The EstiMate Software Blog

Have you ever “just known” that if you were more efficient, or organized, you could be making more money from your business?  EstiMate DiamondMine takes those feelings and boils them down to math. Using EstiMate DiamondMine, you can now very easily see where the financial “leaks” are in your business and learn how to plug them, all by answering a few simple questions and generating a free report.

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We’ve been asked over and over again to provide an easy way for potential customers to configure and price the EstiMate system that fits their shop. Well, we are proud to announce our new configurator! The EstiMate configurator will allow you to select options that describe how you want to use EstiMate in your shop and will build a system for you, ready to go. Enjoy!

Designed For Mac OS X and iPhone

RateMate Hourly Rate Calculator is a port of our ProfitWatch Software from Microsoft Windows to Mac OS X and the iPhone.  Mac and iPhone lovers can now determine their hourly rate in style using this new release.

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Want To Take The Hassle Out Of Selecting Plugins And Just Get Started?

EstiMate is now available in bundles at slightly reduced prices.  We’ve put together six bundle packages that we believe will bring you what you need to get started right away with EstiMate and we’re offering them to you beginning today.

The packages we have available are:
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Lately I’ve been working on a new project, an hourly rate calculator for the iPhone.  RateMate is a port of our ProfitWatch software to the iPhone.  I think calculating the proper hourly rate is so important to small business that I hope this app will bring the concept to a wider audience.

iPhone development has turned out to be a real blast — very solid tools with Xcode and Interface Builder, coupled with a solid iPhone emulator, made the only challenge the learning of the Cocoa environment.

<Nerd Moment>
Cocoa is a development environment wrapped around Objective-C, which is a fascinating addition to the C programming language. Objective-C operates based on objects and messages, much like Smalltalk, and practically abandons any procedural thinking. I remember moving from being a Basic, Pascal, &  C Programmer to programming in C++, Object Pascal, and learning object orientation in those last two.

The difference between procedural programming and object programming is just huge. Moving to Objective-C almost felt like that again, and I had to rewire my brain to think purely in terms of objects.
</Nerd Moment>

For those of you who are programmers and are interested in learning new platforms, I have to say the tools provided for the iPhone are stellar and lack only in tutorial based documentation.  That I ended up getting from the book iPhone SDK Development by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson.

Available through the Pragmatic Programmers website, this will give you the rest of what you need to get started with iPhone development.

RateMate is currently undergoing the App Store review process and I will post again when it is released.

The new Flatbed Digital Printing plugin for EstiMate represents a great leap forward in pricing technology, not just for flatbed printing, but for EstiMate overall.  We’ve really put our all into this one and if you have a flatbed printer, and are using EstiMate, it’s an absolute no brainer to get this plugin.  If you’re not using EstiMate, this just may be the reason you should grab a trial and get started.

This plugin has many powerful pricing features, as you can see in the following screenshots.

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The new Sandblasted Signs Pricing Plugin is one that I’m really excited to release, from my old-school perspective.  This has been long asked for and many people will find it to be the perfect complement to the Vinyl and Painted signs plugin as far as pricing dimensional blasted signs.

Quick and Easy Pricing Of Sandblasted Signs

You’ll find this plugin to be extremely easy to use even though it has a lot of behind-the-scenes pricing math going on.

First, you do the usual, selecting your blasting substrate (cedar, redwood, SignFoam)… and enter quantity, # of sides, width and height.  That’s when it gets interesting.

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Great news! The EstiMate user manual can now be downloaded in PDF format. It can be downloaded from our support page or by clicking this link:

Download the EstiMate User Manual PDF

Enjoy!

Great news! Two new hotly requested plug-ins for EstiMate are right around the corner. We’ve developed plug-ins for flatbed digital printing and for sandblasted signs that are just about ready to go.   From the get-go, we have wanted to cover as many areas as possible in the sign business, and EstiMate 2 really lets us deliver.  These plugins should be available for purchase by October 1. 
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Long time no blog! Jennifer and I got married on June 11, and all of the prep work for the big day was incredibly time-consuming! However, everything is relatively back to normal now, so over the next few weeks expect to see posts coming with more regularity.

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