Pear Note is Leo Laporte’s pick of the week on this week’s MacBreak Weekly! Thanks very much to Leo for the kind words about Pear Note, and for being such a great tech journalist. Leo actually helped lead me down the Mac path back when he was the host of The Screen Savers, and I still enjoy listening to him today on shows like MacBreak Weekly.

Since Leo gave away my secret weapon to get his attention, I figure I should share the recipe with the world. These are one of my favorite treats, and Leo’s family evidently liked them as well. So, here is the recipe:

South Carolina Chewies

1 pound box dark brown sugar
1 stick butter or margarine
3 eggs
1½ cups flour
1½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
1 cup chopped nuts
1 tsp. vanilla
Powdered sugar

Cream sugar and butter. Add eggs and sifted flour, baking powder and salt. Add vanilla and nuts and mix well. Pour into greased pan. Bake in 9×13 pan for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and cut into squares.

If you bake this in a 9×13 pan, the chewies will be kind of thick. If you want them smaller, use a jellyroll pan or cookie sheet. They will be thinner.

Pear Note 1.2.3 is now out and available. It has a few bug fixes (thanks to all of you for alerting me to them) as well as some minor improvements you might appreciate.

1. Improved support for UVC webcams – If you’re using a USB webcam that is plug-and-play (meaning you didn’t have to install a driver), it’s likely using the UVC standard. These cameras don’t behave as well as they should on OS X right now, but Pear Note 1.2.3 adds some workarounds to help this. They still sometimes misbehave, but things are at least better with these fixes. To really solve the problem, we’ll have to wait for Apple to improve support for these cameras.
2. Proper handling of quoted searches – If you’ve tried to use quoted phrases in Search, you’ve probably found that Pear Note did not handle quoted phrases the way you would expect. As of 1.2.3, it does.

Enjoy the new release, and let me know if you have any problems.

A new version of Pear Note, 1.2.1, is now available. While this is primarily a bug fix release (with lots of bug fixes), there is also a bit of new functionality. Specifically:

1. Pear Note now shows video and jumps around the timeline even when you’re not recording or playing. This should make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for without hitting play, though it may take a little getting used to.
2. There are new zoom capabilities for the slides and video windows. You can see these under the View menu when one of these windows is active.

Enjoy!

Daniel Jalkut, the developer behind Red Sweater Software, has a great post up about how he’s inspired by the success of the folks at Panic. Panic has become one of the best known names in independent Mac software for good reasons. They make excellent software and really listen to their customers. I personally am a big fan of Coda, which I used to build this website.

While I take inspiration from Panic, they seem so far off that it’s sometimes hard to identify with them. Daniel, on the other hand, is a great inspiration for me. He’s built a successful one-man business on top of some great apps. He is known throughout the Mac community for quickly responding to user needs and he just makes you want to use his software. So, Daniel, you are an inspiration to me. I look forward to the day when Useful Fruit Software elicits the respect that Red Sweater Software does today. I hope that one day Pear Note can be the first thought that comes to Mac users when looking for note-taking software in the same way that MarsEdit is the first thought for Mac users looking for blogging software.

Useful Fruit is growing well, which is inspiration in and of itself. Stories like these of those companies a little further down the road combine with this inspiration to really get me excited about the future. I hope I can continue to use people like Daniel as a guide to help me know when I get off track (and feel free to let me know if you see me doing so). Despite what you see on the news, the future is bright.

The Mac Gems article on Pear Note that Macworld put online in January is in the May issue of Macworld magazine. If you want to check it out, it takes up most of page 40. I want to again thank Dan Frakes of Macworld for his great review.