Many Tricks
If you’re coming here via a link about our Donation Day promotion, it has come to an end. We’ll have an update on how it went somewhat later today. Thanks to everyone who did the right thing by donating their savings to a charity of their choice!
All posts in the ‘Company News’ category
Subscribe to the RSS feed for the 'Company News' categoryDonation Day has come to a close
Friday, December 21st, 2012Some ideas for your Donation Day savings
Thursday, December 20th, 2012Update: It seems Apple has ended our App Store pricing somewhat early; all App Store prices are back to their normal levels. (This probably happened in preparation for the shutdown that begins at midnight tonight, Pacific time).
Our own store’s schedule remains unchanged, however: you can buy for $1 through tomorrow morning.
Now that Donation Day is live in most of the world, we thought we’d make the task of donating easier by providing some links to various charities (a few people have asked us for such). Note that the intent of Donation Day is for everyone to donate to a charity of their choosing, thereby perhaps getting some money to charities that don’t usually get much visibility. However, we realize that some people may prefer a bit of guidance on the subject.
So with that said, here are some links to help start your charitable giving campaign…
- Charities that Many Tricks has donated to include the National Pancreatic Cancer Foundation and Charity:Water.
- You can use PayPal—they have a gigantic list of charities that you can donate to directly from your PayPal account.
- Charity Watch’s list of top rated charities is an excellent resource. These charities all have low overhead, so more of what you donate goes directly to those who need it.
Hopefully this list gives you a nice start at finding a home for all that cash you saved on your Many Tricks’ purchases today!
Announcing Many Tricks’ Donation Day
Wednesday, December 19th, 2012In the past, we’ve donated proceeds from our software sales to worthy causes, such as the National Pancreatic Cancer Foundation and Charity:Water. This year, we thought we’d try something different…
On Thursday, December 20*, all of our apps
will be priced at $1 ($0.99 on the App Store).
The catch: We want you to donate the money you saved
(compared to list prices) to the charity of your choice.
For example, if you want to own Moom ($10) and Time Sink ($5), we’ll expect you to donate $13 to your favorite charity. Usher ($35) and Desktop Curtain ($5) would mean a $38 donation. Buy everything in our portfolio for $9, and donate $109 to charity. It’s pretty simple math, regardless of which apps you’re interested in buying. (These donations should be tax deductible, too, but please don’t take our word for that!)
You may wonder how we’re enforcing this donation requirement. The short answer is we’re not. We both firmly believe in the goodness of people, and we’re confident that those who purchase on Thursday will do the right thing. Will everyone? Absolutely not. But we believe that many will, which will hopefully lead to some nice contributions to a wide range of charities.
Sure, we could have kept prices at their normal level, and donated proceeds to a charity or two of our choosing. But we feel strongly that you should be able to pick your own charity, and we hope that by dropping the apps’ prices to $1 for the day, we’ll get more participation than we would by simply donating our proceeds.
So if you’ve been waiting for a good excuse to purchase one or more of our apps, Thursday’s the day. You get the apps you want at an amazing price, you get to choose who gets the money you saved on our apps, and you get to feel good about supporting a charity.
All we ask (ask, not require) is that you let us what you did with the savings. You can either send us an email with the details, or just tweet about it, and copy @manytricks on your tweet. We’d love to know how much money was donated, and to which charities, if you feel like sharing that information.
Happy Holidays!—Peter and Rob.
*
Because the world insists on having multiple timezones, our Donation Day pricing will roll out differently for the App Store and for our web site. App Store buyers will see Donation Day pricing starting at 12:01am on December 20th in their local timezones, and it will end 24 hours later.
On our web site, Donation Day pricing will begin at 7am Pacific USA time on December 20th, and end at 7am Pacific USA time on December 21st. This will give buyers, regardless of their local timezone, 24 hours to purchase directly from us, if that’s their preference.
Witch 3.9.1 solves the fat font problem—really!
Tuesday, June 5th, 2012Witch 3.9.1 is out today, and it’s got only one change—but it’s a good one, especially for those users who find the fonts in Witch 3.9 too thick, even after setting their preferred font for the switcher.
How did we solve the fat font problem? We added a font smoothing setting to the Font pop-up menu (on the Appearance tab of Witch’s settings panel). You can set font smoothing to Enable, Disable, or System Preferences Default. Enable and Disable are self-explanatory; the final option sets font smoothing to match the state of the “Use LCD font smoothing when available” checkbox in the Appearance System Preferences panel.
The differences are quite noticeable; here’s an example with the bold face of Eurostile, my Witch switcher panel font of choice. The top example is with font smoothing enabled; the bottom, with font smoothing disabled.
A big Many Tricks’ hat tip to Richard L., who helped us figure this out thanks to his use of a hidden OS X font smoothing setting. Once we were aware of the cause, it was relatively easy to add a method of disabling smoothing (without having to disable it system-wide, which wouldn’t be a good solution).
As always, direct purchasers can get the update via in-app updating (or from the Witch web page); App Store customers can get the update via the App Store application.
Note: Barring any changes in the App Store sandboxing rules, this is the last App Store version of Witch with any new functionality. From now on, any features we add will only appear in the direct sales version (as we’re not allowed to add them to the App Store version). For those interested in migrating (at no charge) to the direct sales version, here’s how to do just that.
Moom wins an Eddy!
Monday, December 5th, 2011
Today we learned that Moom has won a 2011 Macworld Editor’s Choice award, better known as an Eddy. Quite frankly, we’re stunned, grateful, and thrilled at earning this award. Moom was our first completely new product as a team after the relaunch of Many Tricks, and to have it be so well received makes us both feel incredibly good.
It also says something for the nature of “indie” development—Moom really started as nothing more than a hunch and a feeling. Peter got busy coding, and a couple days later, we had the beginnings of something that we thought might be useful. We then spent a bunch of time working on the details, including the name, the user interface, and the feature set, to try to turn the hunch into something that we’d both be proud of.
When we shipped Moom 1.0, we were very happy, but not just because it got a great reception from those who tried it. What really made us happy was the amazing quality of the feedback we received from those who used Moom. We got so many amazing ideas from so many users that we were able to release Moom 2 (as a free update for everyone) within three months of the release of Moom 1.0. (And yes, we’ve got a ton of feedback to take into account as we think about Moom 3.0!)
In addition, we received (and continue to receive) words of praise and thanks for what Moom has done for users’ productivity, and we love that—because that’s the real reason we’re in this business: We love helping you all do what you do, regardless of how you use your Macs.
So to all of you who have helped Moom become so incredibly successful, thank you very much. This Eddy award is a direct reflection of your feelings about Moom, and we’re deeply thankful for your support of our efforts.
App Store reviews: Of one-way streets and sidewalks
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011Yesterday, I had an interesting (to me, that is) discussion about App Store reviews with Smile Software‘s Jean MacDonald (@macgenie) and Unmarked Software‘s Mark Munz (@mmunz) on Twitter (I’m @petermaurer, of course). It started with me trying to reach a user who had left an App Store review, including a suggestion that prompted me to believe he’d be interested in testing a beta build I had just completed.
So I took to Twitter, mentioned the name he had given in the review, and asked him to contact us. No result, as usual. From there, the following conversation unfolded…
A short year, indeed
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011On this day in history, one short year ago, Many Tricks re-opened for business with Rob firmly in control of public relations and the business side of things. Rob already looked back at his first year as an indie software guy recently, and since he usually does things very thoroughly, there’s not a lot I can add to that. That’s a good thing, too, since I’ve been having slight difficulties with typing recently. So I have two excuses to keep this short, but I still want to make a couple of remarks.
Work has never been more fun, and it’s never been more economically sound than during this past year. Although Rob’s and my discussions about both important decisions as well as negligible matters of taste can be exhausting, there hasn’t been a single instance when I wasn’t convinced that the energy spent there would ultimately yield a better result. It’s downright comical how different we are in almost every aspect of daily computer usage, but this helps us keep an open mind and come up with solutions that work not just for us, but for lots of users as well.
Speaking of users, what more could we hope for than customers who consider our support life-affirming? If anyone benefits more from Rob’s work than I do, it’s you, the customers. And you seem to be very aware of it, judging from the amount of positive feedback I see in the occasional support ticket I read.
So in case any fellow indie developers read this, here’s my advice: If you haven’t done so already, find yourself a Rob. (No, you can’t have mine.) Even though you won’t be able to act quite as spontaneously as you did before, you’ll find that you’ll actually feel more independent. Your customers will be happier. You’ll be able to move faster when confronted with somewhat unexpected events like this year’s pre-Lion Mac App Store opening. You’ll be more efficient, because you can concentrate on things you’re good at. And just in case you like money, you’ll make more of that, too.
Anyway, it’s been a great year. Rob already said so in the anniversary blog post I linked to above, but it bears repeating: Thank you everyone! And thank you Rob, for making a career choice that must have seemed incredibly risky to a family man. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never felt better about being an indie developer than I do these days, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here.
Happy Anniversary to me!
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011One year ago today, I started working at Many Tricks. It’s astounding to think a year’s gone by already, as it seems like it was just a few weeks ago that Peter and I were working on getting the web and support sites up and running. But the reality is quite different, and time has been flying due to everything we’ve done in the last year:
- Relaunched the main site.
- Added a new support site.
- Released one entirely new product (Time Sink).
- Released major updates to four products (Desktop Curtain, Leech, Usher, Witch).
- Released 47 minor updates across all our apps.
- Rewrote help in all apps (except Butler, which will happen with Butler 5).
- Created video walkthroughs for many of our apps, with more in the works.
- Posted 70 items to our blog.
- Managed to get six programs in the Mac App Store, with a seventh (a totally new app) pending.
- Sent 5,057 emails
So much for the numbers…what this post is really about is what the last year has been like for me, personally.
Conversations with the App Store
Saturday, January 29th, 2011We’re now roughly three weeks into the Mac App Store’s existence, and both Peter and I have been thrilled with how it’s gone. We’ve found it generally pleasant working with Apple (they’ve yet to reject one of our apps or updates), and the users we’ve chatted with have found the store to be a pleasant place to browse and shop.
With that said, there’s one feature missing from the store that impacts our ability to interact with customers and prospects: there’s no mechanism for developers to respond to questions or comments in users’ reviews. (We could modify our program’s descriptions, but using that space to answer questions seems like using a hammer to crack an egg.)
So we’ve decided to start an occasional series here on our blog, of which you’re reading the first installment: Conversations with the App Store. Each installment will address some of the questions and comments raised in reviews on the global (those we can read, at any rate!) Mac App Stores.
While this isn’t an ideal feedback mechanism—Apple should really allow developers to post responses directly—we hope it provides useful information to those who may have similar comments or questions about our programs. So without further ado, here’s the first edition of Conversations with the App Store.
Witch, $9.99 pricing, and the future
Friday, January 28th, 2011As we’ve now reached the point where the Witch $9.99 sale is scheduled to end, we thought we’d take some time to talk about how the two-day sale has gone, and what that means regarding Witch’s future price.
Before the sale began, Witch was doing a decent volume in the App Store, and fluctuating between the 20s and 60s on the Top Paid and Top Grossing charts for the Utilities category. So what impact did the sale have?
Unit volume increased twenty-fold, and Witch moved to (as of this writing) number two in Top Paid and number three in Top Grossing in the Utilities category—and it’s hovering around the top 20 in those charts for All Categories as well. Simply put, we’ve been floored…and obviously, the volume numbers got us thinking about pricing over the last two days.
It’s clear from these results that many people felt Witch was a utility they wanted, but one that was simply too expensive at $16.99 (the App Store’s no-preview-images price) and $19 (for the fully-featured version on our site). So we’ve decided to do two things:
- The current $9.99 sale has been extended through the weekend; it will now end at 11:59pm (PST) on Sunday, January 30th.
- The new standard price of Witch will be $14 ($13.99 App Store), a reduction of over 25% from the previous level. After talking with some users, and seeing what other utilities are priced at, we feel this is a fair and affordable price for an excellent window-switching tool.
It’s our objective to get our programs into as many users’ hands as possible, and yet do so at a level that will allow us to sustain the company and add support and development resources in the future.
We think Witch’s new pricing strikes the perfect balance between those two objectives—it’s more affordable for everyone now, and yet not so inexpensive that we’re mortgaging the company’s future to achieve unit growth today. After all, what good is the best window switching utility out there if there’s nobody around to support it any more?