Saturday, December 02, 2006

Marketing

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was one of the fortunate ones that got Xslimmer through the MacZot bundle and I must say I am very impressed. This app is a must own for any MacBook user with the skimpy stock 60 or 80GB drives. With my iTunes directory being over 10GB and having only a few GB free, this has been great and has freed at least a few hundred megs already. So far so good, everything that has been slimmed works fine.

Thanks again for a great app, and please keep up the good work.

pmoshay said...

i just bought it. interesting. don't know that saving 500mb on an 80Gb HD is really hugely important. what i wonder, and i suspect others might as well, is the sole benefit of 'slimming' ones app with xSlimmer saving HD space, OR might there be some performance improvement as a result?

Jorge said...

Paul, thanks a lot for your nice comments, they truly encourage us to continue. Hope you enjoy Xslimmer for a long time.

TBNH, thanks for purchasing it. The basic benefit is that you gain space without having to give up on anything. In addition, as you mention, you could notice some app launch speed improvements. Fat binaries add a header that allows Mac OS to know how many architectures the file has, among other things, so it can select and load the right binary for your machine's architecture. Once apps have been slimmed, that header is no longer there, Mac OS does not read it, nor it does it need to make the decision on which architecture part of the file to load, it simply loads the binary itself. So, there are some timing improvements, but, I would say that in most modern machines those should go unnoticed. We have, though, received some positive feedback from people who say they have seen a significant increase in the load speed of some applications.

Xero said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Xero said...

Sorry if this is off topic but I can't think of anywhere else to post.

This is about XSlimmer. Have any of you had this problem?

I downloaded XSlimmer a few days ago. Got a free license (MacAppADay). I just tried using XSlimmer today(12 Dec) and after about 1 minute a message pops up saying:

'This beta release has expired. Please download a new version from www.xslimmer.com'.

I downloaded XSlimmer from their site and then installed it again. The message still pops up. I checked my registration status in XSlimmer and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong. I checked the version and it is 1.1.3. Check modification date of the app in the Finder: 5th December for both installers that I have.

Does this suggest that the file up for download is a beta release and the official release will be up in a few days time?

Submitted a Feedback/Bug report. Waiting for a reply.