“Dude. Where the heck is MYStuff 2.0? You said, like, months ago that you were working on it.”

While not a literal email from any of the current MYStuff users, it’s a paraphrase of a number of emails as of late. So I thought I’d take a few minutes and give everyone an update.

As I stated over a year ago, MYStuff 2 is a ground-up rewrite that I started in September. It’s more than just re-writing all the existing features and making them better. I’m adding tons of new features, too. From the database backend to the user interface to all the new stuff, MYStuff 2 has been a major undertaking, and some of the features have proven to be quite ambitious. Further, all this new code has to be tested and debugged as well, and since it’s a ground-up rewrite all the program code is new. (Well, not all of it. I was able to re-purpose about 10% of the existing codebase.)

Half of me is jumping up and down with excitement about the new version and is screaming in my left ear, “It’s close enough! Wrap it up! Ship it now! Ship it now!” while the other half of me is screaming in the right ear, “It’s not done! Make sure it’s polished! Don’t cut out any features! Give the users a good value! Make it seamless!”

So I’ve been left with a decision: strip out planned features and release “soon” and dribble out the missing features as I finish them, or stick with the intended feature set for 2.0 and ship “soon-ish”.

After much hand-wringing, I’ve decided to go with the latter option.

And I’ll give you an example of one of the features that’s been slowing me down: barcode scanning.

I’ve had people asking for it since MYStuff 1.0 was in beta. Unfortunately, it’s not a trivial feature to implement. There are other programs out there that have it, but few have pulled it off successfully. I have a little test program running that scans barcodes just fine and dandy, but it’s problematic: It generates false readings about 20% of the time, and that’s assuming you have the lighting good enough to get it to recognize the barcode at all. If the lighting is good and you have everything set just so it doesn’t do a bad job, but do you want a piece of software with a feature that’s just “okay” and doesn’t work well enough for you to use all the time? I didn’t think so. At the same time, if all I gave you for an upgrade was a new paint job and no new features worth mentioning, would you be excited about it? Again, I didn’t think so.

Long story short, I’ve been working hard at making MYStuff 2 (and MYStuff 2 Pro) an upgrade worth getting excited about. Rest assured that it is under very active development at the moment, and that it will be getting into beta “soon” with an expected ship date of “soon-ish”. Have patience. I promise it will be worth the wait.

The first thing existing users will notice is that Stock Keeper uses much less memory than the 1.0 version. And when I say “much less memory” I mean “an order of magnitude lower.” Really. How was I able to accomplish this? It’s geeky programmer-speak, but for those of you who care about such things, I switched from automatic garbage collection to manual memory management. This consumed the bulk of my time in getting 1.1 out the door, as it is not a trivial task. Almost everything that was woking perfectly (albeit while consuming gobs of memory) was now broken and had to be tested, fixed, and tested again and again and again. I turned to the excellent beta testing program at MacDeveloper.net which I had used before, and about 50 people participated in testing the beta releases, helping me find at least a dozen memory bugs that I never would have found myself. Let’s just say I spent a lot of time staring at crash logs starting with “EXC_BAD_ACCESS”.

The next thing existing users will notice is a huge increase in speed and performance, especially with large images and large libraries. Before, Stock Keeper was generating images for the browser view on-the-fly, which really bogged down when you have boatloads of high-res images. So with this release, Stock Keeper is now generating 512-pixel thumbnails on import and using those for the browser view. Thanks to the improvements in memory management, this operation was able to be threaded with virtually no impact on import speed.

Finally, the “hallmark feature” for Stock Keeper 1.1 is the menubar widget. I wanted to do this as part of 1.0, but simply didn’t have the time. The worst thing in the world is to have to stop work in your foreground application so you can go digging for a file in your media library. I don’t care if your library is in Stock Keeper, iPhoto, or you manually manage your library in the Finder… switching applications and mentally breaking the flow of work is a horrible drag on productivity. Think about it: you’re working along, and all of a sudden you go, “I need a picture.” (Or audio file, or movie clip, or whatever.) I don’t care if you’re a graphic designer needing a logo, a software developer needing an icon, or someone putting together a presentation on their new nanotechnology startup. After you spend 15 minutes looking for what you needed, you come back to Illustrator or Xcode or Keynote and you go, “Okay, now where was I? What was I going to do next?” Stock Keeper’s menubar widget fixes this problem. Now, you never have to leave your foreground application to get to what you need, quickly, all without breaking your mental flow.

Sure, Apple’s applications have the “Media Browser”, which is fine if 1) your media is in iTunes, iPhoto, or your Movies folder, and 2) you’re using an Apple application. Stock Keeper’s approach is to make your entire media library accessible to every application on your Mac. Period. If your application accepts files via drag-and-drop, you can use Stock Keeper with it.

Finally, a word about Stock Keeper’s library. Some people complain that Stock Keeper has its own library and that it doesn’t just scan a folder full of files. That is the point. Think about it: on your iPad, do you care where your files are located? Do you care what they’re named? When you take a photo with your iPhone, then a few hours later you want to send an MMS message with that photo, do you navigate a file hierarchy to find it? No. You don’t care about where the files are located, nor what they’re named. You want this photo in that application. That is all that matters. With Stock Keeper, the goal is the same: remove you, the user, from the pain and time-consuming hassle of organizing your media files, and just make it easy to find them and use them.

I know, it’s hard to embrace this way of thinking after years of maintaining meticulous file folder hierarchies. But manually organizing media libraries is nothing but a time-consuming chore that gets more painful and more time-consuming the larger the media library gets. With the power of today’s computers, using the computer to search is always faster than manually drilling down through a byzantine maze of file folders. So when you import files into Stock Keeper, just tag them with information that is fresh on your mind: project number, client name, “logo”, “product shot”, et cetera. Use tags that are the same as folders you might create to store the files. Then later, just search. That’s all you have to do, because that’s all you should have to do. Find your file, use it, get on with your life.

This line of thinking has led us to adopt a new tagline for Stock Keeper: Stop organizing. Get working.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, it has to do with resources, and the proper utilization thereof.

As any dedicated businessman, I make it a point to do three things:

1. Listen to my customers
2. Evaluate my competition
3. Work hard to deliver an exceptional product

In the almost-three-years we’ve been in business, I’ve never once had someone email me asking me to make my applications better looking. Not once. They always email asking for features. And in that same time period I’ve seen lots and lots of applications rise up in the Mac market (some competitors, some not) that put the sizzle before the steak.

Imagine you go to a steakhouse and order a 12oz New York strip, cooked medium. After about half a beer, the waitress comes over with one of those cast-iron plates with wood bottoms, a sizzling steak on top of it, and a caution to “be careful, the plate is hot.” The steak looks beautiful, a nice brown with a perfect char. The sizzle sounds wonderful. And with a huge grin you grab your steak knife and cut into it… and it’s bleeding. It’s so rare you can hear it moo. The waitress looks busy, so you decide to take a bite and see if you can suffer through it… and it’s way over salted. After 15 minutes you finally flag down the waitress, who rudely takes your steak to the back. Twenty minutes later, you get a new steak that’s well done. You suffer through it (after all, you’re hungry), pay $35 for having a crappy meal, and swear to never go back.

Was the sizzle worth it? In my book, no. I want a hassle-free and enjoyable steak-eating experience. I want my steak the way I ordered it, and I want it to taste good. And I could care less if it comes on a sizzling plate if it’s not cooked to my expectations.

The same situation is happening in the Mac software market: many applications look nice. Until you try to use them and you find them lacking in features, or incorporating some sort of weird “workflow” model that you have to learn how to use. Many of these applications are part of what’s become known as The Delicious Generation.

With the limited resources I have, I have to choose how best to spend my time. If I’m going to spend two days on something, I can choose:

• to implement a much-requested feature, or
• to make it look pretty

Is it possible to do both? Yes. But it takes twice as long, or twice as many people.

There’s nothing wrong with making something look good, and I want my applications to be visually appealing and easy-to-use, but unless my customers want it, I’ll focus my efforts on putting the steak before the sizzle. Why? Because companies that put the sizzle first don’t last very long, and eventually their applications wind up like this. We’d much prefer to establish a long-term relationship with our customers, rather than disappear after a short-lived flash in the pan.

So, I’m here today making my customers a promise: I will always strive to deliver applications that are simple to use and feature rich before I spend time making something look good only for the sake of it looking good. I will never put meaningless aesthetics over usability or features. Ever. You have my word.

Since version 1.0, we’ve received a ton of feature requests. The most popular by far has been “make an iPhone version”, and yes, I am working on MYStuff Mobile, which will be a companion app to MYStuff 2. But there’s been a lot of other ones that may seem mundane, but are important, such as improved CSV import.

As we stated previously, MYStuff 2 is a ground-up rewrite, complete with a new and improved interface. (And yes, the new version will migrate all your old data). But when we sat down with our feature list for 2.0, and realized while there’s a ton of new features, some of them should have been part of MYStuff from the very beginning. We didn’t feel that users of MYStuff 1.x should have to pay for an upgrade to get features that should have been there all along, but at the same time there’s a bunch of new features that will be worthy of a paid upgrade.

Our solution, then, is that we’re going to release two versions of MYStuff 2. MYStuff 2, and MYStuff 2 Lite. All registered users of MYStuff will be able to upgrade to MYStuff 2 Lite for free, and be eligible for discounted upgrade pricing to the full version of MYStuff 2.

MYStuff 2 Lite will have all the same identical features as the current version of MYStuff, but we’re adding a bunch of new (long overdue) features. A few of these include:

• Improved CSV import
• Total values for each Category
• Right-click functions
• User-editable columns
• Smart folders

Obviously, this isn’t a complete list of all the new features of MYStuff 2 Lite, but it should give you an idea what to expect. Of course, there are a few unexpected “wow cool!” features in MYStuff 2 Lite that we’re keeping under wraps for the moment, and the full version will set a new standard for “stuff management” software.

Now the $64,000 question: when will it ship?

I wish I had a firm date, but in the world of software development, there are “hope to ship by” dates and there are “actual ship by” dates. The two sometimes coincide, sometimes they are vastly different. I’ll just say that the “hope to ship by” date is December 31st, 2011 so that people can use it to record the deluge of new stuff acquired over Christmas.

Stay tuned!

{ UPDATE } Based on feedback from MacUpdate customers, the names will be “MYStuff 2″ and “MYStuff 2 Pro”. So all registered users of MYStuff 1.x will be able to upgrade to MYStuff 2 for free, and be eligible for a discounted upgrade to MYStuff 2 Pro.

Also, I’m now expecting a ship date around the end of January. Personally, I’m disappointed I haven’t been able to get the new features implemented as fast as I wanted, but as my engineer wife reminds me, “innovation takes time.”

When developing software, there’s lots of things you have to do to make it ready for public consumption. Every aspect of every interaction must be reviewed, and testing every possible thing a person could do that would result in breaking your program. So in addition to using the software myself in my daily work, I deploy it to a team of beta testers who beat on it too, and catch things I never would because everyone uses a program a little differently.

So when you think it’s perfect, when you think you have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, you ship it.

And you misplace a decimal point or some other mundane detail that winds up not being so mundane.

(Yes, I just made an Office Space reference. I think fully 65.3% of my daily dialog is made up of movie, TV show, or lyrical references. And the more arcane the better.)

Two “mundane details” marred an otherwise perfect launch of Stock Keeper, forcing us to quickly release Stock Keeper 1.0.1. Looks like I just had my glitch for this mission. (See, there I go again with the movie references. This time to Apollo 13.)

So if Stock Keeper is giving you the “the 30-day demo has expired” dialog, be sure to update to the 1.0.1 release. You may have to download it manually from here and replace the 1.0 version, but regardless how you do it, download the update and it will cure all your ills. (Three references in one post… a new record!)

Prior to software development, I spent 13 years pushing pixels as a graphic designer and ad man. And from one viewpoint, it can be said that software development isn’t that much different from advertising. Namely, you have a problem to solve, you have various tools to use, and you have to figure out the best way of solving it that appeals to people.

In advertising, that involves coming up with a message that has broad reach, and visual imagery that has aesthetic appeal.

In software development, that involves figuring out how someone will use your program in their everyday lives, and make the program visually appealing and easy to use.

In advertising you use the Adobe products and/or QuarkXPress to do your work. In software development on the Mac, you use Xcode.

In advertising, you have folders full of images that you use for concepting and developing your layouts. In software development, you have folders full of icons and other graphic bits that you use for assembling your user interfaces. In both situations, people spend hours searching for and managing their collections of raw materials. No application on the market helps people solve this problem. It’s time-consuming and a royal pain. And it was a situation that was long overdue for a fix.

So while working on MYStuff and MYComics I realized that I could apply my experience in graphic design and advertising to the problem and come up with a solution that would appeal to both graphic designers and software developers. (And anyone that needs to manage digital media assets.) The idea for Stock Keeper was born: An enhanced iPhoto-like application with a built-in web browser for searching online for stock photos and icons, and the ability to track usage licenses, where the media came from, how much was paid for it, and more.

After 3 months of development, we’re very excited to release Stock Keeper. And at $19 we hope that everyone can afford to make their media-management lives much easier. Head on over to the product page and download the demo.

In the past few months, we’ve been in contact with Universal Uclick about MYComics, and during those discussions we’ve agreed to scrap some of the future features we had planned, such as web scraping (which would display the comics without displaying the web page). Comic authors who are syndicated through sites like GoComics make their money from ads and merchandise found on the pages hosted by GoComics. Far be it from me to advocate taking money away from the people who have used their talents to provide us entertainment over the years.

Other features are in the works, however, which will further improve your comic-viewing experience while at the same time respecting the copyright of the authors.

Needless to say, we are very excited about the added functionality iCloud will bring to the MYStuff platform, especially MYStuff 2 and MYStuff Mobile. We’re actively looking into iCloud and MYStuff compatibility at the moment, but it looks like the current version of MYStuff will “just work” with iCloud in the same way MYStuff “just works” with Dropbox.

As the developer resources are made available to us, we will be optimizing MYStuff to work as fluidly as possible with iCloud across multiple machines. Check back here for more news as it becomes available.

We didn’t, however, test a “new install”, as in “a new user launching MYStuff for the very first time.” And unfortunately, there was a bug that only affected new users.

Ouch.

Fortunately, it was reported quickly (late in the afternoon yesterday) and we had the bug fixed and a new release thoroughly tested and posted by this morning. If you downloaded the 1.5.5 release, either manually or via auto-update, you’ll need to manually update your copy of MYStuff to 1.5.6. Simply download a fresh copy and replace your old version.

Which brings us to the future of MYStuff 2. In recent months, we are beginning to appreciate how Apple felt when Mac OS 9 was out and OS X was under development: you still have to support the older technology, but you can’t wait to leave it behind. Old software code has a way of being like the “junk drawer” in your kitchen: you start out with it all neat and clean and organized, and over time it becomes filled with things that you should have thrown out a long time ago, or put away in their proper place but never quite got around to it.

After over 2 years of active development, MYStuff’s code has gotten to the point where it needs more than just a little house cleaning. MYStuff 2 is going to be a ground-up rewrite.

Radical? We don’t think so. There are a lot of benefits for us as developers, but the real winner will be our customers. Like Apple’s transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X, we’ll be laying a new foundation for the future growth of the application. (And trust us when we tell you that we have some great plans in store for MYStuff 2 and beyond.) From faster performance to more modern technologies and exciting new features, we know that doing a complete re-write for MYStuff 2 will be more than worth the effort.