Latenitesoft: Mac & iOS Applications

Announcing Lab for iOS

2010-12-10T03:33:00.000-08:00

It is been a while since I last posted here. I am happy to do so to announce our newest product, Lab. Lab is an app that I wanted. I found myself often wondering when and where this or that picture on my iPhone was taken. So, now, using Lab, you can get detailed information about the picture in your iOS device's photo library. That way, you don't need to transfer your photos to a computer to find out details about your own photo library. Sporting a gorgeous design, Lab is the perfect complement to your iOS device's photo album. Using Lab you can:

Find out the resolution and size of your photos.

Let Lab remind you when and where a picture was shot. The location, when available, will be displayed for you in a map.

Examine advanced info including histogram, exposure and shooting details, right in your device.

Lab 1.0 is available now for iOS 4 in the App Store. If you like to take photos, give it a try for just $0.99. We hope you like it.

iPad: 7 Things to Love, 7 Things to Improve

2010-04-24T14:22:00.001-07:00

To Love

Size. If there is something I like is to be able to use the iPad practically anywhere. I am writing this on a plane where it would be hard to fit a laptop, given their "fit as much people on an aircraft as possible" policies. The iPad fits nicely and allows me to get the job done. It is very portable and you do not even need to take it out on security controls.

Screen. Colors are vivid, resolution is nice and the overall usage of the screen is a joy. At 768x1024 pixels games look great, but almost all other applications can benefit from the screen too. Sketches 2 has even more potential here than on the iPhone given the screen real estate.

Sound. Due to its thin size, I was not expecting to get good quality sound. I am glad I was wrong. For my ears, the speaker on the iPad is practically of the same quality of those on my 2007 Macbook Pro.

No heat, no noise. On most laptops, and computers in general, CPU or graphic intensive applications cause the temperature to raise. In the case of laptops on your lap, it can get uncomfortable. But it is not only that, raising temperatures imply heat dissipation mechanisms, which are normally noisy. Not with the iPad. Even while playing games, the iPad is cool and quiet.

Battery life. You can play games, watch videos, listen to music, browse the Internet or whatever you like to do. The battery will last for at least 6-7 hours. In my experience, it can even surpass the 10 hours of the Apple specifications. Amazing.

Instant on. Casual use feature never one. No waiting for your computer to boot up. Want to google something? Grab the iPad fire Safari and surf away. Look up an article on Wikipedia? Play a game? Same thing.

Safari. If there is a killer app that comes already installed in this device, I would say that is Safari. Browsing the Internet with this is a joy. It was not long ago that many Internet sites read "this site looks great at 1024x768". Here you have it in the palm of your hands.

To Improve

Memory. The iPad has 256Mb of RAM, the same as the iPhone 3GS. I find this the weakest point of the iPad. Checking the crash logs, running out of memory is the primary cause for most of them. Having much higher resolution than the iPhone, this is not strange. I would have guessed that Apple had placed at least 512. Maybe on the next version.

Weight. Obviously, at 1.5 pounds (680 grams), it is much lighter than a laptop. However this machine is supposed to be easily held with your hands. Reading a book or playing a game can easily get tiring given the heaviness of the device.

Battery charging. If you connect your iPad to your computer it will take a while to get it charged. In my tests 5 hours did not get me a full charge. Fortunately, the charger included with the iPad, even with the same size and aspect of those of iPhone and iPod, is more powerful, so it is able to speed the charging process. Still long.

No protection included. With such a big screen, the iPad can easily get harmed if unprotected while traveling or if handled carelessly. A simple cover to protect the screen would have sufficed to keeping the screen safe in most situations.

Screen becomes dirty. Oleophobic or not, the screen easily gets full of fingerprints. This is not much of a problem while working with the device, but does not look good when the screen is off.

iPhone Apps. I am glad that I can run iPhone apps on my iPad, don't get me wrong, but they do not look good. At 1x apps look too small, at 2x they look pixelated. I believe we could see a better 2x mode in the future.

Mail app. While email look good, navigating between accounts takes several steps. In addition, there is no mail list while reading your mail in portrait until you hit the email list. Then, there comes a popover, you select a new message, the popover goes, and you have to repeat this process again. Personally, I want to be able to switch messages and accounts quickly independently of the device orientation.

Conclusion

Overall the iPad is an amazing machine, more taking into account that this is version 1.0. These are just some of the small things I would like for Apple to improve. However, I must say that I am very happy with it both as a user and as a developer.

Written on an iPad, using Pages.

Sketches 1 and 2: Two Products in the App Store

2010-01-30T04:42:00.000-08:00

As some of you might already know Sketches 2 is available on the App Store. Also, the original Sketches is still available as a different product.

When Sketches was created, it was a simple drawing application. It had no menus, no color or line width selection, or anything else. You were able to draw using a red line of fixed width. When the application was closed, it stored the document. When the device was shaked, the drawing was erased. With each new update, thousands of downloads occurred, a clear indication that there was interest for such a product.

In version 0.3 of this jailbroken world, we added several options to choose color and make some simple geometric shapes using the multitouch capabilities of the iPhone. This version was a big push, and made Sketches even more popular.

When Apple announced the SDK, along with the App Store, Pedro and myself seriously considered the idea of making this our way life. For several months we worked in making Sketches a more complete product, while converting it to the official SDK.

On July 10th 2008, Sketches was among the initial group of apps to make it into the store. It was also featured on Ars Technica and promoted by Apple in the European Union. For us, it was a big success. We made $150,000 during the first three weeks of sales.

During the next months we worked on adding the features we had originally designed for version one, while resolving any bugs that appeared. We added text shape creation, tooltips, additional stamps, web sharing, improved image flattening, fixed memory issues, fixed map rendering issues on certain locations, improved mail sending of drawings, added ink opacity options, added corkboard rearrangement, improved zoom, improved saving performance, etc.

At the same time, we received many different requests to make Sketches a more professional product, featuring an advanced color picker, transparency, brushes, more zoom and so on. As we designed these features, we realized that the existing UI was not able to hold them. In addition, we would need to change the way things are done to fit this new functionality (for example, a progressive zoom that worked like in the photo album would need the shape placing mechanism to be changed). Finally, we were taking little advantage of the new 3.0 SDK functionalities. It was time to move onto version 2.

When we designed Sketches 2, we decided to make it 3.0+ only, and to change the menu system, looking to achieve 2 things:

1. Be able to work while having the menus open, so you could change the ink color or other options without having to reopen the menu every time.

2. Keep the original simplicity, while adding the advanced options

(example of Skeches UI evolution)

Once the product was almost ready, we saw that the changes were many, and made it a different product, with different usage. So, for the time being, Sketches 1 and 2 are going to be living together in the App Store. We probably could have called them something like "Sketches" and "Sketches Pro" or "Sketches Classic" and "Sketches Advanced", but we liked "Sketches" and "Sketches 2" better.

We did not want, however, to forget those users who welcome change and are looking for the new Sketches 2 features. So, for a few more hours, we are still promoting Sketches 2. The promotional price is just $1.99. Take advantage of it!

For us, it is time to get Sketches 2 onto the iPad!

LateNiteSoft Contribution to Haiti Relief

2010-01-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, it seems that only through big tragedies we are able to gain perspective on our lifes, and are reminded how extremely lucky we are that our families are healthy and safe.

As we were talking about this during lunch, our twitter stream showed a couple of great help initiatives from the Mac and iPhone communities. The guys at OmniGroup are donating more than $45,000; Mike Piatek-Jimenez will donate all proceeds from Seasonality for the rest of the month; Daniel Jalkut and others are calling for action on an initiative being put together by Justin Williams. We decided to adhere to Justin's idea, but we thought we'd also like to do something by ourselves.

Although we are not able to provide such a substantial up-front help as OmniGroup's, we thought we could just keep half of our income from the sales of Sketches (versions 1 and 2) during one week, and donate the other half to a non-profit aid organization. If you like our products and would like to help us on this, please consider buying Sketches or Sketches 2 now.

On a personal note - since we created LateNiteSoft, I have frequently considered how lucky I am to enjoy the best job I could ever dream of. However, I also get anxious or sad about work issues or personal situations, and those feelings sometimes obscure the rest. I will try to approach the future with a better scale, to be permanently aware -and not just during a crisis- of how mundane and small my problems really are. I hope this resolution, my only one for 2010, will make life a bit easier for those around me.

Update: We finally donated $1510 to Save the Children. Thanks very much everyone for helping us with this!

Xslimmer 1.7 now available, fully compatible with Snow Leopard

2009-08-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

Xslimmer 1.7 has just been released! It supports 64-bit binaries, honors code signing rules, is able to handle and create native HFS-compressed files and adds many other improvements that will continue to provide a worthwhile and reliable experience to Snow Leopard users (as well as to all others that choose not to upgrade to the latest OS yet). Read on for the gory details!

Universal Binaries are so 2008, aren't they?

Well, unfortunately they are not. Or, should we say, fortunately they are not. Universal Binaries were a key technology that allowed Apple to transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs in the most awesomely flawless technology adoption ever. The same Universal (or, as they are affectionately called, "fat") Binaries are being put to work again to ensure that Snow Leopard and its apps run flawlessly in all compatible Intel machines, including 32-bit and 64-bit ones.

So instead of packaging binaries in a bundle that contains PowerPC and Intel versions of the code, it will now become usual for developers to provide the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of the same code. The 64-bit version will be used in 64-bit computers, whereas the 32-bit code will run in CPUs that are not able to handle 64 bits. There is no magic way for the system to transform one into the other, so no matter what computer you have, chances are many of the apps you install will contain code that will be ignored and never will run.

But it gets more interesting! Snow Leopard is truly awesome, but there is no reason for developers not to support Leopard if they can. True, some apps will take advantage of Snow Leopard exclusive technologies such as Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL or some other new APIs; however, many others won't need these innovations yet and will still support Leopard. But Leopard does run on PowerPC machines, so developers should include a PowerPC version of the code if they want to support the same hardware requirements as the OS. As a result, we are starting to see applications that include not two, but three architectures: Intel 32, Intel 64 and PowerPC. This is the case for some very popular apps such as Tweetie for Mac or the latest version of Apple's own Airport Utility.

Xslimmer was designed to handle these situations, and it has now been tested and optimized for the scenarios above so it will always keep the best version of the code that is available for your Mac. If you own a 64-bit-ready Mac, then Xslimmer will preserve the 64-bit version of your applications' code - when it's available.

Won't Xslimmer break 64-bit applications? What about code-signing?

As discussed above, Xslimmer carefully analyzes your applications and selects the best possible architecture among those available. This is done in a per-application basis, and not following some batch process that blindly keeps a single combination. Analysis includes evaluation of signed resources: code-signing rules are fully honored so that only binaries that can be safely modified will be processed.

Extreme care is applied when slimming, and the operation is performed in the most friendly way. Your slimmed applications are registered again for you in the internal OS databases - your keychain authorizations are preserved, and you don't even need to restart your Mac after slimming it.

But Apple applications are already compressed!

Snow Leopard achieves significant space savings by using transparent file system compression. In fact, all system applications and utilities are installed in a compressed state, although they are transparently uncompressed on the fly without the user ever noticing. Xslimmer 1.7 recognizes and supports this type of compression: if a compressed application is slimmed, then it will be recompressed automatically. Therefore, all system applications in Snow Leopard will still benefit from additional space savings if they are slimmed, without affecting their compression status.

When running on Snow Leopard, Xslimmer will always show you the actual size your applications take up in your disk, and not the uncompressed size as reported by Finder and other tools. This way you can be absolutely sure about the savings you achieve.

We have even taken this technology a step forward. A new option in Xslimmer 1.7 will allow you to compress slimmed binaries that were not originally compressed. This way, your installed third party apps can also benefit from this awesome new HFS+ compression technology in Snow Leopard.

Ok, I'm sold - I'll give it a try!

Wonderful! We've always worked hard to prove that your choice of Xslimmer is really the best option for your slimming needs. In Xslimmer 1.7 you'll find many features designed to slim your Mac easily and with total peace of mind. These include:

Strip out unneeded localizations - As usual, Xslimmer 1.7 will remove translations you don't need, achieving great space savings.

Visual indication of architectures - Another new feature in Xslimmer 1.7, you can now see what architectures an app contains and what the resulting architecture is: Intel 32, Intel 64, PowerPC 32 or PowerPC 64.

Downloadable blacklist - for those apps that check themselves (for anti-piracy reasons, usually) and refuse to start after they have been slimmed. We test every report from other users about malfunctioning apps.

Your personal exclusion list - for folders in your disk that you don't ever want to mess with, for whatever reason.

Integrated backups - designed to let you test your slimmed apps with the confidence that you'll be able to recover them in one click.

Extreme compatibility - Xslimmer 1.7 has been fully optimized for Snow Leopard, but it will still run in Panther, Tiger and Leopard.

So, no matter whether you are a longtime Xslimmer fan or have come across it recently, now is an excellent time to check the combined space savings that Snow Leopard and Xslimmer will bring. We hope you like Xslimmer 1.7!

From Orange to Apple

2009-07-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

Maybe the title should have been “From an Orange Executive to an Apple Indie Developer”, or simply put “Learnings After One Year as Indie”. Basically, I wanted to explain how I came to make one of the biggest changes in my life, what the motivations were, and some of the things I did learn throughout the process.

My background

So, at 39, I was a reasonably successful executive at Orange, the French telecommunications company owned by France Telecom. At that time, France Telecom had more than 200,000 employees, more than 3,000 of them in Spain. I was one of them, one of those called “Top 100”; a director in charge of Web operations, leading a group of nearly 50 people. I had a nice salary and nice benefits too.

I worked for Orange during 8 years. Prior to that, I had been working for other multinational companies, always related to technology, which was, and still is, my passion. That is also the reason why I majored in computer science. However, soon after I started working, it became clear that I could not make a living creating software, at least not the software that I wanted to make. Soon after that, I got a masters degree in business administration, and began a managerial career that some years later took me to Orange.

During my time at Orange, I started Cocoa development, a bit as a hobby. I had been developing applications, mostly games, since I was 14. Being new to the Mac, I wanted to see what Cocoa was about. At the same time, Pedro, who also worked for the same employer, had this idea about making a universal binary stripper. So he went ahead and made the first implementation of his idea as simple shell script. It worked just fine. We had been working together several years, and we knew each other quite well. When he showed it to me, I told him that I wanted to make it more “Mac-like”. I, then, created a user interface that showed the application list and an icon for the architecture. Finally, Pedro integrated the guts of his script into Cocoa. It was the birth of Xslimmer. To our surprise, Xslimmer's popularity began to grow, and with it, so did its sales.

Months later, around August 2007, we created Sketches. Those were the jailbreak days for us, as there was no official support from Apple for third party applications. Interest for it skyrocketed, and for every new update there were hundreds of thousands of downloads. Some months later, Apple announced the SDK and the App Store. It was clear that there was an opportunity.

The change and its motivations

So, my day job, family and other responsibilities were taking most of my time. I felt stressed, and drank a lot of coffee. I had a gut feeling that the time was coming to make a change. As opposed to what was clear to me in the early 90‘s, Xslimmer had taught me that it was possible to make a living on selling software that I had created. And the App Store was coming.

At that same time, Orange was starting to feel the pounding from the world's financial and economical crisis, and had bad forecasts for the future. As it had happened in several occasions before, and in preparation for the crisis, there was a management reshuffle. I was offered the IT Project Management Direction. The job was for sure interesting, but my head was somewhere else. I needed to pursue my dream of creating my own software company, one that would make software I wanted, and I knew that the time was then.

I left Orange, on July 4th, 2008. Exactly one week before the App Store went life.

The learnings

After one year there are a few things I have learned, that might deserve sharing:

App Store success is temporary. I compare it to the music industry. While you are on the top chart, you sell; once you are out, your sales level is much, much lower. In our case, Sketches did great for a couple of weeks, reaching Top 12 in the US for a while.

Apple listens, but it takes them a while to react. During the iPhone SDK beta testing, we wrote several bug reports - it sometimes took several weeks, but they were all answered to, and most fixed. Once the App Store was live, I wrote an article a while back that included several suggestions for improving the App Store. Most of the things that I wanted changed are now changed. For example, allowing only users of the application to voice an opinion and rating about it.

On marketing, experiment and follow your instinct. During this year we tried different things that did not work out. From joining other developers to create an “Apps Gems” site, to purchasing online advertisement. We were new to those types of actions. However, simpler, and cheaper, tactics did work out quite well. Twittering, blogging or simple press releases did much more than any expensive advertisement. I obviously need to learn more on this.

Get help for your paperwork. Administrative stuff and taxes is unavoidable. You just have to do it. We have a small accounting company that takes care of filling up the necessary forms and that keeps the accounting information for us, but most of the work, you still have to do. You have to process those PayPal reports, you have to process those iTunes Connect Financial reports, you have to scan all the invoices you receive, and so on. But having help from a third party places some routine to it, and ensures that you will meet the necessary deadlines.

It is not all fun, but automation helps. You cannot start new products all the time. You have to take care and nurture your existing products, so that your customers realize you actually take them seriously and are committed to making them better and better. Your customer base demands time too. Customer support takes a good chunk of your time. The more products and the more sales, the higher the number of customer support requests. I would say that around 2% of sales translate into customer support requests. Most are very simple, but some are not. The solution is to try to automate things as much as possible. From self service (recover your license) to email templates, all helps.

Working at home is harder than I thought it would be. This is not because of a lack of discipline, but, in my case, the environment is really noisy and busy during the day. I found myself trying to work while being interrupted. Being used to code at night, this was really hard for me. We ended up renting a small office, just a few days ago.

There are more things in life than just work. For a couple of months, I believed Pedro had lost interest in our little software start-up. One day he explained to me that he was ending his 15-year-old marriage. It took a while for him to reorient his life, and, as a result, we deviated from our scheduled workplan, and part of our initial inertia was lost. However, now I try to spend more quality time with my family, while keeping a more flexible philosophy about how to spend my time. For example, last week I took the afternoon off and spent it having fun with my family. What's more, I did not feel guilty or time pressured about it.

You can do all those things that you never could. Now there is no excuse. It is just a question of organizing yourself. In my case, I wanted to lose weight. That is hard to do when you spend a lot of time traveling around, eating sandwiches at meetings or while preparing presentations at 2AM. But once you are the owner of your time, it is. I lost 20Kg (44 pounds) from September to December last year.

The dream

So, now what? Well, when I think of what I want to accomplish in the future, I do not think of creating a huge company with many employees, controlling the world’s software market. My objective at this point in time is to create a company similar to Panic or the Omnigroup. These companies keep the indie spirit, while having some specialization and some size, so they produce quality products while providing a quality service, as their employees can dedicate most of the time to what they do best.

So, for LateNiteSoft 2.0, and if our numbers allow for it, my intention is to hire an enthusiast support/webmaster/marketing person, as the first non-founder employee. Then, where we go from there remains to be seen, but I am sure it is going to be both interesting and fun.

Apple iPhone: Light-Years Ahead

2009-06-29T15:59:00.001-07:00

As shown in one of the banners at the Moscone West during WWDC 09: one year later, light-years ahead:

It could not be more true. Many things have changed during the last two years, and in the last year in particular.

I truly believe there is still no competitor for the iPhone. I have tested many different phones. I have owned, both Blackberry and Palm branded phones, and I have had several Nokia phones in the past. Being a mobile device fan, I have the tendency to ask people to show me their phones. I have seen many, and there is still no competition, not even in those new touch screen phones that keep popping up.

It is also my believe that the key to is not in the hardware, which is definitely good, but not unique. The key difference is in the software. Apple created a software base that is extremely responsive to user input, and that made it easy and intuitive. Then, with the SDK and the App Store, opened the door to rest of us.

Many things have changed. From the initial 550 applications that were available on July 11th, 2008, the App Store has now surpassed the 50,000 mark. That is almost 100 times more applications, and still growing fast. Another change is the introduction of firmware 3.0. Technologies like MapKit or Core Data, are amazing. Finally, new hardware. Faster, with more memory and more powerful.

In my opinion, 2 years after the introduction of the iPhone, Apple clearly dominates the smartphone market and it is clear that its intention is to keep doing it. But what it is most impressive is, that Apple is listening to both customers and developers. Took a while, and there are still things Apple do not want to change, but they are doing it. Almost all my requests for new iPhone SDK APIs have been made available in firmware 3.0, and almost most of the common requested features are now there (like copy & paste). Even most of the changes I wanted on the App Store are there.

So, I want to take this opportunity to say: thanks, Apple! Thanks for the iPhone, for the SDK, for the App Store, for your updates, and most of all, for listening. Keep doing it, and you shall keep light-years ahead of the competition.

Reject-me-not!

2009-02-17T04:50:00.001-08:00

While it's been a while since our last post, we have not been resting on our laurels. During this time, we have released new versions of both Xslimmer and Snapshot. We have also released Sketches 1.5, and prepared and uploaded Sketches 1.6 to the iTunes Connect portal. Version 1.6 of Sketches, however, has already been rejected twice. As it happened with the undo icon back in October-November 2008, reviewers have found previously undetected issues in our product.

The first of these rejections was due to the fact the reviewer was confused about two distinct features: image hosting, and Web sharing. We had updated our application description to reflect the fact that sharing your images via twitter or email causes them to be uploaded to a new web hosting service we have developed anew for Sketches, instead of the former third party service we had been using. It was also explained that the reason for this change was to ensure an excellent quality at all times: we are not interested in placing ads on Sketches' image hosting services; we can act promptly on the event of unexpected downtime; and we can grow the service in the future with new features - none of which was possible with the previous offering.

The Web Sharing feature, on the other hand, allows customers to start a tiny Web server running inside Sketches in your iPhone, then download your pictures in PNG, JPG or PDF from your computer.

After activating the Web Server screen (see screenshot below), the reviewer somehow kept waiting for the drawing to be uploaded to our server. This, of course, never happened, and thus our app was rejected.

When the rejection mail came in, I uploaded the same binary again and wrote back to the reviewer:

"Thanks for your feedback. Uploading to our server is only done when exporting to email or twitter.

What you attached as screenshot, is the integrated web server. That is, Sketches has a Web server that allows you to access your drawings from a Mac or PC using a Web browser, in order to export them. To do so, you simply have to connect to the URL address shown in that screen. In your case, if you open Safari, enter "http://10.0.0.3:8080" [IP address changed from original value] in the URL field. You should get something similar to the screenshot I have attached. Then you can press on the file type you want to export, jpeg, png or pdf, under any of the drawings to obtain a local copy.

I hope this clarifies it. Let me know if you need any further explanation."

A week later, the second rejection email was received. This time, the reviewer had found a true issue, totally unrelated to the previous discussion. Sketches Web capture mechanism used two icons that did not adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines "as outlined in iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.5".

The funny thing is that those two icons have been there since the App Store launch back in July 2008.

What's interesting is that Sketches 1.6 is just a small, bugfix release that was submitted shortly after Sketches 1.5 was approved. Sketches 1.5 added some notable new features (such as our own image hosting service, as described above), and it was approved in just 40 hours. Somehow, improving over the existing feature set has triggered more alarms to fire off than creating new functions in the first place.

Anyhow, we talked to Adam Betts and he sent us a new pair of icons in no time. We created a new build and upload it again. 5 days later, we are still waiting for a response.

App Store: Try Before You Buy

2008-12-16T11:54:00.001-08:00

Some time ago, I wrote about "The Cruel Economy of the App Store". This article was echoed in TUAW and Business Week, among other media. Since then, Apple has introduced several important changes that will improve both the developers' and the users' experiences:

- Different sorting options per category.
- Multiple screenshots available in the device when browsing the App Store.
- No voting / comments allowed for people who have not purchased or downloaded the application. This will prevent users from leaving destructive, uninformed comments that do not really help other users make purchasing decisions, nor the developer in crafting a better product.
- No shifting in category sorting when updates are released. This avoids confusion to the final users, as they always look at the latest released applications. In addition, it is no longer possible to trick the system with simple, unimportant updates whose main purpose was just to relocate the apps at the beginning of the list.

These changes are very much welcome, and I do believe they are steps in the right direction.

However, the improvements are not enough. The App Store is populating at a very fast rate. When it launched it had around 550 applications, whereas it hosts more than 10,000 today. That is, in only 4 months the number of applications is 20 times what it was at launch, and it continues to grow on a daily basis: according to AppShopper, around 100 apps are added every day.

This rapid growth is a challenge for all App Store stakeholders. First of all, for Apple: they need to manage, review and approve all the new apps and the corresponding update cycles in an efficient and consistent manner, doing so quickly and applying common criteria to similar cases. What's even more important, Apple is probably extremely interested in promoting high quality apps to keep their lead in the thriving mobile computing platform race and once again, they need to do it consistently and coherently to keep their independence. I would anticipate that one of the top priorities for Apple at this point should be to listen to developers' technical feedback, in order to identify potential extensions to the API, evolutions and other improvements. Keep in mind that one of the most anticipated new features in the API -the ability to receive push notifications- was announced long before it was ready, probably to respond to concerns from the developer community about the implications of not having such mechanism.

Developers also need to deal with such a rapid growth: they are seeing their apps drowned in a sea of apps from others, and it is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate their products in the eyes of the customers. Since users would choose what apps to buy based on just a simple description, a screenshot and a price tag, price soon became the single most important mechanism to market your app inside the App Store. As Craig Hockenberry pointed out, the problem now is that there's a strong tendency to lower prices all the way down to $0.99 - as a consequence, not even price will be enough to differentiate apps any more.

Lastly, users suffer from such a formidable response to the App Store in terms of uncertainty. It's fantastic to have literally dozens of competing apps for any interest area; however, users can only see a uniform, flat offer of similar apps with similar screenshots, similar descriptions and similar prices. It's thus becoming more and more difficult to ensure you buy the app that meets your needs the most, or the one you find easiest to work with, or the one that has those little details you love, or the one that launches faster, or the one you think is simply most beautiful.

Trying

There are many things that Apple can do to adapt to the new situation, helping users and developers at the same time. As they have already demonstrated, I'm sure they will be working on many areas of improvement; however, I would like to stress what we believe is the single most important missing feature in the App Store: a "try before you buy" mechanism.

Such a mechanism should be part, we believe, of the official SDK. It would allow developers to offer trial versions or trial periods for their products in a snap, since the App Store would handle the specifics of downloading, expiration checking and upgrading. Users would be able to list the applications in trial, with details about how many days there are left and what features (if any) would be disabled if the user chooses not to upgrade. The App Store would allow the user to purchase "the license" that would allow the application to be properly registered and keep operating normally thereafter.

This is a model that has been in place for many years in the shareware market, and is perfectly understood by consumers and developers. An additional advantage of implementing it in the App Store would be the coherence and consistency of the user experience - trial policies, once defined, will be shared by all apps.

Our experience - Sketches Trial

Since we are firm believers of this principle, we actually prepared and submitted a special "Sketches Trial" version to the App Store on October 18th. Unfortunately, it was rejected two weeks later, on the grounds that they could not accept our trial because "the application must be a fully functional app and cannot reference features that are not implemented or up-sell to the full version".

From our point of view, our concept was not in conflict with that. Our idea was simply to allow the user to try the application for a few days, without any limitations at all. After the trial period was over, the user could still use some of the features in Sketches, making it act more like a "Sketches Lite" version they would get for free.

What surprised us the most is that the rejection email actually encouraged us to create a free Sketches Lite version, as many others do, but the trial concept was out of the question. What we don't understand is, why is it better to offer a "crippled" lite version, instead of a fully functioning one that some days later transforms into the same lite version? We are proud of the variety of features we've implemented in Sketches while maintaining the ease of use, and we'd like our prospective customers to see and try all of them - that's the only way they can fully evaluate and appreciate the usefulness of the product. In contrast, a "lite" version would necessarily offer a subset of the functionality, and therefore users would get the wrong idea about the capabilities of the product, or they would be constantly nagged about the limitations that do not exist in the full version. We believe those alternatives are clearly inferior.

The Road Ahead

We believe that the addition of a "try before you buy" mechanism would be a terrific improvement to the App Store, since it will encourage customers to try all the apps they want - hence, sales will be informed ones, satisfaction will be much higher and prices will be easier to match to product features. Our idea to offer our own trial mechanism was clearly an interim solution until Apple delivers global trial capabilities. They are in the perfect position to apply all the well-known shareware practices in a consistent, reliable and easy to use way, and we have no doubt they will be considering this improvement.

We'd like this blog post to be seen as a small contribution towards the improvement of an already awesome platform. If you, as a developer or a customer, agree with us, don't hesitate to express your comments or digg the story :)

License delivery delays

2008-11-06T04:19:00.000-08:00

EDIT: Everything seems to have gone back to normality now, and we are receiving PayPal events in a timely manner again. All licenses should be out now, please write to us if you haven't received yours yet.

----

PayPal is undergoing a systems maintenance period today, and we are experiencing delays in receiving transaction data for Xslimmer and Snapshot. We will be processing licenses manually during this period, so they might take a little longer to reach you than usual. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

We'll post an update as soon as the service is fully restored, or follow us in Twitter for the latest news.

iPhone Programming Tips: building Unix software

2008-10-02T14:04:00.001-07:00

The NDA that was part of the agreement between Apple and registered iPhone developers was lifted yesterday. Not an hour had gone by before other developers started to share tips, code or even full frameworks. Like them, we'd also like to contribute some of the learnings we've found during our work with Apple's SDK.

We've decided, therefore, to write a second piece in our internationally acclaimed iPhone Programming Tips series. Our first article, devoted to image orientation techniques, was written during our jailbreak apprenticeship, before the NDA even existed - how's that for anticipation?

This time we'll explore a very different area: how to build a Unix source package in such a way it can be used as part of your iPhone project.

The Problem

So you've found this wonderful open source Unix package that perfectly handles one of the areas you need in your application. Being a publicly scrutinized, well-maintained library, you decide you would waste your time if you tried to do something similar, so you try to use it in your project and concentrate on your own features. Or maybe you simply want to test how this thing would work in the iPhone. Whatever your reasons are, you download the distribution and read the INSTALL file. This package is so well designed it compiles under a zillion Unix variants, including many evolutionary dead ends. It includes a fancy "configure" script that guesses everything it needs to know to configure itself properly. Apple's Developer Tools include a full gcc/make toolchain, so you perform the sacred ritual "./configure; make" and presto, you obtain an Intel dynamic library ready for use!

Wait a minute, that's not what you need. You want to cross-compile for ARM so that it runs on the device, of course. And you need it to run in the simulator, too.

Being a resourceful, tough programmer, you drop the source code on your Xcode project, alongside the rest of your code. You build your project and get like 148 errors and 57 warnings. Naturally, there are lots of definitions that ./configure should have defined, and the source defaults must be those of a PDP-11, or something. You try to tweak the settings manually for 10 minutes before you give up.

Your next step is to tell the configure script to cross-compile for a different platform. But you don't know exactly how to tell it your platform is like Mac OS X, only running on an arm chipset, what's the problem about that. After reading the scripts and template files and googling your way around, you use something like ./configure --host=arm-apple-darwin. This doesn't work, either, because configure insists on using your standard Mac OS X system libraries and headers instead of the ARM ones for the iPhone. You then try to tell configure to use the gcc compiler in your /Developer distribution, and this still doesn't work. Oh, well. You know what you need to do - investigate compilation options and library locations - but it's painful.

Wouldn't it be nice to have some notes on how to set up your environment to compile an Unix package from the command-line, but using Xcode's development libraries for the iPhone?

The Solution

If you have read the introduction above, you will have noticed that it is just a feeble attempt to disguise the fact that this article is only going to tell you how to configure your environment variables to compile a Unix library using Xcode's toolchain from the command line. That's it. It is admittedly not a very glamourous or innovative task; however, we still had to devote a few lenghty hours to set everything up properly, following the embarrassing steps outlined above, one after the other.

So, without further circumlocutions, let us show the damned variables. I'll dissect one of the build scripts I have actually used, accompanying the definitions with some comments or caveats.

The following two definitions point to the root of the command line developer tools and iPhone SDK. You may need to modify them to update the location in your own system, or if you are using a newer version of the SDK:


export DEVROOT=/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer
export SDKROOT=$DEVROOT/SDKs/iPhoneOS2.0.sdk

Next, let's save the current build environment - we'll use it later to build the i386 version of the library which will run in the simulator.


# Save relevant environment
U_CC=$CC
U_CFLAGS=$CFLAGS
U_LD=$LD
U_LDFLAGS=$LDFLAGS
U_CPP=$CPP
U_CPPFLAGS=$CPPFLAGS

We'll now define the values we need to use to target the ARM architecture. Compilation flags in my case look something like this:


export CPPFLAGS="-I$SDKROOT/usr/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin9/4.0.1/include/ -I$SDKROOT/usr/include/"
export CFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -arch armv6 -pipe -no-cpp-precomp -isysroot $SDKROOT"
export CPP="/usr/bin/cpp $CPPFLAGS"

Linking flags are a bit more tricky. You need to ensure the output of the compilation process is a static library, and not a dynamic library or an executable file. Dynamic libraries can in fact be produced, but the iPhone sandbox will sadly refuse to load them at runtime - only dynamic libraries and frameworks in predefined system locations can be used. There's a mention about this limitation somewhere in the Development Agreement.

Even though you won't be using dynamic libraries in your project, some packages are configured in such a way that it is easier to let them compile the dylib then ignore it, rather than trying to convince them not to create the dynamic code. If you encounter such a case, you should configure your linker in a way similar to this:


# dynamic library location generated by the Unix package
LIBPATH=src/.libs/<libname>.dylib
LIBNAME=`basename $LIBPATH`

export LDFLAGS="-L$SDKROOT/usr/lib/ -Wl,-dylib_install_name,@executable_path/$LIBNAME"

This will create a valid dylib file that you will be able to use within Xcode; however, it won't run in the iPhone as described above.

Therefore, you will actually be interested in using the static library version, so we'll store its location:


# static library that will be generated
LIBPATH_static=src/.libs/<libname>.a
LIBNAME_static=`basename $LIBPATH_static`

Now we are ready to run the configure script and build the libraries.


./configure CC=$DEVROOT/usr/bin/arm-apple-darwin9-gcc-4.0.1 LD=$DEVROOT/usr/bin/ld --host=arm-apple-darwin
make

Depending on the package you are trying to compile, you might need to supply additional arguments to the configure script. Some packages, for example, will accept arguments indicating whether a static library or a dynamic one should be built. It is also frequent to disable features or modules you know you won't use in your project. You need to refer to your package documentation for fine tuning details.

After make finishes (hopefully without errors), we'll move away the generated libraries to a safe location:


mkdir -p lnsout
cp $LIBPATH_static lnsout/$LIBNAME_static.arm

We repeat now the same steps, but targetting the i386 architecture. This will allow us to build libraries compatible with our iPhone simulator environment.


make distclean

# Use default environment
export CC=$U_CC
export CFLAGS=$U_CFLAGS
export LD=$U_LD
export LDFLAGS=$U_LDFLAGS
export CPP=$U_CPP
export CPPFLAGS=$U_CPPFLAGS

# Overwrite LDFLAGS
# Dynamic linking, relative to executable_path
# Use otool -D to check the install name
export LDFLAGS="-Wl,-dylib_install_name,@executable_path/$LIBNAME"

# ToDo - error checking
./configure
make

# Save generated binaries
cp $LIBPATH_static lnsout/$LIBNAME_static.i386

After we have produced the i386 and arm versions of our library, we will create a fat Universal Binary enclosure containing both of them:


# Create fat lib
$DEVROOT/usr/bin/lipo -arch arm lnsout/$LIBNAME_static.arm -arch i386 lnsout/$LIBNAME_static.i386 -create -output lnsout/$LIBNAME_static

Finally, you can add the generated library and any necessary development header files to your project and build it. If everything went well, your application will be linked with the library and will run correctly in both the simulator and the device.

As explained above, this is mostly basic Unix tinkering, but it took us a while to get the right configuration. Maybe we were just rusty, so if you know a better way to achieve this, please do let us know!

Sketches 1.3 is out!

2008-09-25T03:47:00.001-07:00

After a long 5-week wait that felt like an eternity, we are glad to announce that Sketches 1.3 is finally available in the App Store.

The reason for the delay was that we were requested to modify some details in the User Interface. We immediately complied; however communication during this process was slow.

To celebrate the release and compensate our patient customers, we will be starting a one-week promotion next Saturday. From September 27th through October 4th, Sketches will be $1.99 instead of the usual $5.99. So, if you were in the brink of purchasing a license, please wait until next Saturday and you'll get Sketches almost for free.

Yoyu can check Sketches 1.3 new features and improvements in this previous post. In addition to that, we have fixed image uploads to Twitter: while Sketches was in review, our image hosting provider discontinued its service, and we had to urgently integrate a new one. Our appologies for the inconvenience.

If there's a good thing about the delay, it is that Sketches 1.4 is ready. We are testing it throughly and will submit it very soon. We hope it won't take so long this time.

The Cruel Economy of the App Store

2008-09-22T07:50:00.001-07:00

A recent article in Wired suggests that Trism’s creator could become a millionaire soon, from Trism sales alone. I doubt it, let me explain why.

Wired's article explains that Steve Demeter, the sole author of Trism, made more than $250,000 in the first two months after the the launch of the App Store in July 11th. That is, without a doubt, a nice sum. They conclude: “If the game keeps selling at this rate for a year, he will have made $1.5 million. Not bad for a lone coder.”

However, what the article fails to analyze are the dynamics of sales in the App Store, probably assuming that they will work out in a similar fashion as desktop online sales. The Mac shareware market is a healthy business with an ever-expanding user base, and products have considerable longevity after being introduced; thus, it is reasonable to approximate sales linearly as a rough figure of yearly revenues. In our experience, however, the App Store is currently operating in a way that resembles the media business more than the shareware market. Like in sales for a movie or a music CD, if you are able to produce a hit like Trism the App Store will give you 30-45 days of glory. Those are the days when your application will be listed as one of the top sold apps, as very well explained by John Casasanta. Being featured in the App Store will have an echo effect in other media and your app will be reviewed, analyzed and blogged about.

The App Store, being a tremendous sales channel, is obviously acting as the most influential source for iPhone software. Think of it as if there was a single Top 40 music radio station everybody listened to: moving up or down in the list has a huge impact on sales, and dropping from the list means your sales will be easily reduced by one or two orders of magnitude.

Let's look at this further.

App Store Sales

There are basically 5 parameters that affect your sales on the App Store:

+Product
+Price
+Apple’s product placement
+Position in the charts
+Star rating

Your product is described and shown as a series of screenshots in iTunes. The better the description and appeal of the images, the better for your sales.

Prices on the App Store are quite low. Ever since Super Monkey Ball was announced at $9.99 a few weeks before its launch, the psychological barrier for all games, and most other applications, was set at that price point, and lots of users will not buy anything above $4.99. This was a big surprise for us, as we thought that a game that normally sells for $40 in other platforms would sell for $20-$25 on the App Store. Anyhow, the lower the price, the higher the probability that your application will sell more.

Apple has a lot of prescription power. Whatever they promote on “What’s new”, “What’s hot” on the iPhone, or the iTunes App Store home page, will sell. At this point this is completely managed by Apple.

Being on the Top 25 generates sales per se. Users trust other users, and if your application is on top, many others will buy. In addition, being among the first applications in a category, like Entertainment, will also facilitate people finding you application and buying it.

The star rating also has some influence. It is another mechanism from users to tell other users if they like the application or not. In the App Store, anyone can rate an application, irrespective of they having purchased it or not. This helps applications get votes and comments. Most users use the overall star rating as a guidance: if the application has 3 stars or more, it must be OK; otherwise, it must be no good.

What marketing tools do developers have?

Product

A quality product with certain appeal, will be more likely to sell well, than poor quality products. But having a good product is not enough. More and more apps arrive at the app store each day. Unless the application comes from a big game studio, or a known developer, it is easy that good new apps get their sales diluted among the list of thousands of applications in the App Store. As there is no “try before you buy” mechanism, visual appeal is very important. The screenshots and the description of its functionality of your product will be key.

Price

This one is really tricky. Depending on how you price your application, you will get better or worse reviews, even from people that may not be that interested in your app. As of today, 3 of the top 5 applications are priced at $0.99, the other 2 are $1.99 and $2.99. Thus, the influence of price is huge. Having seen this, there are many developers that are following the "first free, then charge strategy". It is the case of Air Sharing, currently free, but that will most probably be at the top of the sales chart, once they change the price to their announced amount of $6.99.

Today, Pangea’s games are on sale. Cro-Mag Rally is being sold for $1.99 when it was $9.99 a few days back. It has climbed to the Top 3 paid apps ranking. Prior to lowering the price you could see this kind of reviews:

That is people, even liking the game, lower the rating due to price. After lowering the price, however, you can see this:

The text of the review reads as follows: "A lot of early adopters paid $10 for an app that is now 80% less... a lame attempt by devs to drive up their sales rank. REALLY terrible way to treat customers. As for the game, it's not for me. But I wouldn't be complaining if they hadn't decided to treat early supporters like garbage. Thanks a lot, guys. You've cost yourself at least one future customer."

The dilemma is served. If you lower the price for your application, you will hopefully attract more people, but users who have purchased your application at the previous price will post negative comments about it, lowering your star rating.

The issue derived out of this is that many developers are opting for creating simple, nice looking, low-price apps. This lowers the risk of developers and provides higher probability of success. But, how many of these apps will get maintained once the initial 30-45 days are over and sales have gone down dramatically?

So, right price handling is very complex. It will influence your sales, charts, ratings and comments, and, the product itself, in the medium term.

Apple’s product placement

Most developers have no control over this factor. Big corporations, like EA, will obviously get some attention. But Apple will also promote products from other developers. We were lucky enough to be among this group for the App Store launch. Sketches was highlighted in several countries. And today you can go into Apple’s physical stores in the US and see the Sketches icon (Top line, 3rd from the right):

It was Apple, though, who decided to promote Sketches. We, of course, provided all the material and information they required. But it was Apple contacting us, not the other way around. Thus, there is little a developer can do, apart from creating a great product and get some visibility, then hope for Apple to like the product.

Product Position

The position your app has in the charts can only be managed by 2 factors: price, as discussed before, and updates. Price will influence the sales chart. Updates will allow for your application to be shown sooner in the category it belongs to.

Ideally, updating often would allow for your application to be listed before other apps in the category, making you sell more. Unfortunately, updating in the App Store is not fast. What's more important, the developer has no way to know how much time it will take for an update to be approved, possibly affecting your options to create marketing and advertising campaigns. Sketches 1.3 has been in review for more than a month now. In terms of positioning, we are totally lost towards the end of the Entertainment category. In addition, Apple discourages frequent updates, unless they fix severe bugs.

Star Rating

The App Store has no barriers for comments. As anyone can post an opinion on your application, developers are out of control on this. The good thing is that nice apps, will attract nice users, who will post nice reviews. On the other side, depending on different factors, mostly unrelated to the product itself, your app will also attract some unhappy users that will punish your every move.

Currently the global rating is built as the arithmetic mean of all votes. A destructive, even unreasonable rating will count as much as a well thought out review of your application. It would be nice if individual ratings were weighed by the "helpfulness" factor, indicating how many other people thought the review was relevant for them.

Marketing outside the App Store

There is some marketing that can be done outside the App Store. Blogging, news and press releases do help. We have even joined other developers in creating AppStoreGems. However, given the margin per sale, it is hard to buy advertising and get a profit out of it. Given that developers get 70% of each sale, acquisition costs for a $4.99 app have to be below $3.5. That quantity of money will buy you a few guaranteed clicks, but I am not sure if the sales will cover the cost.

Other popular marketing tools that are well proven in the Mac shareware business are also not possible in the App Store. Daily offers like MacZot or MacUpdate promo, hugely successful bundles such as MacHeist, discounts or even cross-product sales (buy AppZapper and get a discount on Disco, iClip or Picturesque) cannot be achieved today.

Trends

Even though the App Store is only two months old, the way it has been working so far seems to signal towards two very different app trends, if the mechanisms keep being the same.

+ On one hand, blockbuster productions from established companies will be hits in the App Store. Given the enormous value of the precious few "Top App" spaces, competition will become more and more fierce (more so as the number of iPhones sold increases), and I expect big companies investing considerable amounts of money to release new titles and get one of the spots. This is basically games from big studios we are talking about.

+ In the short term, we will be seeing more "disposable" apps: short-lived apps that can be crafted in a short time and that explore a good, original or fun idea. These apps will be offered at $0.99 with the expectation to hit the list and make a profit for a few days. After the app is out of the list, it will be basically forgotten since the operation costs (support, improvements) will not be justified by the very low vegetative revenue. The trick to succeed in this space is to launch many apps and expect that one out of 10 will make it. The success ratio will lower as time goes by and game studios take the top places.

This prospect basically leaves out the space for small but carefully crafted apps with a long time-span, such as those from indie shops we are so familiar about in the Mac shareware market. Creating a good app is hard, even for the iPhone, and sustaining it takes a lot of work. In the case we know best, we started working in Sketches in August 2007. Of course it was not a full time job then, but it was a necessary training that allowed us to create the app we wanted to, and to do it in such a nice way that Apple decided to feature it at App Store launch. Today we keep working on it, adding improvements, answering to emails from our existing customers and planning the next major release.

There is a catch in our previous statement: those are the trends _if_ the status quo is not changed and things keep being the same. Our bet is that the App Store will evolve, simply because customers will demand apps other than big games or little smart toys. When we decided to put effort in Sketches, it was a bet that someday we could even sell it, and now we have something as revolutionary as the App Store. Likewise, we still believe that there will be a place for companies like ours in the future.

Reality

Today, Trism is ranked as the application number 499 in popularity, 63 in the paid apps rankings, as per the information medialets provides. I am betting though, that it has gone up during the last few days after the article was published and made popular in digg. Thus, as anticipated in the introduction, it is becoming subject to the App Store "Top Apps" dynamics and it will be hard for its author to keep the past sales level.

So, if anyone wants to become a millionaire on the App Store, think again. I am not saying it is impossible, but it is not as easy as some people have put it.

Sketches Update and AppStoreGems.com

2008-08-25T05:44:00.000-07:00

This week is looking great. We uploaded Sketches 1.3 to the App Store last Tuesday, so, we are hoping to see it in the App Store very soon. This new version includes:

+ Text input using the virtual on-screen keyboard, for those situations when that option is more adequate than entering hand-drawn text. This is possibly the most frequently requested feature from our current customers.

+ Web Sharing via a built-in web server. A very tiny and efficient HTTP server has been integrated to facilitate exporting the drawings in PDF, PNG or JPEG format. Users simply use their browser to connect and download their drawings, and they don't need to install desktop synchronization software or use other intricate solutions.

+ Improved shape placement algorithm. The shape placement algorithm is now tolerant to the user accidentally taking one of his fingers out of the tactile area during a multitouch gesture. This was a frequent issue when trying to locate a shape near the edges of the screen. In this new version, users can even purposely lift one of their fingers to easily move the shape to a corner or even halfway out of the screen.

+ Tip system. Small "hints" are displayed the first time the user selects a new feature or tool. This will solve the problem of some users that found themselves in full-screen mode and did not know how they got into it or how to bring the toolbars back! These help topics are presented as nice subtle overlays that dismisses after a certain amount of time to not interfere with your work.

+ Additional shapes, featuring a brand new "Office" category with pushpins, sticky notes, tape paper and the like. Fun and Callout categories have been improved as well.

In addition, several bugs have been corrected and several optimizations have been made.

But this week, we are also starting with a new idea: App Store Gems. We are joining forces with other developers that have created quality applications, in an effort to stand out from the already pretty crowded App Store. Promoted by John Casasanta and Austin Sarner, it includes 5 other applications apart from Sketches: File Magnet, Where To?, Pennies, Kineo and Groceries.

Today, in its first day, we are all donating our application revenues to a charity. In our case, Prevent Cancer Foundation.

To promote this new effort, we are making cooperative advertising, as explained in this post. It would be great if you help us digg it. Many thanks!

Text, Sketches, Soon!

2008-07-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

We have received a good number of requests about adding text to Sketches. We are working on it, here is a sample:

It will take a some more days to get all the details finished and done correctly, but we are getting there!

Sketches Available on the App Store!

2008-07-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

We are extremely excited to announce that Sketches is now available on the App Store, and is highlighted in several countries:

We want to thank everyone who has supported us in this process: Apple, our users, our friends, and particularly, our families.

Sketches Web site is now back. Any comments or suggestions can be posted through the contact form.

LateNiteSoft Acquires Snapshot

2008-07-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

As a consequence of our last visit to San Francisco for WWDC, we are happy to announce that we have acquired Snapshot from Stunt Software. We sat down with Dan Messing and reached an agreement that we have now made operational.

We are excited about this opportunity. We believe Snapshot is a nice product that makes a great addition to our portfolio, and that will become a nice complement for Sketches in the future.

To all current Snapshot customers, welcome! We'll try to live up to your expectations.

WWDC 2008

2008-06-21T15:20:00.001-07:00

If I had to summarize this year's WWDC in one word, it would be "Awesome". A year ago, we went to WWDC with no clear goals. We attended a lot of sessions, and met a few people. Overall, it was a good experience, in which we gained a lot of technical knowledge.

This year, it was different. Our primary goal was not to spend all of our time in sessions. We wanted to make our visit business oriented, meeting people, and getting feedback about different aspects of our applications.

After 2 years of working with him, we finally met Louie Mantia, our graphic designer. Currently, he works mostly for our friends at Tapulous, but, fortunately, he still does some work for LateNiteSoft.

We also met Chuck Soper, Cabel Sasser, Daniel Jalkut, Mike Lee, Kenichi Yoshida, Steve Scott, Tristan O'Tierney, Colin Wheeler, Kevin Hoctor, and some others in the SF Mac Indie Soiree.

During the week, we met with many Apple employees, as well as other entrepreneurs, developers, designers and journalists. We participated in a few labs and different consultancy sessions. We were present at the parties and events, but overall we probably did not make it to more than 5-6 sessions each.

The overall result has been very good, and we are very satisfied. Within the next few weeks we hope to start showing you the outcome of our visit.

Server Up :)

2008-04-21T07:47:00.000-07:00

We are glad to inform you that the issues with our Web server have been fixed, and it is back online. We are sorry for any inconveniences caused.

Server down :(

2008-04-21T06:53:00.001-07:00

I regret to inform you that our web server is currently down. It started responding very slowly a few hours ago, and not at all some time after that. We've asked our service provider to reboot our server (it's a dedicated one), but they have just found a hardware fault in one of the hard drives and are working on a fix or replacement.

This affects the Xslimmer and Sketches web sites, as well as the remote Xslimmer license retrieval feature we released yesterday. We beg your patience and understanding while the problem lasts.

Our services had been 100% available for the past 250 days, even through a change of IP addresses. Jorge and myself had been planning to set up a second server in a different service provider as an emergency backup solution. Unfortunately, we didn't do it in time.

We'll keep you posted. Thanks again for your patience.

Dark Xslimmer's Toolbar

2008-04-15T03:58:00.001-07:00

A few days back, I watched Cabel Sasser's C4 presentation. I thought it was a very nice presentation, with some insightful bits that can only be produced out of experience. I particularly enjoyed the part where he explains why they had to create their own toolbar. We had to do the same.

During the summer of 2007, Louie Mantia challenged us to produce a black themed version of Xslimmer. As Leopard approached, we were thinking that providing Xslimmer with face lift was a good idea. So, making Xslimmer black would made it look nicely different. At that time, it did sound as something simple: just make the grey areas of the window become black, and the black ink become white. Easy.

I started developing the window part. Fortunately, some people had walked that path before me. Making the window black was relatively easy. Using a background image for the window title + toolbar area was the only tricky part, as, in the beginning, it was not correctly rendered. The top half of the image was drawn in the bottom half of the toolbar, and viceversa. Fortunately, I discovered that setting something called "the pattern phase", within the graphics context, cured the wound. The black window was done.

Next step was to make the toolbar font white. I checked the documentation. Nothing. Checked Cocoa development sites. Nothing. Checked everywhere I could think off. Nothing. Asked other developers. Nada. How could it be? Similarly to the guys in Panic, who were fighting to get access the 3 bottom pixels of NSToolbar, we just wanted to draw white text with a bit of grey shadow, and make the black dotted lines, white dotted lines. That was all. I tried every hack possible, subclasses, all sort of undocumented stuff to try to get access to the text rendering part, so I could invert the colors. Nothing.

My first thought was: "I will just build the toolbar using Interface Builder". Then, I started to design how it would work and operate. I soon realized that it was not going to be an easy task. Not only would I had all sort of issues placing the different pieces of the toolbars, but also controlling them during run time. In addition, Xslimmer already used toolbars in 4 different places, so the code to manage them was already there and would need major rework.

I decided it was time to create our own toolbar management system, a system that would operate in the same fashion as Apple's, but that would provide the needed flexibility. This would allow us to not change the existing toolbar management code, and, at the same time, make the text color any color we wanted. It took a while, but it was fun, and the results paid up:

It was time to get other people's opinion. So, during our beta testing phase, we had a poll. Most of our users did not fully like the dark theme. We held several internal discussions and finally went back to a more "Leopard-like" look, the one that Xslimmer uses today. Given the fact that code for toolbar management was unchanged, rolling back was trivial.

So, at the end, we never used the newly developed toolbar system. At that time, Chris Messina suggested that there might be some interest out there in continuing its development, that we should open source it. To make the toolbar system open source would imply some work: I would have to extract the toolbar and window code, produce a sample application, etc. So, prior to making the effort, I was wondering: Would anyone be really interested?

Leopard & Time Machine Experiences

2008-03-25T17:06:00.001-07:00

Ever since Time Machine was announced, I had been awaiting for it. I am one of those people that do backup from time to time, but with no regular schedule or automated system. Clearly, Time Machine seemed simple enough and could very well prevent any undesired hiccups.

Once I had Leopard installed on my iMac, I was excited to give Time Machine a try. I decided to buy a Lacie external HD to make the backups. After connecting it, I immediately got a message asking if I wanted to use the disk as a Time Machine disk. I answered positively.

The disk was connected through firewire 800. I left it backing up all night. I took several hours to get all the used space on my iMac HD, a total of 250 Gb, onto the disk. Next day, I launched Time Machine's animated interface. Wonderful. Everything seemed to work fine.

After a some minutes, Time Machine began backing up automatically. This time just a few megabytes. Unfortunately, it took around 15 minutes for something like 3 Mb. In the following days, this became a constant, and I was not happy about it. Backups took way too long. I thought that I had not chosen a good external drive, or that it was faulty.

In addition, my Leopard was not too stable, nor did it operate as fluidly as I was hopping it would. I carefully considered reformatting the iMac with Leopard, and restoring all the user files from Time Machine. I was worried, thought, that the restore process would not work as smoothly as I would want, given the slow backup times and my doubt about the external HD condition.

After some investigation, I found an article that explained how issues might arise for using an APM partitioned drive on an Intel Mac. This could be the cause of my Time Machine troubles. Time for a repartition, reformat, re-first-time-backup.

As my final goal was to get my iMac into better condition, than what the upgrade from Tiger had left it into, I decided that after repartitioning, I would make the external hard drive bootable. I took the Leopard DVD, and using Disk Utility, I "restored" it onto the external hard drive.

Now I had an external hard drive, that used GPT (GUID) instead of the the original APM partitioning, and that was not only bootable, but it had the capacity to install Leopard. Time to try to get all 250 Gb on that disk again. This time it was much faster. It took around 3 hours.

Then, I booted from the external drive. Made a Leopard clean install in around 20 minutes. When the option for transferring files from another Mac was up, I chose to restore from Time Machine. It did it.

Once the restore process finished, most things were fine. As usual, Spotlight started indexing and made the Mac a little bit slow for a while.

After careful examination, I realized that some folders at root level were duplicated. I had "/Applications" and "Applications (from old Mac)". This was true for several others. I deleted all those folders. After all, if I was to need any of those files, they would be present on the Time Machine backup.

Now both Leopard and Time Machine seem to behave reasonable well. I am, though, ready to reproduce this process if I ever need to do so again.

There is Xslimmer in the Air (in the Macbook Air)

2008-02-29T03:08:00.000-08:00

Since the Macbook Air was first presented at Macworld '08, we have had several people telling us that we should write about it. In particular, how Xslimmer is an ideal tool for it due to the small hard drive sizes. Faced with this kind of proposal, the question becomes what to exactly point out that it is not totally obvious. Xslimmer is a product to recover disk space from applications. The Macbook Air has a small hard drive. What else? As I do not know, I leave it there and point to you to some other people's articles:

* http://www.isights.org/2008/02/free-disk-space.html

* http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/31/unboxing-video-of-macbook-air-more-notes/

Enjoy!

Colors in Sketches

2008-02-29T02:33:00.000-08:00

We knew it had to come. With only 6 colors in Sketches 0.5 and older, we had several requests to add more. Some were really specific, "please add brown", some were more generic, "a few more colors would be nice". With our passion to do things as simple as possible for our users, this was no easy task. The current color picker was easy to understand and nice:

We looked at a good number of existing color pickers in different systems. From Hue, Saturation and Lighting circles to the Mac crayons, all had advantages and disadvantages. The HSL circles provide a great range of colors, but it is hard to select the same color twice, plus, not all people understand it well. Other pickers were not too suited for the iPhone/iPod touch interface.

We finally decided to evolve our current color picker, adding more colors, for a total of 24, getting rid of the text and giving it a different aspect:

After several tries, this was the final result:

We hope you like it!

iPhone programming tips: image orientation

2008-02-27T18:42:00.001-08:00

One of our main focus when we started to write Sketches was to leverage as much as possible the existing technologies already available in the iPhone. This is not a new idea: just as all Mac OS X apps cooperate with each other, we thought that integrating Sketches with the rest of apps in the system would make it a far more fun and pleasing app.

Given the complete lack of documentation or experience, trying to figure out how the APIs work and fit together with each other was no easy endeavor. However, we bravely set out to study the Cocoa iPhone APIs, armed with our previous knowledge of desktop Cocoa, and a lot of patience. Sometimes we thought the effort might be overkill, but being perfectionists at heart, we were uneasy to deliver something that we ourselves considered suboptimal. We are satisfied with many of the results we got, and people seem to appreciate them too. In fact, we've had several fellow coders ask us about details in our image handling code, or how we manage to send emails from Sketches without actually launching MobileMail.

One of the areas we are frequently asked about is the way we handle images shot from the camera or picked from the photo album, and how we detect their orientation. Instead of answering the questions privately, we thought it could be interesting for others to post them here. Maybe our explanations will become outdated next week after The Event - if so, that'd be great news for all :)

In the following paragraphs I'll try to describe some of the interesting "features" I found when guessing how to use the Camera and Photo Album APIs, with a special focus on detecting orientation. I may be utterly wrong in my interpretations, but so far they have been working reasonably well for Sketches :)

* Warning: technical burble ahead *

The first idea that comes to mind if you want to have the camera shoot pictures and use them in your app, is to use the cameraController:tookPicture:withPreview:jpegData:imageProperties callback invoked by the CameraController class. It looks promising, but after some experimentation, we found this approach was not as flexible as we required. Instead, we are using a different mechanism in Sketches. We subscribe to the CameraImageFullSizeImageReadyNotification event, which is sent just after a new photo has been taken. Early in our development we decided to subscribe to all notifications and log them in a file, a simple technique that was instrumental to learn about the existence of this particular notification. In our code, the method that receives the notification is similar to the following:

- (void) cameraImageFullSizeImageReadyNotificationObserver: (NSNotification *) notification
{
    NSLog( @"cameraImageFullSizeImageReadyNotificationObserver" );
    [cc stopPreview];
    CameraImage * cameraImage = (CameraImage *) [notification object];
    if ( cameraObserver && [cameraObserver respondsToSelector: @selector(imageWasSelected:)] )
    {
        [cameraObserver performSelector: @selector(imageWasSelected:) withObject: cameraImage];
    }
}

The important piece of information here is that the "object" property of the notification contains an instance of the CameraImage class, which belongs to the PhotoLibrary API framework. In a moment we'll show how to deal with CameraImage instances.

For photos picked with the photo album browser, we use the PLUIController class. A line like

[[PLUIController sharedInstance] setDisplayingPhotoPicker: YES];

will trigger selection of a photo from the photo album. If you set a delegate object, the photo album will invoke your delegate's imageWasSelected method, indicating as a parameter the CameraImage instance that corresponds to the image selected. Note we are using the shared PLUIController instance and do not instantiate a copy ourselves - results are more difficult to achieve the other way around, because the constructor of the shared object actually knows how the instance has to be instantiated, while we have no idea about the properties we should set to make it work.

Therefore, for both types of photo selection (shooting with the camera or selecting a photo from the photo album), we end up with a CameraImage instance to deal with. A CGImage can be created from the CameraImage, using the following API call:

int orientation;
struct CGImage * cgimage = [image createFullScreenCGImageRef: &orientation];

Now we have a Core Graphics image, which is a good thing because there's actually a whole lot of documentation about that.

However, this is where things get a bit hairy regarding how to determine image orientation.

First of all, there are three different sets of values that refer to orientation characteristics:

- If you copy photos from your iPhone to your computer and look at them in an EXIF browser, you'll see that they contain one of the following values: "1" for "normal" images; "3" for images that are rotated 180 degrees; "6" for images that are rotated 90 degrees; and "8" for images that are rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise.
- The orientation value returned in the integer above does not correspond to the EXIF values just mentioned. The values returned by createFullScreenCGImageRef are, respectively: "1", "2", "3", "4". To make things amusing, images shot with your phone in the vertical upright position will typically be stored to disk with a 90 degrees CCW rotation; therefore, the orientation value you'll receive if you pick such a photo from the photo album will be "4".
- Third, the device orientation, as reported by UIHardware, uses a different set of values. They are the following: "1" (phone vertical, upright position); "2" (phone upside down); "3" (phone rotated 90 degrees CCW with respect to the vertical position); "4" (phone rotated 90 degrees CW).

Therefore, after you select a photo from the photo library, you should check the orientation value you get when creating the CGImage reference, and then you have to correct the rotation using the rotation and translation transformations provided by the CoreGraphics API.

For photos shot with the camera, however, the orientation value returned by createFullScreenCGImageRef at that particular callback is always "4", no matter what the device orientation is, or the way the photo is stored in the disk. This probably happens because my initialization of the camera related APIs is possibly incomplete, but I haven't figured out how to achieve a better result. For shots, therefore, what we do is use the device orientation value, then rotate the photos according to the description above.

Another option I tried was to open the physical files that refer to the CameraImage and read their properties. I was hoping to get the EXIF orientation value, but it seems that at this stage not many properties are available. In fact, code like the following yields a dictionary with just a "FileSize" property:

NSString * imgPath = [[image fileGroup] pathForFullSizeImage];
CGImageSourceRef imageSource = CGImageSourceCreateWithURL( (CFURLRef) [NSURL fileURLWithPath: imgPath], NULL );
NSDictionary * imageProps = (NSDictionary *) CGImageSourceCopyProperties( imageSource, NULL );

We are using these techniques in the current version of Sketches, and will also be the basis for some new features we are still cooking up. We hope they are useful to other iPhone programmers too!

More iPhone Drawing Fun: Sketches 0.5 beta released

2008-02-08T20:13:00.000-08:00

Sketches 0.5 beta has just been released, it should be available soon via Installer.app.

The biggest feature is support for multitouch drawing, making it possible to easily draw shapes such as ovals, rectangles, lines or arrows. Multitouch has been integrated with the "single-touch" mechanism in previous versions: you can use two fingers to create a shape, or just one to continue drawing free style, just like you were used to.

Sketches 0.5 is compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch devices running firmware versions 1.1.1 through 1.1.3, adapting to platform specificities automatically. The bug that caused only one photo to be exported to your photo album has been fixed, and sending sketches via email has been made a bit more user-friendly by providing visual progress indications.

More details about these new features and other improvements are available in these iPhone-ready release notes.

We hope you like this release!

Xslimmer 1.5 is Out!

2008-02-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

It has taken us more than expected, but Xslimmer 1.5 is finally out.

Initially we intended to release this version along with Leopard, but we changed our strategy along the way. Feedback received from our testers and some difficulties in getting localizations recommended to dedicate some more time to this version. At the same time, we did not want to delay full Leopard compatibility, so we decided to add Leopard functionalities (code signing support, time machine exclusion, and others) to the 1.2 development line, while continuing to work on 1.5 at the same time.

Shortly after our initial Leopard-compatibility release we started to work on the preparation of the Christmas promotions we chose to take part in: MacUpdate bundle, and MacHeist II (as a loot for Mission 4). They both have been a success, and we have managed to get Xslimmer into the hands of many more customers.

The wait is now over. Thanks very much to all testers and to all our customers for your patience. We hope you enjoy this release, and that you see a lot of your suggestions covered by it.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T03:47:00.000-08:00

From the Xslimmer Team, our best wishes for the new year that commences today.

Japanese Localization

2007-12-18T13:21:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-03T19:12:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-30T14:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-14T03:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-13T00:19:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

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 ?

2007-04-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-03-30T17:44:00.000-07:00

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.
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Xslimmer, dugg (indirectly)

2007-03-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

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!

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Lossless same-drive Mac HD Repartition

2007-03-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

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.

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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]

Disclaimer: Visitors do assume all the risk of viewing, reading, using, or relying upon this information. We assume no responsibility for damage to computers or software of the visitor or any person the visitor subsequently communicates this information to.

Have fun!

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Back...after the break

2007-03-06T14:57:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-14T18:15:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-14T07:06:00.001-08:00

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!

2007-02-14T02:57:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-02T11:03:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-23T02:46:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-13T18:00:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

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.

Xslimmer in Pomcast.com

2006-12-30T08:20:00.000-08:00

Two days ago we had an interview with Stuff MC, from Pomcast.com, for the Spanish version of the podcast. During the interview, we comment on the creation process of Xslimmer, future possibilities and we talk about the Apple world in general. If you are interesed, you can check it out here.

There will be an English version in the future. Until then, we wish you a very happy new year.

Season Greetings

2006-12-25T01:48:00.000-08:00

The last 2 months have been very intensive. We launched the first public beta of Xslimmer on November 1st. Since then until now, we have had several different releases, 10 in beta, 6 non-beta. Beta releases were mostly oriented to issue resolution, while non-beta have been dedicated to adding new features to the product. Today, in addition to what was included in the very first version, Xslimmer includes:

* Dock-drop feature
* History log window
* Restore function
* Report function
* Growl support
* Direct Slim feature
* Revamped Preferences
* Improved Window animations and transitions
* Other UI improvements
* Many performance improvements
* Panther compatibility

We continue with our roadmap, which includes quite a good number of additional features, and some major new functionalities, like the ability to strip languages.

This is not all. During this period, we have executed 3 different marketing actions. We started with the GiftZOT bundle (at MacZOT), then a MacAppADay one-day feature and the AppZapper/Xslimmer Christmas bundle.

Hundreds of emails, many hours dedicated to the website, particularly its backend and much, much more. Seeing the results, it clearly has been worth it. Pedro and myself would like to thank you all for the support and feedback you have provided us.

We hope you enjoy a very happy Christmas and a great new year.

Making History

2006-12-17T14:37:00.000-08:00

Making Xslimmer's history functionality took a little bit more than what was initially scheduled. The basic reason was that new ideas kept coming while we were designing its window. From these new ideas, we implemented the possibility to restore a backed up application and the possibility to report issues with applications slimmed.

Additionally, we took a while to design the window. In its initial conception, the history window had only text, and too much information. Little by little we transformed it into something like this:

While this image was pretty close to the final version of the window, there were still many little details to take care of. First, the color buttons. These did not look completely right to the eye. In addition, they did not behave too well while one of the apps was selected. Second, the sorting buttons in the segmented button were not showing correctly. Third, I had made it so that when an application was restoring, its restore button would show a spin progress indicator, so the window did not really need one. Finally, the window was in need of some gradient.

As a result, we kept working, and the window was almost ready a few days later:

Still solving the segmented buttons bug in Cocoa was going to take quite some code. Louie commented: "I know how to solve that bug: get rid of the buttons, and make the table headers the sort buttons". That is what finally went into 1.1.4:

So, tell us what you think!

Panther

2006-12-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

OK, so finally we shifted priorities and launch Panther compatibility prior to the Slim History. Both are demanded, but we thought that being able to use Xslimmer in Mac OS X 10.3.9 would allow many more people to enjoy it.

Marketing

2006-12-02T11:59:00.000-08:00

These last few days have been a bit different. Initially, we had plan to work on getting 1.1.3 out by today. In 1.1.3, we intend to include a "Slim History" window that will allow you to review all the applications you have slimmed, your overall savings over time and the possibility to recover an application from its backup, if you did had the backup option turned on during the slim process. In addition, from the Slim History window you will be able to report any problematic application in an easy way to us.

While I worked on the Slim History, Pedro was working on Panther compatibility. We believe that being Panther compatible, will Xslimmer useful for a much wider audience. It is tricky though. First, we are using Intel machines for our development, so we have had to buy a PPC machine in order to work on this. This machine will allow us to ensure that we get to that desired Mac OS X 10.3.9 compatibility, and will also permit to better test our releases in the PPC platform. Second, Panther does not have some of the fine 10.4 methods, so some parts of the code are being rewritten.

During the last week though, we have been busy in getting people to know that Xslimmer exists. We contacted Brian Ball some time ago to promote Xslimmer via MacZOT. When he got back to us, he suggested to include Xslimmer within the GiftZOT 1.0 bundle. After the mystery bundle was unveiled, our Web site traffic increased significantly. Clearly, it is a signal that tell us that Xslimmer is starting to get known. Right now, we are planning another couple of marketing actions, that will happen within the next 2 months.

Right now, I am going back to work on Xslimmer's 1.1.3 Slim History.

Xslimmer 1.1.2 has been released

2006-11-26T17:21:00.000-08:00

After the release of the first non-beta of Xslimmer we have been quite busy. Lots of emails with questions, suggestions, and so on. Now we are back with our implementation roadmap, and today we have released version 1.1.2.

In this new version you will find the dock-drop feature: applications can now be dropped to Xslimmer's dock icon, making it even easier to slim them down. Apps can also be dropped on the application icon. This was requested by several people since the application was made known. In addition, we had still to optimize one heavy-duty loop. This optimization has also made it into this release, along with an optimization into checking applications dropped against the blacklist. Finally, we introduce some changes into de animation between windows that should make them smoother, particularly in PowerPC systems.

And now, to work on 1.1.3. Take care.

Xslimmer is Out!

2006-11-18T16:52:00.000-08:00

That is right! We got there. After 20 days of public beta, we are ready to launch commercially. From this moment, you can buy a license of Xslimmer, and, for a limited time only, is just $6.95.

Thanks go to all people who have helped us during the testing period.

1.0.8.RC2 is out. 1.1 Coming soon!

2006-11-13T00:15:00.000-08:00

We have a new version of Xslimmer out. Unless we get any last minute surprises, it will be the last beta version. Next Saturday night, the night of the 18th to the 19th of November, Xslimmer 1.1 will be launched.

This will be the first commercial version of Xslimmer. To support our launch we are planning different marketing actions. First of all, we will have, for a limited time, an special introductory offer. For this period of time, a full license of Xslimmer will cost only $6.95. In addition, we are also planning different limited time offers whose deals are being worked upon with different Mac sites. You probably know who they are. If you want to suggest to us any special action, you are more than welcome.

Getting there, at last!

Xslimmer 1.0.7.RC2

2006-11-07T01:42:00.000-08:00

We have released a new version of Xslimmer, 1.0.7.RC2. With the previous release, 1.0.6.RC1 we believe to have achieved significant application stability. The new release will build upon that, featuring:

- Speed boost: 3x app analysis speed after drag.
- Reduced memory consumption: Previously, applications with a significant amount of files could take up several megabytes of memory. Due to this, dropping a significant amount of apps onto Xslimmer could end up filling up the system's memory, forcing the Mac to paginate, thus becoming very slow. In 1.0.7 each application will take only a few kilobytes. I tested it with 240+ apps, and memory consumption did not even increase by 1 megabyte.
- Centralized application blacklisting: New system to prevent slimming applications that fail to behave correctly after slimming due to integrity checks. This new system will differ from the current protected applications scheme. The protected application scheme will be for you to voluntarily protect whichever app or path you want to protect. The blacklist system will be able to gather the latest information from the Internet, and protect apps known to fail.
- Projected application size: You can see how much space you will save before actually slimming.
- Slight GUI modifications.

As these changes are pretty significant, version 1.0.7 is now our second release candidate, or RC2.

Stay tuned.

Getting there

2006-11-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

It's only been a few days since we launched the public beta for Xslimmer on November 1st (at 3am :-) These days have been extremely busy for us, much more so than expected. We had tested the application under the most varied circumstances, a closed beta programme had been conducted with a few friends, and we were pretty confident that everything was completely under control. In our minds we had secretly planned to sit back and count the downloads, just like what the Netscape people did in the good old times. That's a joke, of course. Since Xslimmer was announced, we began receiving a lot of feedback from users, and new bugs that had not been noticed before were uncovered. So, our testing had not been enough. Big thing. As developers we already knew that much, and the beta had been prepared with that purpose in mind. So we set to work at a frantic rate to try and solve everything, nail down all details and polish all corners. Too bad we also have our day jobs. And our families. And relatives that insist on celebrating their birthdays, and friends that have newborn children that have to be visited. No fear, writing software is fun. It's not nearly as bad as it was for the Netscape team: I've actually slept 8 hours in the past 3 days - summing them all up together, that's it.

What this translates to, in practical terms, is the release of several application updates. As of this writing, the latest version available for download is 1.0.6 RC1. More than 2,000 copies of Xslimmer have already being downloaded, and thanks to the people that have chosen to participate in this beta, some important bugs have been uncovered. Fixes have already been applied, and we hope they will never surface again. At this stage, the most important bugs have already been solved:

- Crash after dropping DivX Player 1.0.1.
- Crash when selecting "Preferences" while applications were being analyzed.
- Dropping a huge number of applications caused Xslimmer to fail, displaying an error message stating "Slim operation failed".

Apart from those, many smaller cosmetic bugs have also been fixed, and even some improvements have been implemented.

Bug fixing has been an important task we have been performing these days, but it has not been the most time-consuming one. What has taken most of our time is the testing of applications that users have reported problems with, after they had been slimmed down. We already knew that some applications check themselves upon startup for integrity, security, anti-piracy or other legitimate reasons. That's why we included the option to "blacklist" or protect applications whose binary files should never be handled. With more than 4,000 applications already available as Universal Binaries, and more than 2,000 Xslimmer downloads, the variety of cases we have had to review these days is huge, and we are constantly updating the list of protected applications.

Even though we believe Xslimmer is now stable and reliable, we are aware that some people have experienced problems due to some applications not working properly after its use, and not because of defects in Xslimmer itself. Having said that, we were the ones that chose to create a tool that may not work with a small number of applications, and therefore we feel we have to make every effort to address this situation. As a consequence, we have decided to work on this area extensively, in order to provide the best experience possible. We are still considering some details, but expect to find in future versions an streamlined way to gather results from other users. This will allow our users to check how the applications they want to slim worked for others. We are excited about this feature which, we believe, will provide a lot more confidence!

To conclude, we would like to thank all those that have submitted their feedback to us. We have received praise, bug reports, and many other comments, all of which are useful and encouraging. As our small way to say thank you, we will draw 10 for-life licenses among those that have provided us with any type of feedback.

Comments on Glenn Wolsey's Review

2006-11-03T13:31:00.000-08:00

As far as we know, Glenn Wolsey has been the first site to provide a mini review of the Xslimmer application. Thank you for that, Glenn!

The small review seems to have caused some confusion as Glenn asumes it is for Intel Macs only. Probably the selected screenshot has caused this. Here is a PowerPC one:

So, to clarify: Xslimmer works both for Intel and PowerPC Macs. If you have a PowerPC Mac, the part that gets eliminated from the slimmed apps is the Intel one. That is why Xslimmer is a universal app. You can use Xslimmer to slim it self if you want to. To check what processor architecture Xslimmer has detected you open the about window:

In addition, as it is not mentioned, I want to point out that Xslimmer has a feature by which you can drop apps from a mounted image (.dmg). It will install the application for you and then, pressing slim, you can slim it right away. Thanks to this you can save an step in installing new apps you want to slim.

Xslimmer v1.0.4 - Beta License Key

2006-11-01T13:43:00.000-08:00

In order to improve your testing experience, we have included a license key in the new beta release of Xslimmer. If you did download Xslimmer before version 1.0.4, you can visit our home page at http://www.xslimmer.com and download the key directly in there. The key is valid until November 15th.

Public Beta is Out!

2006-10-31T18:09:00.000-08:00

Xslimmer public beta has started! Please download your copy and tell us what you think and if you encounter any issues. We are really willing to hear your opinion about the application we have been developing for the last few months.

Private Beta Ends Tomorrow

2006-10-30T00:27:00.000-08:00

These last few days have been a bit different. While the private beta was out, we have dedicated ourselves to write documentation (FAQ, Help), creating the Web site, ready marketing details, as well as improving little things in Xslimmer that have been suggested by the testers.

In addition, from the beta test we have gathered several new ideas to implement in future releases.

Tomorrow we shall build a new release of the application, getting ready for the open beta period. Hopefully, tomorrow night, Halloween, will be the start of this new and final stage towards the application launch.

Private Beta Is Out

2006-10-25T04:46:00.000-07:00

We have delivered the first beta to a few selected people. We are very excited and willing to hear their comments. Hopefully nothing major will come out, so we should start the public beta period next weekend.

Ultimating Details

2006-10-24T00:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we made our appcast available. That is the information that allows Xslimmer to know if there is a new version available. As a consequence, we realized that in some cases the "last updated" date within the preferences was a bit too long.

We also dedicated ourselves to finalize some aesthetical aspects of the application, like some windows transitions that happen very seldomly, but did not look too nice.

We are now finishing the creation of the dmg file, along with the Web and documentation setup in order to start the public beta very soon, hopefully, within this week. But before we do that, we are going to allow a selected group of beta testers to try it out first. These are people we know and trust, and we are sure that will provide interesting feedback in order to improve both the application and the documentation.

We are getting there!

Got that bug

2006-10-23T12:39:00.000-07:00

Last night we had some bug that kept us awake for a long time. What happened was that the application was booming randomly after re-registering it (something that is not supposed to happen very often, if at all). Pedro signaled that was probably GUI related, he ended up being right.

In order to nail the bug, I was using Xcode's debugger. Unfortunately Xcode's debugger did not show up any information about processes being run. I made some changes to the code, and by temporarely eliminating some pieces I finally managed to get to the offending code statement. It was around 2am.

I read the statement a few times. I could not make out what was happening. I did some more testing. Finally, I looked at the local variables. Found something wierd. We had an string that had an invalid pointer. What was the reason? 2:30am and I was still tracing code. Made some more changes. Finally, around 3:10, I found it.

The bug was due to the fact that at some stage, in one of our classes, we were retaining twice the same variable. We actually ment to retain 2 different ones, so the one that was not retained ended up causing the invalid pointer. As we were using KVO methods to assign a value to that variable, so it would be shown in the GUI, the hold thing exploded.

Fixed, we are getting there.

End of Xslimmer's Development; Start of Beta (soon)

2006-10-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

After several months of work, we have finally finished the Xslimmer app. We are now producing the documentation as well as the Web site for it.

Xslimmer is an application that will allow users of Mac OS X to recover disk space in a very simple way, without having to give up to anything. How is that possible? Well, this first major release will allow you to get rid of foreign architecture code in the installed universal binary apps. This allows the applications to continue working as they did, but taking less space. For future release we have many other ideas that we want to incorporate to Xslimmer.

By the end of this week, we will be releasing the first public beta version. If you are willing to try it, please go to http://www.xslimmer.com and download your copy. We are willing to hear from you at beta@xslimmer.com.

We are getting there!

2006-10-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

This is how the initial version of Xslimmer used to look. We thought we were almost done. Every aspect of functionality we wanted to add for v1.0 was there. Then we met Louie Mantia. He redesigned the interface, and a month later, we are still working to get it right. We have changed the look significantly, hoping users will like it better. Soon you will be able to judge for yourself.