Japanese Localization

We have the next release of Xslimmer ready to be delivered. We have been waiting for our localizers, who have diligently worked on the translations for French, Italian, Dutch and so on. For this next release we have included German. As each localization has been finished, we have prepared and tested the geometry to ensure that all localized versions of Xslimmer do look as good as the original English version. There is one missing, though.

Unfortunately, our Japanese translator is unable to comply with our request at this moment, so we need someone else to do the job of translating Xslimmer 1.5 to Japanese. If any of you are able to, or know of someone who could help us, we would be most grateful, and we could ensure a prompt release of Xslimmer 1.5. To contact us, use our web form. Many thanks!

Xslimmer is one year old

Xslimmer is one year old. During its first year of existence, Xslimmer has evolved a lot, and has gained quite a lot of friends. It has been downloaded, directly from our site, more than 150.000 times, we have answered more than 1.500 emails and a quite a few people have even bought the product.

It has been your support what has kept us coding, evolving Xslimmer. Your nice comments, suggestions, questions, purchases and even your demands have encouraged us to keep on working and trying to improve. We have put a lot of effort trying to make our software the best we possibly can, and it is really encouraging to see people realize it and appreciate it.

To all of you, thank you very much!

Sketches 0.4 beta 2 released

We have just released a minor revision of Sketches, our native iPhone app. We have removed a dependency with a dynamic library (libarmfp.dylib) that we took for granted, but was in fact installed by the BSD Package. This prevents new users from experiencing crashes when trying Sketches.app without having installed the BSD System first.

It looks like this is a common problem with many apps, more so as easier jailbreak methods are available that do not require the user to ssh into his iPhone or install any low-level command line tools.

Other than avoiding the frustration of new users, this new release does not add any new features. We have spent the last few weeks completely focused on the release of a fully 64-bit and Leopard compatible version of Xslimmer, which is an intermediate release before we finish the beta-testing and localization of what will become Xslimmer 1.5.

PS: Sketches works on your iPod Touch, too.

Xslimmer 1.2.6 is Out

Featuring support for 64-bit binaries in Leopard, we released a new version of Xslimmer yesterday. Xslimmer will now correctly recognize Universal Binaries that contain 64-bit code. It will keep the 64-bit version of the binary on 64-bit capable machines running Leopard, or the 32-bit version otherwise. In addition, non-Mac architectures are now correctly identified. The release notes are available in our download page.

If you use Time Machine, please exclude the Time Machine backup path in Xslimmer preferences. Even though Xslimmer will not slim Time Machine backup apps, it will analyze them when the Genie is launched, resulting in an overall performance decrease. To avoid this, simply exclude that TM path. A future Xslimmer release will automatically detect and exclude Time Machine folders.

This release is not to be confused with the one for which we are now in betatest period. We just borrowed some of its features, to ensure that Leopard was fully supported.

Enjoy Xslimmer and Leopard!

Xslimmer and Leopard

We are getting a good number of enquiries about Xslimmer's current version with Leopard. As far as we now, it should work fine: we have tested it out with all developer betas and it did.

Developers did not get the Leopard final build before the general public, so we are now in the process to test it thoroughly with the commercial release to see if there are any new issues we should cope with, although they are not anticipated so far.

On the other hand, apps in Leopard may contain additional architectures with 64-bit versions of the binaries in addition to the usual 32-bit versions. We are now beta testing a new Xslimmer release that is optimized for this situation. Hopefully, it will be released in a few days.

Interested in testing the new Xslimmer?

We have finally pushed the Xslimmer version to a few testers. This is the start of the private beta.

We would like to add a few more people to the beta testing group. So, if you are interested in testing the new Xslimmer version, and want to help us in giving it the finishing touches by sending us your comments or bug reports, please contact us.

Sketches, iPhone Drawing Fun

Edit: Sketches is available in the App Store since July 10th, 2008, as described in this newer blog post.

After a temporary shift of priorities, we have developed and released a beta version of our second app. But in this occasion, even though it runs under Mac OS, it is not a Mac application. It is an application for the iPhone.

Sketches, as the application is called, allows you to draw on the screen, select a picture from the photo album or shoot a photo to draw on top of it. It also has the ability to select pencils and colors, a library of stationery to use for your background, saving your work to the photo library (so that you can synchronize back to your computer), send to mail and undo. You can even erase your drawing by shaking your iPhone, as if it were an etch-a-sketch (see David Pogue demonstrating it).


Users have given Sketches rave reviews:

- "I'd like to congratulate you on creating this fine app. It is really useful and fun."

- "Everyone I show it to immediately turns into a little kid and enjoys the hell out of it."

- "Sketches .3 beta is awesome. It's definitely among the best 3rd party iPhone applications."

We really hope that Apple, one day, decides to open the iPhone platform to third party apps, Then, Sketches could be used by all iPhone users. And we, developers, could get all the right tools and documentation we need, so to make the iPhone an even greater device.

--

LateNiteSoft Recent Activity or, Xslimmer 1.3 is coming soon

It is been a while since the last Xslimmer release. You might be wondering if we are still working on it or not. We are.

You might not have noticed it, but during the last 9 months we have made 35 blacklist releases. With each release, we introduce one or more applications into the blacklist. This is a time consuming process, as we try to test each application blacklist request prior to committing it. Blacklists releases are normally silent, unless a user selects to manually update. Recently, we received a request to add release notes to the blacklist releases. We are considering adding this feature, but would like to do so without disturbing the user too much.

We have been fixing our issues with the email server. Some servers still consider our emails as spam, and having license files as attachments does not help. We did resolve the DNS issues. We need to work on the attachments. That is why we are now remodeling the way the license server works, so we can provide the license files as downloadable links. This will make it easier for everybody and should cause less anti-spam related problems.

We are also actively working in Xslimmer. We are working both on release 1.2.5, which shall introduce some bug-fixes and some functionality changes based on user's requests. In addition, we are working on version 1.3. For this version, we are introducing changes in the UI and some additional functionalities. Moving from a designer's mock-up to a fully functional application is always complex, and requires a lot of attention to detail, but we are getting there. We are expecting to start a small beta test in around 10 days.

I hope this gives you a feeling of what we are up to, but if you have doubts or suggestions, feel free to ask.

Lossless same-drive Mac HD Repartition, part 2

A while ago I explained how I did repartition my iMac hard drive. Then came WWDC, and with it I got the Leopard beta. Being in SF, without access to my iMac, I decided that I had to repartition my MacBook hard disk, so I could install Leopard and follow the sessions correctly.

Using my own post, I followed the different instructions. At repartition time, everytime I executed "diskutil resizeVolume ..." I got an error message about not having enough space. My MacBook's HD had been almost full, but I had freed 26Gb in order to make a new 20Gb partition. Clearly, it was not the disk space. It was also clear that my disk was probably highly fragmented and that diskutil was unable to allocate 20 contiguous gigabytes for my new partition.

I found an app called iDefrag. After some tests, I told it to defrag my drive with the default options. I took like 45 minutes to complete the whole process. I then retried the "diskutil resizeVolume ...". This time it worked perfectly.

During and After WWDC

We are back from San Francisco. Wow! What an experience.

We started be finding the Moscone building and getting our badges for next day. Then we went to visit Cupertino. This is me in 1 Infinite Loop:



Next day we saw Steve's keynote and learned about how Mac OS X was evolving. During the next few days we learned about different topics. Everything was very well organized and presentations were generally very good. In addition, the opportunity to talk to the Apple engineers was very interesting.

But not everything was nerdy during those days. We met a lot of people, some of whom we only knew virtually (basically through IM). This is both of us with Brian Ball (MacZOT):



These are Sophie Teutschler (Coversutra), Stuff MC (Pomcast) and Pedro, with John Casasanta in the background:



Juan Alvarez and Mathew (Cha-ching):



Austin Sarner and friends:



Skitch's presentation at the Delicious Generation party:



Apple's party:



And we even had some time for touristing around:



Certainly a nice trip. We hope to repeat it next year!

LateNiteSoft at WWDC '07

I have started WWDC preparation. I have downloaded some of the headstarts, based on the sessions that interest me. Now, I have to install the latest Leopard preview in my laptop. For that, I need to go back to the repartition the hard drive once again. Lucky I did documented the first time!

I believe there are some very interesting technologies in Leopard. Core Animation being one of them. As I have been always interested in Special FX, game development and movie creation, it seems like a natural choice. So, once I get Leopard installed, along with the latest Xcode 3, I will take the material for Core Animation and try to grasp the basics before getting to San Francisco. I do have some ideas of things that would be nice to implement in Xslimmer, and even some ideas about possible new apps that we could create using Core Animation and other Leopard technologies. If I just had a more time...

Anyhow, I hope next week will be a fun one. I am really looking forward to meeting other Mac developers, whatever exciting news Steve Jobs provides us with, and all the possible learnings I can get.

If you are around, and would like to meet, let us know!

Spam, Alternative Email Addresses

Spam. It is ubiquitous. All around. In our case, we even get spam through the contact form of our website. Every single day. The issue is so big that practically all big email providers have added anti-spam measures. This allows users to get less spam, which is great, while still receiving genuine messages. That is normally the case. Unfortunately some providers must have such a big of problem, that at times they reject genuine messages too. What's worse, in some cases those messages don't even get to the user's spam folder.

In our case, we have had problems with customers with addresses from Hotmail/MSN and AOL. Messages to their users sent from our automated system were rejected. This meant that licenses were not getting to their legitimate owners in an automated way, and we had to resend them manually. In some cases, even the manually sent messages failed to reach the final users. So, we had to get Hotmail and AOL account to contact the users whose messages were not reaching them. Not ideal. If you were one of them, our apologies.

After investigation, we found out some of the rules that these providers use to reject email. We made several changes to the DNS configuration, and made several requests to our hosting provider. All these were intended to get our messages through. It seems like it is working fine now. We want to thank all the people who helped us detect this issue and resolve it.

Now, as spam is still going to be among us for a while, if you need to contact us for whatever reason, please provide us with an alternative email address. Particularly, if you buy Xslimmer and do not receive your license after a few minutes. Thank you!

Big thanks for all comments about Xslimmer 1.2.3

As you probably have seen, we have released Xslimmer 1.2.3 some days ago. We wanted to thank you on all the comments we received, both public and private, about the beta version.

We hope to have included the best options based on your comments. For example, we made sorting headers optional. They are accessible through the main window via the gear button. We also used the 1.2.2 icons for Stop and Clear, and definitely took out the dividers. You can check the full release notes here: http://www.xslimmer.com/download/.

We hope you keep enjoying Xslimmer.

Application Blacklisting

Recently we received an anonymous message requesting a new feature: Adding new apps to the public blacklist. In addition to this request, from time to time we receive email requests to blacklist this or that app.

Xslimmer has a feature already that helps us a lot in blacklisting apps. To use it, you should open the History window. It will show the list of applications you have slimmed down. Then, you can click on the "report icon" (exclamation mark) for the application, and this will open the "blacklist report" dialog:



After receiving a report, normally we test the app ourselves. It is not possible in 100% of the cases, but whenever it is we do. Then, we proceed to blacklist it with the information from the report, crediting the person who sent the report, if his/her name was included.

When an application is reported to us, it is marked as "excluded" or "privately blacklisted" in your preferences. That way, if you recover it from a backup or reinstall it, it won't be unwillingly slimmed again.

I hope this clarifies how our public blacklist is managed. Should you have any doubts, do not hesitate to ask. Thank you!

Xslimmer 1.2.3 Beta Updated / Design Poll

So far, no bugs have been detected, but we have updated Xslimmer 1.2.3 beta in order to reflect some suggestions from different testers, along with some other minor changes in Localization and blacklist. You can download it here: Xslimmer 1.2.3b3 download.

In addition, we would like to hear which of the following designs you prefer:

(Current Xslimmer, 1.2.2)

(Xslimmer 1.2.3 b2)

(Xslimmer 1.2.3 b3)

As you can see, the main change is the existance of the headers, which will allow sorting the apps by the criteria of your choice, including number of languages or architecture type, along with the existence of column dividers (which do not add any functionality itself). Any thoughts, really appreciated.

Want to try Xslimmer 1.2.3 Beta ?

Xslimmer 1.2.3 is finished. Quite a few things have changed from the previous version:

• Column headers, sorting. The application list now features column headers, allowing you to sort the applications by the criteria of your preference
  
• Additional application information through drawer. Using the "Info" icon of the toolbar you can get a side drawer that adds information on the application, and offers a couple of actions: exclude and slim.
  
• Single application slim. You can use the drawer or the secondary click on an app to slim that app alone.
  
• App exclusion is now accessible through toolbar, secondary click menu and drawer
• Progress bars and several icons design has been updated
• 3 new localizations have been added: Japanese, Dutch, Swedish (not complete yet)
  
• Delete, Backspace keys now eliminate applications from the list
• History is now resorted after slim has finished, maintaining the selected criteria
• History and backup purging are no longer active by default

So, we want volunteers to test it for a few days before launching it. Please remember, it is beta software. Should you detect any issues, please contact us!

Xslimmer 1.2.3b2 can be downloaded here.

Xslimmer 1.2.2 crack released! So what?

I've just found out that Xslimmer 1.2.2 has been cracked. It's not too bad, this release has been out for a few weeks already, while previous versions had the dubious honor of having been pirated in only a couple of days. Is this because we have strengthened our protection system? No, it is not. We haven't changed a bit (or a comma) of our code in that respect. Are we planning to do so? No, we are not. We have too little time and too many things to do. We prefer to spend our precious sleepless hours working on new features and customer support rather than fighting some infantile dumbheads.

The situation is very simple. We have made a lot of effort, and people seem to like our software. If they keep buying copies, we can continue improving Xslimmer and working on the other ideas we have. Otherwise, we won't. Each individual sale is worth much more than the 12 bucks we charge for a license. Each sale is a recognition that we have made something useful and valuable, a boost of morale, a reason to keep on working to the expense of our free time and our families. We strive to provide our customers the best service we possibly can. You see, it's not only the money, it's not even the prospect to become full-time indie developers one day: it's our pride and reputation that are at stake.

I believe that this is clear not only for ourselves, but for the vast majority of the "Mac community". As you may know, being recent switchers we are relatively new to the Mac family. One of the most notorious aspects of owning a Mac involves the feeling that you are part of a group of nice, discerning people. You don't buy a Mac for nothing: you buy it because you are looking for something special. Mac owners are warm to newcomers, passionate about quality and highly discerning about the difference between a carefully crafted application and a quick, careless hack. The first Xslimmer crack came out in less than 24 hours after release of version 1.0. And some of our well-known competitors are freeware applications. And still, some people buy copies of Xslimmer. It doesn't mean that our competitors are crap, it means that people will recognize the different approach in each application, and will buy Xslimmer if they believe it suits their needs best. And, of course, most don't consider downloading a crack, because they recognize the work that has to be done to put an application together. I had not seen this passion in the Windows or the Linux worlds, and I am proud to have become a member of this community.

Other authors have previously explained that most people that use pirated versions of your software will probably never buy it, even if the crack did not exist. Having lived among Mac users for a while, I'm a convert to this theory now. I'm even inclined to measure it. This post is, in fact, a little experiment to test to what extent piracy affects sales. If you are proud to be a Mac owner, feel free to spread the word: there is a cracked version of Xslimmer going around, but also a legitimate one whose purchase is the way to show your support for its development. Do you think our sales will decrease significantly? I'm willing to bet that they won't. But I'll measure the conversion ratio (sales to downloads) during the following days, and will post any meaningful results here, so we'll see.

A final reason not to use pirated copies of Xslimmer, if you need any, is that we are planning to release version 1.2.3 next week. Version 1.2.4 will come a couple of weeks after that. And so on, until we run out of ideas. Do you want to depend on some random drone to enjoy the upgrades? We'll see in a few days what the results of our little experiment are, but I doubt you will.

Xslimmer, dugg (indirectly)

This week's traffic in our main site has come as a bit of a surprise to us. It all began on Tuesday, 13th -which, ironically, is the Spanish date when bad luck conjures up to make your day miserable-. When I got to bed at around 2am, everything was quite between the normal boundaries. However, when I got up at 6am (yes, it's a hard life for poor little developers with a day job) I immediately noticed that something was happening that was out of the usual: the moment I switched my mobile phone on, I began to receive SMS messages alerting me of events that had been happening while I was asleep. One of the consequences of crafting something that others are willing to pay for, combined with a technically oriented mindset, is that you develop a compulsion to measure, analyze, monitor and graph everything that happens. In my case, I had programmed the sending of SMS messages to my mobile whenever important events, such as sales, take place. Receiving an steady stream of SMS beeps is something I did not expect to happen in a random day with no recent important releases or noteworthy events on our side. This lasted for a couple of minutes, signaling that something had happened in the 4 hours my mobile had been switched off. I got to my MacBook Pro and run a couple of scripts to determine that we were receiving a lot of traffic from this article by Ed Eubanks Jr. at lowendmac.com. Xslimmer was mentioned as one of a variety of options that can be used to help you optimize your Mac. I read the article, dugg it, wrote the author with my compliments and comments, answered to some emails from customers, and drove to work.

Whenever Xslimmer is featured in a popular blog or site, we experience a traffic burst that translates proportionally to sales and mails from prospective customers or new buyers. Although the effect lasts for some days, the main spike declines pretty soon. However, in this case we kept having a relatively steady amount of activity during the following hours. And then, a second burst was noticed at around 15:30: the article had already accumulated 670 diggs and had been deemed "popular" by the Digg team. We kept receiving a lot of traffic, more sales than usual, and therefore had to cope with an increased amount of support activity (mostly derived from licenses that got trapped by spam filters and had to be resent manually). I thought this would last for a day, but that night when I got home the article had snowballed to more than 2,000 diggs and traffic was solid. This continued for another day and a half, and then decreased when the article finally left page 1 of Digg's Apple section.

We are proud and very grateful about the response received from all of you. We have gone through frentic activity trying to answer all your emails as soon as possible, but this activity is much more pleasurable when most of the feedback we receive is positive and encouraging. We'd also like to send our heartfelt thanks to Ed, who originated the best string of sales and response in our short history. And your article is interesting, too, if you don't mind we may borrow some of your ideas for future Xslimmer releases! :)

There are a number of lessons to be made from this story. The obvious one is the immense power of community sites such as Digg. I cannot imagine what would have happened if Xslimmer had been "dugg" in a direct way instead of marginally. A consequence is that quality and word of mouth really, really count: Ed chose to mention Xslimmer because he had liked the program. And because Ed's article was authoritative and respected, it was chosen and made popular by its readers. I believe there is a parallelism between this new wave of user-promoted content and the strong and traditional heritage about quality in the Mac tradition, whose users tend to look for good solutions, recognize them and recommend them to others. Being small software developers, our bet was to provide a "Mac-like" experience to a seemingly sensitive operation and rely on word of mouth to get our message through, hoping that this would pay off in the long run. The process is cumulative, and we do believe that each new customer is a potential referral for new ones; therefore, we have no option but to strive for simplicity, quality, robustness, ease of use, customer support. That's why we chose to distribute 5,000 free (non-upgradeable) Xslimmer licenses during the MacAppADay promotion, back in December, and only a few weeks after having released Xslimmer 1.0: in the hope that this community of users would spread the word if they really liked our application.

You know what? Ed downloaded Xslimmer during MacAppADay, bought it a few days later, and recommended it to the world last Tuesday, 13th.

The next Tuesday, 13th will be in November. After this week's events I'm confident that by then we'll be closer to our goal to "go Indy" and work on this thrilling activities the whole day. We'll keep working to achieve that, and we can't fail because November 13th is my birthday, and I'm determined to prove that bad luck may happen on Fridays, but not on Tuesdays, and certainly not on my birthday!

Lossless same-drive Mac HD Repartition

Recently I discovered a lossless way to repartition my Mac's main hard drive, without having to boot from an external drive. I have been looking for this for quite a while, as I wanted to install the Mac OS X Leopard preview in order to test the new development tools and maybe try a new feature or two for Xslimmer.



Some people had suggested to use the Bootcamp utility to resize and partition the drive. But I had already installed Windows (basically for gaming) and did not want to lose that partition.

So, I finally read an article on how to do this using the command line command diskutil, and its hidden feature named resizeVolume. If you check the man pages, you will see that there is no information on this matter, but you can obtain some executing "diskutil resizeVolume":

freeport:~ jorge$ diskutil resizeVolume
Disk Utility Tool
Usage: diskutil resizeVolume [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node] size
...
Non-destructively resize a disk. You may increase or decrease its size.
When decreasing size, you may optionally supply a list of new partitions to create.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.
Valid partition sizes are in the format of .
Valid sizes are B(ytes), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes)
Example: 10G (10 gigabytes), 4.23T (4.23 terabytes), 5M (5 megabytes)
resizeVolume is only supported on GPT media with a Journaled HFS+ filesystem.
A size of "limits" will print the range of valid values for the current filesystem.
Example: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s3 10G
JHFS+ HDX1 5G MS-DOS HDX2 5G
Valid filesystems: "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Journaled HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" "HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT32" "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS" "MS-DOS FAT12" "UFS" "Linux" "Swap"

So, as you can see, to resize a partition you first need to know its name. For that you can use "diskutil list":

freeport:~ jorge$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *465.8 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 434.0 GB disk0s2
3: Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS HD 31.4 GB disk0s3

In my case, the partition was disk0s2. The partition scheme or the EFI partition should be ignored. As I said before, I already had a Mac OS partition and the Bootcamp partition. I wanted to create a new 20 Gb partition out of the main Mac OS partition, disk0s2.

Now, there are some limitations to the resizing. I guess it has to do with how much free space you have in the partition you want to divide. To verify the limitation, you use "diskutil resizeVolume partition_name limits":

freeport:~ jorge$ diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 limits
For device disk0s2 Macintosh HD:
Current size: 466003951616 bytes
Minimum size: 213448208384 bytes
Maximum size: 466003951616 bytes

Finally, you have to provide the resizing parameters to the "diskutil resizeVolume" command. In my case, I wanted to keep 414Gb for the main partition and create a new Journaled HFS+ with 20Gb:

freeport:~ jorge$ diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 414G JHFS+ Leopard 20G
Started resizing on disk disk0s2 Macintosh HD
Verifying
Resizing Volume
Adjusting Partitions

Finished resizing on disk disk0s2 Macintosh HD
You will need to manually reformat your new partitions.
WARNING: You must now reboot!

In my case the first step, "Verifying" was what took the longest time. After that it all went very fast.

Once done, you should reboot. After rebooting, you can use diskutil or Disk Utility to prepare that new partition for use.

freeport:~ jorge$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *465.8 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 414.0 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_HFS 19.9 GB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS HD 31.4 GB disk0s4

In my case, I used Disk Utility, selecting the new partition, the Erase tab, then proving a name for the partition, and clicking on the Erase button.

freeport:~ jorge$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *465.8 GB disk0
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 414.0 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_HFS Leopard HD 19.9 GB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS HD 31.4 GB disk0s4

(Update) One more thing needs to be done. This time is for Windows to keep running fine. You should edit boot.ini (I used textmate), so it knows the partition is it located in. Mine looked like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

As you see, it says partition(3) for the Windows partition, which is now wrong. I changed it to partition(4) and it worked like a charm. Notice partition(3) appears twice, you should change both.

All set!

Now I have Leopard on my Mac along with Tiger and Windows, thanks to these simple operations. Needless to say, before you attempt to do anything like this, you should have a backup.

[Update: I wrote a second part of this article]

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Have fun!

Back...after the break

As with every major release of an application, not only the days prior to the release are very intensive, but also the days after. With Xslimmer 1.2 it has not been different. Issues, doubts, questions, bugs, feedback. Lots of hours of dedication and little sleep.

The most important bug was what I initially called the "UK English Bug", which at the end also had an important impact on our German customers. After a few hours of being detected, we released 1.2.1 in order to fix it. Incredibly, none of our beta testers were German or UK English people. We apologize to those who suffered this issue.

A few days later, with 1.2.2 we fix some other minor fixes and tweaks were introduced. Then, we took a break. For a few days, we had enough with our day jobs and our families.

Right now we are back, and starting with 1.2.3 and our general Xslimmer roadmap. We shall keep you posted.

Maintenance release

Xslimmer 1.2.1 is a maintenance release that solves a bug detected after launch of version 1.2.0. The bug could cause Xslimmer to remove all localizations of some apps in certain circumstances, rendering those applications unusable. This was the case, for example, for users whose preferred language was British English and decided to keep one language.

Our apologies for not having detected this behaviour even after having conducted a closed beta programme.

Hope you can now enjoy Xslimmer 1.2 to its fullest.

UK English Bug Detected

Unfortunately, there has been a bug detected in the case of selecting UK English as the only language to keep. We are working hard to nail it down and release a fix for it as soon as possible.

Xslimmer 1.2 is Out!

That's right. The anticipated release of Xslimmer that allows language stripping from applications is here. In this release, we include a series of benefits:

* Language stripping. Xslimmer 1.2 allows you to easily select how many languages you want to preserve and will remove the rest, thus greatly increasing the amount of disk space you'll free.
* Send apps to exclusion list. A new menu option allows you to easily add applications to your personal list of excluded ones, directly from the Xslimmer window. No more search for the app to exclude!
* Quicksilver integration. Allows Xslimmer to become a target for Quicksilver's "Open with..." feature.
* Localizations. Xslimmer is now available in English, Spanish, French and Italian!
* UI improvements. A variety of minor UI improvements have been added that contribute to (we hope) a sound, consistent and polished user experience.

Hope you enjoy using Xslimmer 1.2.

Xslimmer Language Stripping Ready for Beta

Time for a new beta! This one will be smaller than the original one, but we want to find out if there could be any issues, that we did not forsee or find out, with the new language stripping system that we have implemented onto Xslimmer 1.2.

This means that we have finished Xslimmer 1.2 development, and we are ready to let our original beta testers check it out. If you are interested in testing it out too, you are more than welcome to write to us. We are limiting total new submissions to 10.

New Version Design

We have finished the version 1.1.x roadmap. It is time to move on to 1.2. As you probably know, 1.2 shall include app language stripping capabilities. This means that many parts of the Xslimmer app will have to be adapted or even rewritten.

The most obvious change will be the main window. How do we indicate that an app has multiple languages? should we show what the final language will be? what happens after the language stripping has been done? But, most importantly, how do we combine both features into one single application and make sure that it is still attractive and easy to use?

Then you have the history or log information. The operation needs to be reflected in there, and in a compatible way with the current existing slim log.

Blacklist. Does it need to change? Will apps behave in equal manner when stripped from languages than when stripped from architectures? There is some testing to do.

These and many more details, are our current thoughts on making 1.2. It will take a few weeks, and a new beta test to get it out, but, as we are in the design phase this week, it would be great to hear any ideas you might want to see included in this or other future versions.

MacWorld Ends While We Release

After a week in which all attention was concentrated in San Francisco, things start to get back to normal. Hopefully, next year we will be able to participate. I am really looking forward to that, and, by that time, the iPhone should already be available.

Meanwhile, we did release Xslimmer 1.1.7. It would be great to hear opinions on the GUI changes. We were concerned that making the drop window disappear, making the main window the drop area, would not be something our user would like. We believe this change simplifies usage of the application, while it provides us with the flexibility to include new features in an easier way.

Xslimmer in 2007

First of all, we wanted to wish you a very happy new year. After a few days of rest, we now retake Xslimmer's roadmap.

We are now finishing v1.1.7, which will bring some changes to the GUI, along with some other features. These changes to the GUI are necessary in order to incorporate the anticipated language stripping feature which we are already working on. Also, it will allow us to add other features in a simple way, like using a dialog to add folders or apps, without having to drag them.

Appart from the new features, from my point of view the most important change in 1.1.7 is that we take out the little drop window. Of course, you will be able to drag apps to main app window, as you are today, and we have built

Next is localization. In 2 ways: first, adding language localizations to Xslimmer, and then the previously mentioned language stripping. In 1.1.8 we intend to include at least one localization, along with some requested features like history purging.

It is version 1.2 that will feature the new stripping function.

We have many other features in our roadmap, but we are not going reveal them all yet.

We are, of course, open to new features requests from our customers. Just click here to send as any ideas you would like to see implemented in Xslimmer.