Well, as luck would have it, apparently even little rustic inns now have wifi access points, so I thought I'd post this quickie during my last evening in Ridgefield, CT.

After we launched WidgetMachine last year, our very first client for a custom Dashboard widget turned out to be Macworld thanks to the efforts of online content editor Jim Dalrymple who was very impressed with our website and products. You can read a bit about its development in this interview.

We're now in the process of updating the widget and I wanted to get some feedback from you guys on what you'd like to see with this. Now, ultimately, the Macworld staff will have final say on what features they want and do not want, and the initial version was affected pretty heavily by their requirements. But hearing the most common complaints and requests here as comments will help us gauge what's wanted. Below is Kenichi's initial mockup of a possible update, removing some extraneous weight from the widget and adding a scrollbar. (Click to see full size.):

Your feedback will be highly appreciated on this one! Current widget can be downloaded from here.

Arne and Marcus are the guys behind the new software tracking site, iusethis, first publicly unveiled in an earlier feature on this blog and now off to a running start thanks to some additional secondary publicity by TUAW and Digg coverage. With its unique "I use this" feature, iusethis has the opportunity to offer a significant challenge to MacUpdate, VersionTracker, and other established competitors in a crowded market. In this interview, we talk about how it's been going in the past week, what they plan for the site's future, and what makes iusethis different from its rivals, when differentiation will be key to its success. Continue reading...

All right, signing on from a hotel wifi connection for a quick post. Having worked with MacZot creator Brian Ball in the past (not to mention having set up camp in his family's living room during last year's Macworld expo), I'm usually privvy to details on the so-called "mysteryzot's" the discount site sells once in a while. For the past few days, they've been running one that includes 5 apps for 5 bucks. You just won't know what they are until the sale is over and the orders sent out.

You probably know where this is going.

While people are going nuts trying to figure this one out, I figure you guys deserve a bit of a break and some insider knowledge. But then again, I can't just list the apps as that would ruin all the fun! (Actually, more like Brian would absolutely kill me.) So I've decided on a compromise. Everyone else doesn't have a clue what the apps are. You guys are gonna get five clues, one for each app.

• One app is an advertiser on this site. Bundle's already sounding good huh?
• One pretty much fully replaced an Apple application and piece of hardware for me.
• One is a great addition to your iLife and Apple's iWeb, for all you emerging stars out there.
• One's a great tool and cheat sheet for an ever more international world.
• One is a slick, indispensible tool for all you web developers out there.

Hope that helps guys, I will say that I'm very happy about purchasing this one, now that I know what's inside. Only pity is that I had already bought two of the included apps previously for over $25 at full retail price, but that only makes the deal sweeter for the rest of you who aren't such shareware addicts.

As promised, today brings a new addition of "Pimp your App". The target? The beloved multi-protocol chat application, Adium. I can't think of any other app that really encourages customization as much as Adium, so while I'll be recommending various modifications available on the Adium Xtras site, I knew this Pimp your App had to include something else special. So of course, as many of you readers know, in an interview earlier in the week, Adium icon artist Adam Betts promised to release an updated application icon along with other goodies today. And I think you'll agree that he delivered in spades once you see what he came up with. Continue reading...

It's always a nice feeling to have the media give some attention to your apps as a (quasi) developer, so while this Menuet mention may've been small, it certainly brightened up the day when I found it while reading the latest issue of Macworld magazine. ("Your iTunes Toolbox", pg. 64. Click the image to read the snippet.)

Anyway, the real point of this post is this. We're working on a massive, massive update to Menuet, as well as an incremental update for Art Collector, and we're looking for localizers. Right now, English, French, Russian and Italian are taken care of, but if any of you readers are up for some translating (especially into Japanese) for some free licenses and credit in the About box, by all means shoot an email to support@specere.net. We've been looking for you. And the rest of you? I can't say too much about what this update will include (*cough* coolskinsnewuisdkandmuchmore *cough*) but I promise that you'll be the first ones to take this update for a spin when a beta build's ready. More on this as it develops.

Update: Well, we now have French, Spanish, German, Traditional Chinese and Finnish covered. Others would be appreciated so keep these coming.

Update Update: And even more localizers volunteered to translate into Swedish, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Persian, and Arabic. Thanks everyone! Should be enough for now.

I love Digg.com, and believe that the idea behind it (users coming up with and filtering out good content) is really cool. So I was pretty excited to hear from Arne Fismen yesterday about a new Mac software tracking site he and his buddy Marcus have been working on over the past year.

The result is "iusethis.com", a website where Mac users can keep track of the latest software updates with a new (and pleasantly familiar) twist: iusethis also allows its users to claim "I use this" status on each app with a Digg-like clickable counter, and as a result, you can easily view the day's updates with the convenient filter of popularity.

Perhaps most promising? Arne and Marcus are currently implementing a powerful recommendation system based on these statistics. Eventually, iusethis will be able to very accurately recommend software by comparing your app collection with those of others. Sounds really cool, and I wish the best of luck to these two guys. If you find this interesting, be sure to check out the public beta, though to note, Arne has specifically asked you guys to resist submitting this to Digg for now.

Recently featured in my Top Ten list of Most Beautiful OS X Apps, the wonderful freeware Tetris clone, Quinn, has recently been pulled from Simon Haertel's website. The reason? The Tetris Company has sent a legal threat, viewable here. According to the developer's post, "I do not know of any clear legal precedent on this matter and The Tetris Company has never actually taken anyone to court over the issue while numerous Tetris-like games continue to be distributed today. In fact, this is not the first time Simon has been bullied by this company and it seems the mere fact that I live in the United States represents a much clearer path for The Tetris Company to push us around."

 

This is truly a disappointing event, and hopefully it wasn't my list that brought the game on to the Tetris Company's radar. My sincere condolences to the developer, and I hope that the story will not end here. If you liked the game, maybe this is a good time to shoot off an email to the developer and offer support.

John Casasanta is the developer of the popular and award-winning multiple-clipboard application iClip, and also the winner of the 1999 Apple Design Awards for Best Macintosh User Experience with his shareware game, Food Chain, which is pretty cool. I started working with John last year, as he coded the Black 'n' Blue and Macworld widgets for WidgetMachine, and also worked with our artist Piotr Gajos on iClip lite. Later that winter, we traveled to Macworld Expo San Francisco together along with AppZapper developer Austin Sarner, and had a blast working with the MacUpdate guys at their booth.

Recently, John has been behind some interesting marketing tactics for iClip, including giving away tens of thousands of copies of the app last weekend and creating a free Dashboard widget, "iClip lite", to complement the full application. We talk about his marketing ideas in this interview. Continue reading...