Probably everyone who reads this blog has already seen this elsewhere, but in case not:
Our good friend and fellow mobile developer, Alex Kac, has written an Open Letter to Warez Sites in his forum, and asked some other developers to help publicize it. Of course I agree with what he wrote (or most of it – maybe not the “have a great day” part), and while I’m not at all convinced that this will change anything (do people really go to warez sites without realizing they’re stealing the content?) I’m completely behind any efforts to do anything to stop software (or any intellectual property) piracy, and happy to do whatever I can to help publicize the problem.
One of the toughest things to do as a (relatively) small software developer is to get the word out about your product. We don’t have a multi-million dollar ad budget or a marketing department filled with people thinking up clever new ways to let people know how badly they need our software. At the same time we have some great products that people get really hooked on once they start using them.
One of the top requests we get for NewsBreak is that we download and cache the web pages that the “Read More” links go to. The reason people want this is that many news feeds don’t provide the full story. They just give you a teaser. If you’re off line this means you can’t read the entire story without going back online. Annoying, I know, especially for those feeds that only give you like one line of the story.
I recently installed IE7, and for a lot of reasons, didn’t like it much. I’ve never managed to get along well with Firefox, but after spending some time with Opera, found that it worked pretty well for me. There’s a lot it doesn’t do – I do keep IE7 and Firefox both available as well, but I decided to use Opera as my primary browser. Given that Opera imported my IE bookmarks and that I only ever let IE save the passwords I didn’t care much about (things that I don’t really consider very secret, like my logins to sites where I have to register just to read an article), I figured the hardest part about converting would be retraining my fingers.
When I announced our open beta I promised that I’d let everyone know how it went. I mean this is a ‘behind the scenes at Ilium Software’ blog after all! I’ll start by saying that overall, this was a great experience. We got some really excellent insights into how people reacted to changes, caught a number of bugs, and found out how folks liked the new features. Without question I plan to run additional Open Betas in the future.