Calf Trail Thoroughfare

Geotagalog upgrade note (for beta testers)

Because we changed its name, beta testers of Tagalog can't automatically upgrade to the just-released Geotagalog 1.0. If you try to use the automatic update, it will fail. But do not panic! Upgrading is almost as easy as trying Tagalog in the first place. Purchased copies will continue to work, and will stay registered.

To manually upgrade:

1. Download Geotagalog 1.0 by hand.
2. Trash that old beta version, by hand.
3. That's it. Give yourself a hand!

After you manually upgrade from Tagalog beta to Geotagalog 1.0, future updates should work automatically. We apologize for this inconvenience.

Geotagalog (formerly Tagalog) released

With a new name and a new icon, but the same easy geotagging found in the "Tagalog" beta, we are pleased to announce the release of Geotagalog version 1.0! Geotagalog lets you GPS-enable any camera for iPhoto's Places. Just give it a standard GPX tracklog, and Geotagalog will give you a live preview of your photos' locations. You can download and try it out yourself.

We'll tell you a secret: even though we just released Geotagalog 1.0 today, we've already started work on the next version. Knowing what features are planned makes it harder for us to brag about all that we've accomplished in this first version. So don't take our word for it. One user found our beta, and emailed to say:

This is an absolutely BRILLIANT idea! I love the fact that it will take a GPX tracks file, take a collection of photos, and put them into iPhoto for me... this is absolutely perfect for my needs and I am impressed.

Thanks, David! And thanks to everyone else who has told friends, provided feedback — or crash reports, sorry about those… — and already bought Geotagalog. We always appreciate your support; let us know if there's anything we can do for you.

Tagalog beta

We are happy to announce that Tagalog is now in beta! Tagalog helps you quickly geotag a set of pictures and import them into iPhoto '09. You can use your favorite camera with iPhoto's new Places feature: all you need is tracklogs from a handheld GPS receiver and Tagalog will do the hard work.

When Apple announced iPhoto '09 with the new Places feature, we were excited to think that anyone who buys a new Mac will be able to see the power of organizing photos on a map. But we also realized that Mercatalog is designed to organize and view photos on its own, and wouldn't be ideal for people who wanted to view their photos in Places. So we took the best of Mercatalog's geotagging technology, and used it to make an iPhoto importer that's even easier to use. Just open a GPX tracklog, connect your camera, and let Tagalog do the hard work!

We hope that Tagalog will work great for you already, but it is in beta. Please let us know if it's not working like you'd expect. If you do like it, we're selling at a discounted introductory price of $12.95 during the beta only, so don't miss out!

The trail so far

Does the trail begin in June 2008, when Calf Trail Software, LLC came to officially exist? Or in December 2007, when we'd committed to the endeavor? Back in the 1990's, as we dreamed in front of our first computers? Or already back in 1714, when Tropka the Heifer was given to an honorable peasant landworker by a merry band of preo-Luddites as they pedalled through Yaroslavl Oblast on their skunkworks velocipede prototypes? (Okay, so that maybe didn't happen.)

Whatever the long story may be, trouble is we've been hard at work over the last year learning stuff and making things, without getting to know you! What things do you enjoy, what stuff are you hoping to get done this year, and how might a "little" software company founded on the edge of Washington's Steppe be of service to you? We've got some ideas, and we plan to use this space to share them with you. We hope you are eager to share your ideas, too. We've got a lot to do in the next few weeks; one of our priorities is to enable comments on these posts.

In the meantime, we'd be glad to hear what you think via email (or just @calftrail us a link to your blog post via twitter!). This post's food for thought: What do you expect (good and bad) in software, from a company that is just getting off the ground?