Essentials is getting more useful and even more is saving your time and nerves. We are focusing on UX on this one and  trying to combine it with beautiful OS X Lion so Essentials would feel like its extended arm. For example, why would you need to click twice to open item? You don’t. Single-tap or click will do now. Some of you asked us to add preference to disable/enable Dock and menubar icons, and we did it. Just don’t forget what is your hotkey combo. You can cycle through groups more easily now, an so on.

Something caught my attention reading reviews and e-mails concerning Essentials since it’s live on App Store: comparing with other similar apps. I understand that people don’t have time to read everything on support pages about Essentials and how it works, and that is fine… as long as you are trying to use it and even use trial & error method. Thats all good. But reading this feature list is also recommendable. Can save you some time guessing feature list . I’m kind of surprised to see comparison with applications that are not similar to Essentials or have completely different purpose than Essentials. Lion Stacks for example or Launchpad. Those are panels for access and preview of one folder in a specific way (Stacks) or have possibility of launching applications (Launchpad). From Applications folder. Did I miss something?

You guys have fun and enjoy Essentials with all that bundle of various things that you can put in or take out of it and keep telling us what else would you like to have in Essentials. Thanks for feedback.

This update took almost a month from submission to approval in the App Store. We’ve had 1 rejection in the process, as Apple’s review team found a bug we somehow missed. After fix and another submission, and some more waiting, release is finally in your hands

Even if we didn’t start with a joke, you can express a moderate smile on this one… There is one feature that we forgot (sorry-sigh) to mention originally while making this web site: in Essentials you can switch between groups with keyboard: Command key (⌘) + 1 or 2 or 3 etc. Sorry for that. Really. Some users regretted that keyboard switching between groups isn’t available and than we had huge facepalm moment. With a sound. But you can look at this as $50 bill you found in back pocket that you didn’t even know you had.

New version was just submitted with few tweaks:

• Improved main application icon
• Improved menu bar icon
• Fixed bug with items repositioning when items grid has beed scrolled
• Fixed bug with running command items by double clicking or choosing “Run command” from right click menu

From today you can find useful Terminal command help page that we added on our website.

Let me just say that THE THING or THE (HANDY) STUFF (we didn’t have the name for app ’cause each of us had its private little sweet name (oh, you don’t want to know it, trust me) that was unacceptable to anybody else, but those two code names were very clear) become some private project that was talked over our “real” projects. We knew that joke was gone when app customization came to moment when items and groups got to be colorized(!). After hearing us talk about it over and over again, our friends and business partners started to ask us “Wha…what is that STUFF you are talking about all the time? Is that some code name? Is…is that some project with non-disclosure agreement?” “Nah, that’s just….stuff.” we answered and showed the current beta version. Since everyone wanted to have it, we started to give it some serious thoughts. We actually searched the web for similar app so we might buy it and stop this nonsense that is taking all of our free time. At that time Mac App Store didn’t exist so we had to google keywords and whatnot. Surprisingly we didn’t find similar app right away and that took us by surprise. “The Stuff” appeared to us in a completely new light. We did not have time or resources to research more deeply about similar apps. To cut long story short, we decided to go commercial with the app.

We got good reviews from our beta testers, and tone of input. Bugs were fixed and then we heard that Mac App Store is coming….now that was a challenge. App was almost finished and then in some web surfing time (when we usually did our daily web research), we found two similar apps. BUT they were not what we needed. So, we were overwhelmed and continued to tweak “The Stuff”. The only problem was the name… After a few really good ones, that were already taken, name issue became saga that-I’m-too-much-sleep-deprived-over-it and I-swear-to-God-am-taking-telephone-directory-and-picking-first-name-I-poke ranting – continued. After 50 facepalms more, we finally got idea. Not for the name but how to get it, and what’s more important – how to agree about it. And that is closer we’ve ever been to actually having a real name. We asked ourself: if we’re doing it for OS X, it has to be like OS X in every way, so name would be simple, intuitive, clear, indicative, light, common, beautiful and one word. We got ourselves – Essentials. And that actually was the real beginning of the whole story. To be true to the end: it is past midnight here in Croatia, and rather exciting day is behind us. We released yet another baby into the World, so now it`s on its own… And it is going to grow, become real beauty and more and more skillful, adept, clever….

Using the Coda’s Objective-C API I managed to overcome described problem by making a simple plugin that does just one thing: switches keyboard focus between two panes. You can find plugin, and it’s source code, below. Feel free to do anything you want with it.

Source code

Coda plugin

Application is progressing slowly, but steady. Lack of time for doing the actual programming is compensated with having more time to think through the problems and come up with more general and optimized solutions to those problems. Currently, my focus is slowly shifting toward refining and optimizing the user experience and usage patterns and flows.

As the base (mainly twitter engine and cacheing capabilities) is very flexible and more and more bugs are being exterminated, Tweetology already starts to show some of it’s strength’s: lightweight GUI makes using the application very easy and intuitive, optimized engine and cacheing controllers make application pretty fast. I’m exceptionally proud of image loading and cacheing mechanism that will make a lot of difference for people who use Twitter more often.