Porchlight Service Shutting Down

After much deliberation, we've decided to shut down Porchlight as of January 9, 2009. There are a variety of reasons for doing this, but it boils down to resources and focus. Running a Web service is a full-time gig and Porchlight never has really found an audience like we hoped. The shifting economy has caused us to make some hard decisions and shutting down this service is one of them.

The other major point is that Second Gear's focus as a company has shifted in the two and a half years since we launched the service. We're a Mac and iPhone development company, so maintaining a Web service just doesn't fit in the cards these days.

We tried unsuccessfully to find a suitor to take over Porchlight, so this seems to be the end of the road.

If you are a Porchlight user, we don't want you to lose your data, so please to export your contents out before January 9, 2009. To do this:

1. Login to your Porchlight account
2. Go to Account Settings
3. Click on "Export all projects and bugs in XML"

The XML output should contain all of your project data so you can take it with you to another service or archive it for your own internal use.

Thanks for supporting Porchlight over the years. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Today 1.5: Alarms, Growl, Notifications, Oh My!

After a bit of a delay, we're pleased to announce that Today 1.5 is now available. Today 1.5 is our biggest update since 1.0 was released back in the spring. We've added three of the biggest features that users have requested. The first is support for creating and adding alarms to new events and tasks you create in Today.

The new alarms panel lets you define any variety of predefined alarms. We include a few commonly used types (5 minutes before, 30 minutes before for example). We've also added support for showing past-due notifications on any task that has lapsed its due date.

The final feature is for the power-users out there who are as big of fans of the Growl notification framework as me. When you perform a few actions in Today, there will now be notifications posted to Growl to give you an extra visual cue that the operation completed successfully.

Today 1.5 is a free update to all Today users, so please do try it out and let us know what you think.

Join the Second Gear Mailing List

It's been a long time coming, but we have finally setup a mailing list to keep our customers and fans up to date on the latest happenings with our products. The list will be low volume and will focus on announcing new product releases, offering a few tips & tricks and offering a few discounts every now and then.

Just so you know, we will never sell your email address to any third party and it will only be used by Second Gear to send you newsletter messages. We hate spam and will never contribute to the problem.

You can find the signup form in the sidebar of this weblog and the Today and Check Off