Mike Zornek’s Billable application makes it easy to track time and invoice clients from your Mac. Version 1.1 adds features to facilitate custom invoice numbers, per-client memos, and the ability to tax billed services (especially useful for European customers).

When I wrote a bit over a week ago that I would be entertaining offers from software developers interested in unloading their projects, I had no idea how numerous, diverse, or interesting the resulting offers would be. I promised then that I’d follow up, and that’s what I’m doing now.

I received a total of 22 legitimate offers, a few joke offers, and a few letters along the lines of “hey, I want to buy an app, too!” Of the 22 legitimate offers, 5 were web sites, and I am excluding those from the overall statistics because I don’t think they’re as interesting in the context of the spirit of the offer. So that leaves us with 17 distinct software products that could theoretically jumpstart an indie software business. Here’s how the stats break down, after crunching them:

Total Software Offers: 17
Highest Offer Price: $25,000
Lowest Offer Price: $1,500
Average Offer Price: $8,135
Median Offer Price: $5,000 (serendipitous!)

What kinds of software was offered? I applied some off-the-cuff categorization to the products offered, and came up with this breakdown:

System Utilities – 6 (35%)
Media Management – 3 (18%)
Entertainment – 2 (12%)
Network Utilities – 1 (6%)
Financial – 1 (6%)
Dashboard Widget – 1 (6%)
Medical Industry – 1 (6%)
Productivity – 1 (6%)

Although I would have expected all Mac software by the context of my request, I did receive as mentioned a few web site offers, as well as one product exclusively for PalmOS and one exclusively for BeOS (!). Two of the products offered were maintaining separate versions for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, and the sale would include both products. One was for Mac OS 9 only (!).

Yeah, and…?

I’m sure some of you have only read this far to see whether I actually bought anything or not. The answer? Most likely. I’m still working out the details with a potential seller, but I would place the odds of an acquisition at almost certain. I won’t share details of the product I am acquiring until the deal is closed, which I expect to happen within a week or so if things go according to plan.

Stay tuned for more details!

Intel has confirmed that the iPhone does not use their chips. I’m inclined to agree with the prevailing wisdom that the device uses some kind of ARM chip, which is suitable for such applications, and also used in Apple’s iPods.

But what if “not Intel” means AMD? I don’t know enough about the embedded market to even know whether AMD makes compelling chips for such purposes. (But my dad might).

Could Apple be hush-hush about the chips because they’re using the iPhone as a relationship-starter with AMD?

The . message . from . developers . is . clear. We want to develop for it. And in our realm, that is the sincerest form of flattery.

Many of us also want to use it. And quickly. If Apple were to open the device up for development, it would also have the effect of establishing a large beta testing pool consisting of perhaps the market’s most critical users, before going prime-time in June. As I understand the FCC regulations, Apple can rent us unapproved devices for development purposes, much as they did with the Intel transition kits. Please? Pretty please, with sugar on top?

In other news, Eric Albert has confirmed that the iPhone is the project he’s been laboring away madly at for the past several months. Major kudos to Eric for a job (apparently) very well done. You might remember Eric as one of the people who brought us the Intel Mac. As far as I’m concerned, Eric should be golden-handcuffed to his desk. Apple, don’t let anybody recruit him away!

On a lighter note, I noticed that Dan Wood was among the developers griping about the iPhone SDK situation. You may remember Dan as the unlucky developer whose two major products have been eclipsed to varying degrees by Apple’s in-house products.

Clearly, if we want an SDK from Apple for the iPhone, we just have to convince Dan Wood to develop one first!

Update: This post was featured today in Technorati’s Buzz TV. Nice to see one of my quotations slickly animated in video format!