Yesterday, the shape of the Mac software landscape changed forever and I'm happy to have been a part of it from the beginning. All of my Mac software except The Hit List are available at the Mac App Store. Here is a status report of where things stand with the Potion Factory apps.

After reading John Gruber's "How Should Mac Apps Be Distributed?", I wanted to mention that The Hit List already does by itself what John suggests Apple consider doing with all apps. That is, if you launch The Hit List from a folder that is not an Applications folder, it asks if it should move itself to /Applications.

Why it does this, though, is not for the reason that most people expect.

We know people are eagerly awaiting The Hit List companion iPhone app and we thought we'd help a few people get it a little early with a contest. Send us a description of an interesting way that you use The Hit List to contest@potionfactory.com. We'll pick up to 10 of the best entries and offer them the opportunity to participate in a closed beta program for the iPhone app when it's ready.

The Hit List 0.9.3 is out. A lot of work went into this release but the two main user visible changes are repeating tasks and AppleScript support. Of those two features, repeating tasks took a surprisingly long time to implement. The code itself wasn't too hard to write, but as usual, settling on a design was the hardest and the most hair-pulling part of the job.

I'm happy to announce that the public preview of The Hit List, my new task-management application is ready:

Download The Hit List

It's a real pleasure to finally take the veils off since I have poured so much care and love into this application.

Of course, as a preview, it's not quite feature-complete yet, but the beta testers report that it's stable enough for daily use. It should be enough to give you a taste of what its personalty is like.

If you have thoughts you would like to share about The Hit List, you can do so at The Hit List Users Google Group.

On a final note, I'm taking pre-orders until version 1.0 ships. The final price will be $69.95, but you can get it for $49.95 for now. While you don't have to purchase a license until the final version ships, that deal won't last forever.

Enjoy.