Today, we’re open sourcing our iPhone time tracking app.

It’s been hard to build iPhone applications. If you don’t know Objective-C, and you don’t know the iPhone SDK, there is a steep learning curve. I’ve talked to a lot of FreshBooks customers over the past year that want to build iPhone applications, and many of them have gotten stuck because few companies have shared their code.

That kind of sucks.

We decided to give something back to our customers by sharing what we’ve learnt. We want to support our customers that want to make the leap to becoming iPhone developers.

A solid thank you to FreshBooks customer and awesome iPhone developer Dave Grijalva whom we hired to build the iPhone application for us.

It’s about building a community

We hope that our little gift will spur others to follow suit. A healthy development community thrives on sharing code.

We’re grateful for Automattic for taking the lead by open sourcing their free WordPress iPhone application. Since the NDA was lifted, it’s nice to see a few others are also following their lead like TouchCode and AppsAmuck.

However, very few other projects have followed suit. Without a healthy development community sharing code, it’s more likely that future applications will be built as web applications, a new distribution method as of iPhone OS 2.1.

And while frankly that is probably easier for developers, it does mean that users will be able to download iPhone applications from anywhere on the Web. That means that the market of iPhone applications is at risk of being fractured. If it’s really hard to find an application, it will be harder to sell them, and therefore harder to encourage developers to make them.

I know Apple is building a web apps directory in a similar style to Built for Blackberry. Maybe they will integrate that directory into the App Store in the future, but they haven’t done so yet.

And even if they do, web apps cannot access iPhone native services, like the GPS or the camera or the contacts or OpenGL. Some of the most truly dazzling applications still require Objective-C. And so sharing more iPhone Objective-C is still a good thing.

So, as the iPhone application ecosystem continues to evolve, we hope that our little gift will encourage others to give a little more. And please stay tuned to our developers blog. We’ll be publishing a more about what we’ve learnt about the iPhone shortly.

Meet us at MacWorld

FreshBooks is going to MacWorld Expo 2009 in force. Look for us throughout the week, including at the Mac Meet and Mingle party the evening of Thursday, January 8.

If you’re at MacWorld and would like to meet to discuss iPhone development or online invoicing, please drop me a line at sunir splat freshbooks.com.

I remember when we released FreshBooks (then called 2ndSite) in May 2004. Back then the web was different - it was a little less mature, a little less evolved. AJAX was virtually unknown and the term Web 2.0 was a twinkle in Tim O’Reilly’s eye.

When we launched FreshBooks, our application was not cross platform or cross browser compliant. Seems crazy today that a web app would not be Mac compliant, but then - while not ideal - it was fairly common. The truth is we were three PC based developers and did not even have a Mac to test on, so we focused on what we knew and that was that.

It didn’t take long for us to start hearing from Mac users though, and I’m pleased to say by August 2004 were were Mac compliant and we’ve never looked back.

I’m thinking about all this today because Sunir and I (largely Sunir frankly) wrote an article for Mac News World about cross browser compatibility:

Building an application for today’s Web is a balancing act. Potential users use several competing browsers. Yet the user experience must be uniform for everyone, regardless of his/her browser of choice. And you can’t support one or two browsers because you’ll cut out major portions of the market.

Sunir did a great job on this post, and if you’re interested in getting a solid understanding of the importance of being cross browser compliant, as well as the litany of hurdles between here and there, check out the article.

Just a little reminder that the FreshBooks office will be closed Thursday, December 25th and Friday, December 26th for Christmas and Boxing Day. If you need assistance, visit our forum or check out our guides.

Happy Holidays, Happy Channukah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

This past Monday FreshBooks was honoured to be a sponsor of a landmark event here in Toronto:

HoHoTO

Starting out as a single Twitter message, this rapidly turned into a discussion that turned into a planning committee that turned into one of the biggest third-party fund-raisers for the Daily Bread food bank of 2008.

I was fortunate enough to be part of the committee that pulled the whole thing together, and I can tell you that watching this event snowball into what it ended up as: the must-attend holiday party for the Toronto tech community that pulled in $25,000 for the Daily Bread when the dust had settled and the donations were counted.

It’s a fantastic story: over a three-week span a group of near-strangers, communicating at first solely by Twitter, used free resources on the web (email, wikis, blogs), as well as their own resources and connections to plan the event, find all the resources (like a space), and rope in dozens of sponsors big and small across the entire Toronto technology community. In the end we sold out all 600 tickets in only 9 days, generated a thousand planning emails (my Inbox is sighing with relief that it’s all over), and acquired over a thousand pounds of food at the party.

And when we needed to ship a thousand pounds of food from the party to the Daily Bread, who stepped up to help us? THE ARMY. Yup, the 48th Highlanders showed up with a truck and some willing folks to load up and deliver food just where it was needed.

When you have the connections to get the Army out to help you, you know you’re doing something right.

Obviously FreshBooks was thrilled to be able to sponsor this event, and a whole pile of FreshBookers were in attendance:

As you can see, a good time was had by all.

Rayanne, Grace and Andrew: FreshBookers on the scene!

As one of the organizers of the event, it means a lot to me to be able to thank FreshBooks, the other sponsors, and everyone who donated time, energy, food and money to make HoHoTO the huge success it was.

And in case you like your stories told with motion pictures, here is an awesome video recap of #hohoto:

Just a heads-up that FreshBooks will be unavailable tonight starting at 10:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. We plan to be back up and running around 10:15. You can follow the developments from the FreshBooks status blog if you’d like more information.

So again, please make sure you’re not in the middle of anything at 10. Sorry for the inconvenience.

On this Sunday, Dec 14 2008 at 10:00 PM EST (Monday Dec 15 3:00 AM UTC), FreshBooks will be unavailable for a short period while we relocate the application onto new servers. We expect the application to be unavailable for only a few minutes. These new servers will enable us to better provide you with a responsive, reliable and secure service.

While things are unavailable, you can see how things are going by reading the updates to our status blog.

What’s New?
Now you can accept invoices from other FreshBooks users inside your account.

We added this capability because we had requests from customers who were receiving invoices from other FreshBooks users and wanted a way to get organized. So we implemented this feature and it’s available from your invoices tab:

How does it work?
When you view an invoice sent to you from another FreshBooks user, you will be asked if you want invoices from this person to appear in your FreshBooks account. Click “Yes”, and your existing and future invoices from this user will appear in your “Received Invoices” sub-tab.

Convert received invoices to expenses
There’s more to received invoices than just staying organized. We’ve also made it quick and simple to convert a received invoice into an expense, perfect for re-billing to a client:

For those of you who receive invoices in currencies other than the currency of your FreshBooks account, you will be prompted to set an appropriate change to the amount of your expense.

Estimates too

Once you choose to receive invoices from another account, estimates sent from that same account will show in your “Received Estimates” sub-tab, and vice versa.

Why receiving invoices (and estimates) matters
I used to do a lot of project work with contractors, and because my contractors and I both brought new business to each other, I used to find it really difficult and time consuming to figure out who owed who what.

For example, I ran a web design shop. We often worked with a local developer named Ben. If I invited Ben onto three projects and he invited me onto four - all of this over a 2 month period - we wound up have no clue what we owed each other, and to figure it out would take a lot of work. We’ve solved this problem with the receiving invoices tab.

Now every time I send Ben work, he replies with an invoice or estimate, and I receive it inside my account. Likewise if he sends me work instead. With FreshBooks as our record keeper it only takes a minute to answer the question, “who owes who what”? That saves a lot of time, and helps me understand your cashflow which is incredibly important.

Psst, pass the word on
For those of you who have a lot of vendors sending you invoices, you might want to consider encouraging these vendors to invoice you using FreshBooks - it’s a really nice way to keep things organized.

A quick note of thanks to the folks at ReadWriteWeb, who have recognized FreshBooks as one of the Top 10 International [Web] Products of 2008:

FreshBooks, the Canadian online invoicing, time and expense tracking service for individuals and small companies, has been showing steady growth over the past year according to Compete, and claims to have over 500K new users since May 2004.
We compared FreshBooks with other online accounting services in August this year, and decided it was easy to use, includes a host of useful features, has an active forum, and offers benchmark data by industry to its users. More recently, we looked at FreshBooks Report Cards which provide an insight into how your business fares in relation to other businesses in your profession. Selected as one of the PICK 20 top Web 2.0 leaders in Canada in September this year, we think FreshBooks deserves a mention here too.

It’s an honor to be mentioned alongside the best applications from other countries around the world. Thanks ReadWriteWeb.

The FreshBoooks Supper Club Newsletter

Did you know that FreshBooks has a monthly newsletter called the FreshBooks Supper Club?

If you read November’s Supper Club and watch the all the videos, you will see that two of the three videos are connected in some not so obvious pop culture way…if you think you think you know how they are connected, just drop your answer in the comment field of this here post (with your correct email address in case you win!) or email me and I will let you know if you won.

I’m not sure what the prize will be yet, but it will be something cool…not as cool as a NEW CAR or a 60 lbs bar of silver…but I have a feeling it will be way cooler than my “Saul’s Birthday Present” present from the newsletter…cause that may be cheese!

Ted Rogers, indisputably one of Canada’s most legendary business figures, died yesterday at home, surrounded by loved ones.

Successful, pioneering and visionary, Ted built a media empire by making big bets. There were times when no one believed Rogers would crawl out from under all the debt he took on, but counting on recurring revenue from Cable TV, and his legal mastery of the government regulation of telecommunications, Ted and his company Rogers survived and prospered.

Our condolences go out to Ted’s family and friends. CBC coverage can be found here.

Photo courtesy of Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press.