CMEasy is an app designed to make it easy and painless to keep track of all of your Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits. For any given activity you store the date, duration, type of activity and category, allowing you to keep track of hours logged over the course of the year.

It’s not just for CME credits though, you can use CMEasy to keep track of any kind of attendance. Continuing Dental Education, Continuing Teaching Education and Nursing Continuing Education are all easily kept track of as well.

There are a couple of neat features that make CMEasy a breeze to use:

1) Use templates for frequent activities

Say you attend Grand Rounds every week. Create a new Template, name in Grand Rounds and set the default duration. Then, every time you need to log another attendance at Grand rounds, with a single touch you can create a new entry with the correct name and duration. Easy!

2) Keep track of total hours spent

CMEasy reports statistics on your total hours by category. It’s a snap to see just how much CME credit you’ve earned.

3) Easy to get your data our

CMEasy makes it a snap to get your data out. Export your data at any time as a plain text .csv file.

It’s only $1.99 on the App Store, go buy it now!

Now the way things work is that you submit 2 image files within your application (one regular resolution (57 x 57) and one retina resolution (114 x 114), even more for hybrid iPhone/iPad apps) that serve as the icon for the application on your iOS device. You then submit a third image file (512 x 512 pixels) that serves as artwork in the App Store.

I dutifully submitted the required files, but only when CMEasy was actually accepted did I notice something interesting. The App Store and iOS render icons differently in (at least) one subtle yet potentially important way:

Transparent areas appear white in the App Store, but black in iOS.

The end result was that my app featured two rather different icons, depending on where you saw it:

iOS on the left, App Store on the right

Oops! Now if you look closely you’ll notice that the orange circle is larger in the App Store – that’s entirely my fault. But rendering the transparency differently caught me completely off guard, and I must say is a bit of an oversight on Apple’s part. Now none of this would be a big deal, except you can’t just go changing either the iOS icon or App Store artwork willy nilly. It requires another submission for review, which I am pleased to say has now passed and the icons now match.

My search for one touch dialer didn’t turn up anything (more on that later), so I decided to write an app myself. It turns out to be a very simple process to write a one touch dialer app so I coded it up, slapped together a cute icon and submitted it to Apple.

A week later I received a rejection citing the dreaded rule 2.11, duplicate functionality:

2.11: Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them, such as fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps

This didn’t jive with my own searches on the app store, so back a-searching I went, this time turning up plenty of one touch dialers. I downloaded a few, tested them out and wrote an appeal citing some minor differences in functionality and marketing between my app and the existing ones.

A few days later I got a call from an Apple representative named Richard who made the rather unequivocal statement:

We aren’t accepting any more one touch dialers.

Fair enough. There are plenty of stories out there about unreasonable App Store rejections, but this isn’t one of them. I quite honestly wasn’t bringing anything especially new to the space, so why clog up the App Store with another duplicate app? I was a little surprised that this merited a phone call, but it was certainly a nice touch and gave me the opportunity to ask questions. I could have asked Richard why certain not-to-be-named developers have at least a dozen identical one touch dialers in the App Store just with different names, and if they planned on doing anything about that (they should), but there wasn’t anything to be gained from whining.

So why the heck did my original search turn up nothing and set me down this path in the first place? I honestly don’t know. I should have been suspicious, after all what simple idea hasn’t already been submitted to the App Store again and again and again these days? I guess some small part of me wanted to believe there was still an unserved niche that could be filled be a trivially simple app. I won’t make that mistake again!

One thing’s for sure though, I’m going to regret not getting a chance to use the icon I made – I really like the way it turned out!

OneThingToday – There are many ways to clean up the business. With OneThingToday you prioritize or project on a daily basis. This helps to focus on key objectives and avoid the spread of attention.

I have no idea how accurate that translation is, but it’s actually a pretty good summary of OneThingToday!

What’s Nuper? Good question. Nuper is my approach to tracking your favorite blogs via RSS.

I designed Nuper with two thoughts in mind:

1. Generally speaking I like visiting sites and reading people’s articles as they are presented on their original site, and not in a traditional RSS reader (like say NetNewsWire). Perhaps I’m in the minority here but most of the blogs I frequent are carefully designed and aesthetically pleasing, and I enjoy visiting them.
2. I dislike visiting one of my favorite blogs only to find it hasn’t been updated since my last visit.

So it became clear to me that I wanted a tool to track my favorite blogs that would tell me when they had most recently been updated, and with a click take me to the site in a browser. Since I couldn’t find such an app I wrote it myself.

Behold, Nuper (this is what it looks like right now as I write this article):

Nuper displays the name of the blog you are subscribed to, the title of the most recent post and the amount of time since that item was posted. Click on an entry, and a new browser window opens with the relevant site. That’s it.

While I was in the midst of developing Nuper, Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica wrote an article about the perils of trying to keep on top of every article in your RSS feed, which Marco Arment followed up on with his thoughts on Sane RSS Usage.

It hasn’t really occurred to me when I’d started writing Nuper, but those two pieces made it very clear that Nuper was a great way to use RSS without being overwhelmed by it. There is no timeline, no unread count to keep on top of and no dock badge to distract you, just a shapshot of the latest things that are happening right now.

No I don’t intend this to be the best solution for everyone, but I think it might be a great solution for a lot of people.

PS: Nuper is Latin for recently

PDFShuffler has essentially one function – it takes a PDF and twins it. What that means is that a PDF with 4 pages (1, 2, 3, 4) becomes a PDF with 8 pages, each of the original 4 having been duplicated (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4).

Why is this a useful thing? Best to let Marc explain that in his own words:

PDFShuffler turns the PDF you must analyze into the one you want to analyze. It is the tool that lawyers, teachers, presenters, researchers & scientists have been needing for years.

Its magic is in its simplicity. It takes your PDF and creates a new document in which each page is duplicated in order. Your original document, with pages 1, 2, 3, etc, remains untouched. Your new document now has pages 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, etc. You are then freed to view your document in “Two-Up” format. Then, you can let loose your inner annotator on one sheet while leaving its twin pristine next to it.

The result? Lawyers can prepare to depose witnesses with their notes always in front of them and effortlessly print the clean sheet for exhibits. In trial, attorneys can display the two-up document half on their own screen and half on the display screen. The attorney’s notes and questions are right where they’re wanted and the pristine version is always displayed to the Court and jury without having to juggle locations within multiple documents. Your workflow is greatly streamlined because you will no longer need to re-analyze documents, as your thoughts are always preserved on your half of the document. Teachers have their lesson notes in front of them at all times. Presenters can even use their PDFs in their speeches by quickly moving from showing the pristine document to the one with highlighted sections. Scientists who wish to crunch information from different angles can do so side-by-side.

And if you decide to print only the pristine pages or the annotated ones, just select the “Print Odd Pages Only” (or “Even Pages Only”) option when printing.

PDFShuffler lets you choose the trigger that is best for you. If you drag a document’s icon onto the PDFShuffler icon, you’ll see a new document appear in the same location as the original with the word “TWINNED” appended to the title. (Yes, you can choose your own preferred naming distinction.) If you want to Twin a bunch of documents, you can drag them all on to the icon at the same time. All of the PDFs will be twinned, and any non-PDFs will be left untouched. And if your preference is to work from the keyboard, just open the intended PDF from within PDFShuffler and voilà, your new document is ready for you to add value to it.

PDFShuffler isn’t for everybody, but if it sounds like it’s for you go check it out.

Why did it take so long? This is embarrassing to admit as a developer of OS X software but my development (and only) machine is not actually capable of running 10.7 – it’s the original Core Duo MacBook Pro. When Lion was released to the public I crossed my fingers and then cursed as I watched the bug reports come in.

I still don’t have an upgraded machine, but I did get access to one for long enough to push out an update. To all the EmailMyCal users who went so long without a working version, I’m sorry.

• Added the option to make the Sticky window float on top of all other windows.

Seriously, that’s all that’s new, but a surprising (to me) number of people requested this feature and it didn’t seem fair to make them wait any longer. If you’d like, the Sticky window can now be promoted to reside on top of all of your windows, as a constant reminder of exactly what you should be working on today. Personally I always feel starved enough for screen space that it’s not a feature I’ll be using myself, but I can see how it would be useful if you had a multiple monitor setup. As always, enjoy!

This is probably Apple telling me it’s time to upgrade my original MacBook Pro to, I don’t know, a machine capable of running Lion! Curse that 32 bit Core Duo processor…

The Good
It used to be if I had a project open, and then opened a random text file or Perl script, said file/script would become associated with that open project. This drove me batty, because it just didn’t make any sense and attached all sorts of obnoxious GUI chrome to the new window. Xcode can happily manage multiple projects, so why couldn’t it just create an ad-hoc project for random files I open?

Xcode 4 of course can:

The ability to include today’s and/or tomorrow’s agenda in the daily email

So now you can get today’s agenda early in the day, or tomorrow’s agenda late in the day, or just get them both any time you please. It’s the first step towards a more flexible setup allowing more than one email per day, and since it was an easy, self-contained step I decided to release it.