Developer Raffael Hannemann is a CS student, recipient of a WWDC 2014 scholarship, and has developed DailySales to help developers track their iTunes Connect sales figures. His app integrates into Yosemite’s Today View, which is a nice change from other solutions that offer  stand-alone apps or take up precious menu bar space.

If TUAW were still up and running, DailySales would probably be an app that I’d look at and then, to be honest, pass on reviewing. It’s student-written, student-quality, and full of good intentions but it offers a minimum to distinguish itself from other competing products in the market place. However, TUAW is no longer up and running, I don’t have an editor to be responsible to, and Hanneman’s email made a great pitch.

The set-up procedure is a bit of a pain. You have to move past endless screens of legalese. You have to install Java because this requires Java to use Apple’s Autoinjestion class, rather than scraping the iTunes Connect website. It wasn’t a particularly big burden to get started but it wasn’t turn-the-key-and-get-going either.

But once you get past the painful setup, the app works. I’ve had it running over the weekend and I find that it well matches Hannemann’s initial pitch: that the app is “decent and convenient”.

The presentation is pleasant and unobtrusive.  I do wish I could put in a time-out, like “don’t check more often than once an hour or twice a day”. I have other material I use the Today view for, and having the pane update each time is visually distracting.

The app has failed to update a number of times. On these occasions, it directed me to look at the console for errors: (Click to enlarge.) So it’s not always smooth sailing.

Like other apps in this arena, Hannemann recommends that you set up a sales-figures only account at iTunes connect for extra security, and your credentials are stored using the system keychain.

All in all, I find Daily Sales to offer a promising beginning to a potentially solid application. It fills a need that many developers encounter, and its $5.99 sales price makes it affordable compared to the competition.

You can learn more about Daily Sales and Hannemann’s other software at his WeAreYeah website.