All posts in the ‘Company News’ category

Subscribe to the RSS feed for the 'Company News' category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

A brief follow-up on Donation Day activities

Saturday, December 22nd, 2012

On December 20th, we ran a promotion wherein you could get any of our apps for $1 apiece, with the understanding that you’d donate the cost savings to a charity of your choice. Obviously, we have no idea how many people actually donated, versus those who just saw a chance to buy our apps on the cheap—hopefully a fair percentage of people at least gave something to a charity of their choice.

From the responses we did receive, the distribution of charities was quite wide. Browsing the emails and tweets, here’s every charity we can identify that received some money from our customers on Donation Day (in no particular order):

Salvation Army • Oxfam Japan • Partners in Health • 10 Days of Giving Food Shelf • Gruft – Caritas Vienna • World Wildlife Fund • Bible for Today • Charity:Water • Sjogren’s Syndrome Foundation • Celiac Disease Center • Mind, the Mental Health Charity • Santé-Sud • Action Contre La Faim • Electronic Frontier Foundation • Brady Campaign to Stop Gun Violence • National Pancreatic Cancer Foundation • Oakton Community College Educational Foundation • Hurricane Sandy Appeal – British Red Cross • Wikimedia Foundation • Coalition to Stop Gun Violence • Jehova’s Witnesses • Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger • Warren Public Library • Mateno • Motor Neurone Disease Association • Local food drive • Local church parish • Nyx – Free public internet • American Red Cross • Local children’s charity • Housing Works • WaterAid • WCNY Public TV • Warren General Hospital

That’s quite a list, and we obviously hope that there are many other charities that benefited from our Donation Day; we heard from only a sampling of our customers.

To all of you who bought and then contributed to a charity on Donation Day, we thank you for following through on something that was based on nothing more than trusting people to do the right thing—both of us felt really good about what was going on as we read the tweets and emails. And for those of you who bought the apps cheaply but haven’t donated, please do so. This wasn’t a giveaway on our part, it was an idea to raise money for charity. So please, contribute your savings and help make a difference.

In closing, and to bring Donation Day full circle, we’ve also made a charitable contribution of our own: Many Tricks has donated $2,000 to Newtown Youth and Family Services, to help everyone there recover (as best as may be possible) from the horrible tragedy they’ve lived through.

We hope you have a safe and enjoyable holiday—Peter and Rob.

Posted in Company News, Donation Day | Comments Off on A brief follow-up on Donation Day activities

Donation Day has come to a close

Friday, December 21st, 2012

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!

Posted in Company News, Donation Day | Comments Off on Donation Day has come to a close

Some ideas for your Donation Day savings

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

Update: 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…

Hopefully this list gives you a nice start at finding a home for all that cash you saved on your Many Tricks’ purchases today!

Posted in Company News, Donation Day | Comments Off on Some ideas for your Donation Day savings

Announcing Many Tricks’ Donation Day

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

In 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.

Posted in Butler, Company News, Desktop Curtain, Donation Day, Keymo, Leech, Moom, Name Mangler, Products, Time Sink, Usher, Witch | Comments Off on Announcing Many Tricks’ Donation Day

Witch 3.9.1 solves the fat font problem—really!

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

Witch 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.

Posted in Company News, Products, Witch | 1 Comment »

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.

Posted in Company News, Moom, Products | 8 Comments »

App Store reviews: Of one-way streets and sidewalks

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

Yesterday, 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…

(more…)

Posted in Behind the Scenes | 3 Comments »

A short year, indeed

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

On 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.

Posted in Behind the Scenes, Company News, Developer | 1 Comment »

Happy Anniversary to me!

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

One 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.

(more…)

Posted in Behind the Scenes, Company News | 9 Comments »

Conversations with the App Store

Saturday, January 29th, 2011

We’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.

(more…)

Posted in Company News, Desktop Curtain, Mac App Store, Name Mangler, Witch | 5 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »