LateNiteSoft Acquires Snapshot

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.

Xslimmer 1.2.2 crack released! So what?

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

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

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

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

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

Back...after the break

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

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

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

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

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.