Let the teasing end. ShapeShifter 2.0 is available now. Download here.

Enjoy. :)

This image will no longer magically change as time passes by.

Somebody want to tell me why I thought it would be fun to just own a bit of Apple stock instead of invest every penny I had?!?

I bought 10 shares of 'aapl' a while back at $24 bucks a share. Well, after their stock closed at $47.75 today, my Apple stock is up 93.3%. Sheesh.... Hindsight is great isn't it? :)

WindowShade X is 3 years old today. So what better time to release version 3.5? :)

MIP-ed windows, say hello to your new sibling, FOT windows!

Lots of people have requested it, and we felt another acronym sibling for Minimize In Place was needed, so one of the spiffy new features in 3.5 is the assignable action Float On Top. The windows even get badged with a little mini WindowShade X icon near the 3 buttons at the top left of the window.

New icon, new interface, new features, compatibility fixes, and bug fixes. Lots of good stuff for you to enjoy.

Labels X

Labels X is also sitting on the ol' release counter with an update to version 1.6.1. This update fixes that nasty generic icon in the sidebar bug. Snag it to relieve some unnecessary stress in your Finder's life.

On October 12, 2000, Unsanity, LLC first opened its doors to the general public. We had an exciting product to present to the world, and we were pretty happy and enthusiastic about telling everybody about it. The product name was Unsanity Echo, and it was a YA-MP3-POT (yet another MP3 player out there). Lots of pretty advanced technology was used there, and some of it is still unbeaten (as far as I know). It used its own scripting language for skins, and Photoshop-style system for combining visual plugins together. Unsanity Echo is long dead now, as we have realized we cannot compete with the iTunes and other players already on the market.

Still, here it is just for the record -- curvy sliders, weirdly shaped windows, mix-and-match visual plugins:

Then we have decided we miss a lightweight MP3 player that just plays your files, no fuzz, and have created Mint Audio. It was light, it was stylish, it had skins, same visual plugin system used in Unsanity Echo, and it stuck to the edges of your screen:

Mint Audio been selling for several years until we discontinued it as well -- and boy, it was a tough decision.

Since then, we've focused entirely on haxies, and have made a dozen of different utilities that extend the functionality of the OS in one way or another. We're still on that road.

For kicks and giggles, here's screenshots of versions 1 and 2 of our haxie installer (we're at 3.3 now):

Overall, the thing I keep mentioning and will mention again is that we are the way we are thanks to you, our users. You give us ideas, inspiration, and money (can't live completely without that, right? ;) to go on. You are the sole reason we exist, and if there's anything we can do for you is to say "THANK YOU" in a bold capital letters.

We're 4 now. We may get older, bigger or smaller and possibly more 'corporate', but we will never forget who is helping us on this road. *Bow*.

As a sign of our appreciation, all the t-shirts in the store are $4 off (we're four now, get it?) -- at $9.50 just for today. There's 4 styles available in handful of colors - right here. No, we're not trying to sell our t-shirts to you. We're trying to share with you our vision of the world.

So today I have finally decided and paid $200 for iView MediaPro. I've been test driving the product a year or so ago (when it was app launch-limited), and felt it is pretty good for my needs, especially given the iPhoto frustration ("slow", say that again "slow"). Back then, I couldn't justify the cost of the product vs usefulness to me, so I didn't make the switch. Then iPhoto was updated and it became singificantly faster, so I decided to continue using it.

Now some time has passed, and I've decided to give iView another try (given how eager some pirates at the unnamed board are to get a serial for the product, I figured it has to be worth trying ;). I went to the iView Multimedia site and noticed they got the 2.x version out.

Now I will present some of my humble opinions regarding iView vs iPhoto. This is by no means a review, just some random things I noticed and liked (or not).

First thing you notice when you launch iView is speed. Yup, iPhoto 2 may be fast, but... Of course, I am by no means a professional photographer, but lately my library has outgrown the 5k photos mark, and man, iPhoto is still slow for anything above 2-3k of photos (at least it feels like that for me).

Another cool things that led me to the decision of purchasing:

• RAW file support. iPhoto chokes on these, and it's nice to keep RAWs organized, given how I only shoot in RAW lately.


• Awesome categorizing features: you can assign people, locations, categories, keywords, anything to a photo or a bunch of photos - in the same window so you dont have to muck with a separate keywords window in iPhoto. Plus, it's über-convenient to pick, say, "Slava" and "Masha" from the list of the people and instantly see which pictures I got where my wife and me are displayed.


• HTML galleries. This ain't a biggie for me, since I use Coppermine to post random family photos for my family mermbers on the web, but still, in cases I need to up some pictures somewhere, it's handy.


• Rotates and other things in iView are faster than iPhoto's.

There's one bug I've noticed in the iView though -- import from iPhoto didn't quite worked for me. It did launched iPhoto, hang there for a moment, then quitted it and nothing happened.

Either way, I think that's a well-spent $200. I now gotta have lots of fun tagging all of my photos, heh.