Firstly
If you don’t know about our software you can find out more about it here. In brief it’s invoicing software that runs on a Mac (it runs on a P.C. too).
In this post I’m going to run through the redesign of the software. Busy Bee Invoicing has been available for nearly a year now – we have made many tweaks and additions and we thought it was time to give the software more of a clean “Apple Mac” look. Just to let you know we are focusing on adding a number of extra fuctions like “Payments”. This will be available in the near future too.
Lets start with the logo
Busy Bee Invoicing logo used to look like this ( a )
We wanted to develop a logo that could be used for all our products, not just our invoicing software, and we wanted it to look modern and stylish, just like most of the software that runs on a Apple Mac. Our new logo design ( b )
As stated above the logo was to be used through out our product line. Below is how it appears as a logo for our online shop ( c )
Invoice Software
Ok so thats the logo now lets take a look at the software itself. Firstly I did a bit of looking around my own Mac computer to look for some ways I could make the software more “Apple Mac”. The first thing I noticed was that the font that Apple used was “Lucida Grande”. So that was the font taken care of. The next thing was staring me in the face the the top bar of the Mac Finder, Safari, iTunes…. Well they all use a grey gradient. So now I had the starting blocks on which to build a new look.
I did not want to totally redesign the software, i don’t think all the people that already use our invoicing program would have like me for that. I just wanted to clean it up. The buttons were to stay in the same place (give or take a couple of pixels) and the main input boxes were to be essentially left in the same place. I did change all the above sightly as you can see below. There is more room for the boxes and all the elements are alined.
Even with one of the main principles of the new look being “just a clean up” the program looks quite different. I’m happy that this will not confuse our users as every thing is still in the same place. So hopefully no looking around for something you already knew how to do.
Below are Some screen shots of our invoicing software.
Before the redesign
After the redesign
Before
After
Before, close up
After, close up
Before
After
Please feel free to comment
The new design is not out yet but we would love to know what you think. The software will look the same whether its running on Apple Mac OS or a PC. If you have not downloaded our invoicing software please feel free to give it a go. You can download it for a test run before you buy here
Love the redesign. Definitely more Mac-like.
Still monitoring your invoicing software as it develops. I have clients who can use something like it, maybe with a few more features.
Keep it up…
Gordon
Thanks’ Gordon, It’s great to hear that feedback. In our latest release we have included “Payments” which allows you to enter/track Payments and view Outstanding Balances on Invoices. We have quite a few more functionality improvements coming over the next year, and the redesign too.
I just want to put on record how much I dig this software.
I work freelance and like the developer I just needed an accounting system that was basically quite simple.
I have invested a relatively small amount of money in this system and since the introduction of the Payment section I have been totally blown away with it. Now, at a glance, I can see what has been paid, who is due to pay and what payment I can expect in the near future (Quote Section). Marvelous!
Not only is it going to make the year-end accounting a whole lot easier but my accountant is going to be delighted. (and hopefully cheaper!).
The update to the design looks clean and fresh and is hopefully and probably in preparation of great success to come.
It maybe will not suit every business need but I would personally recommend this system to anyone.
for item info set up, is it possible to keyin my production id directly ..
The Item code does not display on the Invoice, so if you want to see your own Item code displayed the best way is to put it in as part of the Item Description. I hope that helps.
Would be great if there is an option to use an external DB so I could access the app using both my desktop or laptop(not concurrently of course)
The DB is stored in a fixed location (on a Mac it is: /User/Library/Preferences/WorkerBees/Local Store/BusyBeesInvoicing.db or similar), so at this stage you would probably need to manually synch between computers. But an interesting idea and we will look at this for a future release.