The year is almost over. Looking back it’s been eventful for me personally as well as for Gentle Bytes.

The first blog post of 2010 was about the future of appledoc. At the time it was written, my plans were to start the work on it sometimes in the second half of the year. However the plan was very vague as I had a lot of finish to do with Startupizer and other projects, and even the possibility of postponing appledoc in 2011 seemed viable. But not even in my wildest dreams have I imagined that by the end of the year appledoc 2 will be almost finished! Even when I started work on it during the summer, I planned much longer release cycle due to the amount of work. However as they say – whenever we need something, we’re provided with tools to get it – after researching the net for a while I’ve come across several open source frameworks that allowed me to concentrate on specific code instead of reinventing the wheel. So the work was progressing much faster than expected. As of now, the tool still needs polishing but it’s become useful enough to officially replace the aging 1.0.5 and from the past few days you can find it on the new page. When you’re at it, also check help pages on GitHub. And if you have any suggestions, bug reports or feature requests, please use GitHub issues page.

My plan for Startupizer was to start final polishing phase and work with designer in the middle of 2010. The plan was pretty much on schedule and we’ve started discussing the icons and other graphics around that time. But then it took much longer to get updates from designer than I anticipated. In the mean time I was basically cleaning up remaining issues planned for the first release. One of the most prominent things was establishing online store. From the start my plans were to go with E-junkie, however after doing more investigation, I decided to start with Fastspring. They really offer great service and it was quite a breeze to setup the store on their server. But again, the life takes it’s own direction and in october Apple announced it will open Mac App Store. It seemed most logical to go with that, so I started work on updating to meet the guidelines. In fact, the work mostly included throwing stuff out… Of course there still remains the review process. At present the work on icons is almost done, and I must say I’m really happy with it! One or two more iterations and it’ll be finished. The plan is to release Startupizer in the first 3 months of 2011! Stay tuned!

Somewhere in the second half of the year I started being more active on Twitter, so if you’d like to be updated more frequently, you can follow me.

So that’s it. 2010 proved to be quite successful and I’m looking forward to what 2011 will bring. Although a bit soon, but I may not post until next year, so I wish you all merry christmas and a happy and prosperous new year!