Xslimmer and Leopard

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

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

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

Interested in testing the new Xslimmer?

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

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

Sketches, iPhone Drawing Fun

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

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

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


Users have given Sketches rave reviews:

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

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

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

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

--

LateNiteSoft Recent Activity or, Xslimmer 1.3 is coming soon

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

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

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

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

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

Lossless same-drive Mac HD Repartition, part 2

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

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

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

During and After WWDC

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

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



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

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



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



Juan Alvarez and Mathew (Cha-ching):



Austin Sarner and friends:



Skitch's presentation at the Delicious Generation party:



Apple's party:



And we even had some time for touristing around:



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

LateNiteSoft at WWDC '07

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

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

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

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