmart Server is a really interesting solution for home users that want to store and share media. SlingPlayer is very cool and something to keep an eye on as soon as it gets released to the app store this quarter. We’ll bring you more info on that announcement soon, along with some details on the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center.

Other Announcements

If you’ve been wondering what happened to the Xserve RAID team after that product was discontinued, several of them have resurfaced at startup Active Storage. I had a chance to talk with Alex Grossman on Wednesday and I am very impressed with the attention to detail, and the particular attention to the needs of Mac users, that Active Storage has put into their products. If you are looking for high-density storage solutions that you can easily manage from the Mac, you may not need to look any further than Active Storage.

Intelliscanner has a new update to their SoHo and Mini scanners. If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to get organized and catalog stuff around your house, you’ll love this little scanners and the accompanying software.

Axiotron recruited Steve Wozniak to demo their new Modbook Pro this week. The Modbook Pro, as the name suggest, is based on the MacBook Pro system just as the Modbook is based on the Apple MacBook.

Ambrosia, one of my favorite developers, is announcing iToner 2 and WireTap Studio 1.0.7 this week. iToner 2 adds three new features: ClearTone to help get the audio levels right so your ringtones always sound great on the iPhone, cropping tools to edit snippets right in iToner, and 40+ professionally mastered ringtones that you can use right out of the box. WireTap Studio has been updated to improve performance and add some new control schemes .

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