Ok people, I am going to make a public announcement. No matter how obvious or simple this may sound, I still feel the need to spell it out, mainly for myself: Unsanity, LLC is a business.
Why am I telling that? Simply because today I found myself working on two branches of Labels X: 1.0 and 1.1. Sounds a bit silly, as 1.0 is not even publically out, and I am working on an update already, but that's the joys of commercial programming. Being a small company, based in Utah, with employees scattered around the globe (Utah, Arizona, and Russia), we have to try and make a living from the venture we call Unsanity. This means, being a shareware developer, we have to release things at a steady pace to get noticed by general public -- we cannot afford a one-page advertisements in thick magazines, or billboards on your local Main Street. For that reason, about the only way for us to market our things is release often.
Ok, I was a bit dramatizing the situation - it is not the only way -- word of mouth plays some role too, and we much appreciate you, our users, for that.
Either way, to get steady registrations rate, we now have to split features in versions and release them in small batches, rather than doing one-big-release. I think both us and our users benefit from that - us, because, as I said, we get more exposure, our users, because they don't have to wait forever while we polish and enhance a particular piece of haxie until we're totally, completely, absolutely satisfied with its featureset and can sing a song about every single pixel in the designed UI. And also - we don't charge for upgrades. Never. Once you bought it, it's yours. Although I can perfectly understand companies' view on the whole 'upgrades' business (you have to cover your expenses involved in developing a new version), I also understand a lot an ordinary user's point of view - "why do I have to pay for the same software over and over"? And we're on the users' side. Yeah, we may go bankrupt with that attitude, sooner or later, but I hope that we'll be able to make new stuff often enough to keep ourselves alive (oh, I wish I had about a dozen more hands and dozen/2 brains to implement everything I want!).
And this is where it comes to you, our users. So far you've been doing an excellent job of supporting us. It is great -- we can devote all of our time to Unsanity and development, instead of spending hours in offices doing so called "day jobs". Keep doing it. We count on you. And you can count on us, for sure.
Posted by slava at 03:45 PM
| Comments (6)
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I've got a bunch of additional ideas what you could do with labels. I don't know if this is the right way to bring them in, but here it goes:
- How about other ways to label an object? Like a label that adds an emoticon or an exclamation mark to the icon? I'm sure such icons would look great in higher resolutions.
- Backwards compatibility with OS 9 would be cool, but "sideways compatiblity" with other OS X users that don't have your tool installed would be even cooler. I've thought about this - it's possible. More here in this usenet post
Comments about these 2 ideas?
Michael
In response to the previous comment, Nautilus on gnome already does something along the lines of picture labels. They call it emblems.
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/files/screenshots/nautilus-emblem-sidebar.png
http://tigert.gimp.org/gnome/nautilus/emblems/
But yeah, I agree. A set of 7 emblems to correspond to the 7 label colors would be very nice, especially since OS X has huge icons that are very amenable to being badged.
Posted by: Aaron Sittig on October 7, 2002 8:48 PMI'm not sure I entirely agree. I mean, no one's forcing users to upgrade (well, except Apple with OS X, but they have their reasons). If you're happy running Word 6.0, you don't have to go out and buy Office X. Just keep running System 7.
But if you want to have the latest Dreamweaver MX features, or if you want PCRE support in BBEdit, then yeah, even if you paid for it once, you really have to pay for it again. Most developers only charge a part of the retail price if you've purchased a license in the past.
It's not "paying again for the same software", remember.
(That said, I think there's a lot of really amazing free software out there.)
Posted by: Erik Price on October 7, 2002 8:51 PMrelated to original statement:
Developing for Mac OS X The Do's and Don'ts of Shareware, Part 2
Posted by: jeremy on October 9, 2002 6:46 PMi think after making the update to labels X...
it's tabbed folders time.
los of people at MacNN OSX forums are itching for it now that labels are out
unsanity rules!
Posted by: Jack on October 11, 2002 6:24 PMKeep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated.