Thursday, January 04, 2007

2007: The First Three Years Were Just the Beginning.

It's hard to post in this blog because we don't want to waste our customers' time and goodwill with lots of blah blah blah -- what's important enough to say here? How do we phrase it? Should we be friendly or businesslike? Who should post stuff?

But, eventually stuff builds up, and it needs sayin'. So here we are.

First off: Thank you. Seriously. Thanks. You've bought our software and recommended it to your friends, and you've made our little company very, very successful. We're a tiny little company and we're pretty much having the time of our lives, and that's because you guys actually bought our stuff so we don't have to get real jobs.

Also, various charities thank you. Amongst the biggest beneficiaries of your largess this year was Child's Play, which provides toys to sick kids in hospitals. This charity means something to me personally, because when I was 16-17 my mom was very sick and spent a couple years in hospitals, and I remember how incredibly depressing the hospitals themselves were, for me and (especially) for my mom.

Now, of course, she wouldn't have benefited from a Children's Hospital, since she was (cough) 29 at the time (and still is!), but the idea of little kids being trapped in that environment, and their friends don't even want to visit them... well, that's pretty much the definition of sad, if you look in the newer OED. On the other hand, when you think about these kids in the hospital all blinged out with Xboxes, and their friends lining up to come visit them -- that's pretty neat.

We joined the group of developers who decided to give 100% of one day's proceeds to Child's Play, during which you guys gave $3,600 to them. [We decided to up that and actually gave four or five times that amount at the annual Child's Play dinner and auction, which was a blast.]

Again, let me point out, this was your money. You're the one who spent the bucks, we were just the people holding the big open bag. So, bully for you, and thank you, again.

--

Delicious Library 2 is indeed being written. This should not cause you concern if you are thinking of buying Delicious Library 1. First off, because there will be an upgrade price available (sorry, but it won't be free -- we've already provided five or six free upgrades to Delicious Library 1 with major, major functionality, which is why we're at version 1.63 now). Secondly, we're still quite a ways out on actually shipping Delicious Library 2 -- it's going to ship on Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" only, and we honestly don't know when Leopard is even going to ship. And, meanwhile, we're trying to write our software for an unfinished OS, which is like trying to perform an appendectomy on a patient who is awake and actively slapping your hands away.

Finally, it's worth noting that we're always going to be working on the next version of the software. It's what we do. The day we release 2.0 we'll start on 3.0.

2.0 be a good release. It won't do everything you've suggested, but it does implement the five most common suggestions we get, plus literally hundreds of other tiny little fixes and improvements. Seriously, the release notes on this thing are going to read like a novel. Well, maybe read like a book of lists, like "The Areas of My Expertise."