Tag Archives: os x

Announcing Accent – A Beautifully Simple Way to Find Accented Characters on the Mac

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I’m proud to announce today the release of a small app that scratches a huge itch of mine, finding accented characters and symbols on the Mac.

Accent is the app that’s missing on OS X and offers a beautifully simple UI for copying accented characters and symbols into your documents and projects, and all without having to spend time searching for them online.

 

Accent screenshot

With Accent you simply hover your mouse over a character card and buttons appear for copying that character or its URL escape code (for web designers/developers).  Click and you’re done!  I said it was simple.

Accent costs 99¢ US and supports accented characters from French, Portuguese and Spanish as well as symbols for major currencies, copyrights/trademarks and mathematical markup.

Learn more about Accent…

 

 

KEYBOX Release 2

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I’ve been hard at work on the development of KEYBOX Release 2 and I’m happy to report that it is nearing completion.

My plan is to make it available after I’ve confirmed compatibility on the next version(s) of the iPhone with iOS 5.0.

Aside from many improvements, Release 2 includes an important fix for a compatibility issue regarding importing secrets via Safari 5.1 in Mac OSX Lion. Safari 5.1 caught me off-guard because I released KEYBOX just prior to obtaining lion.

As much as I want to get this fix into everybody’s hands as soon as I possible I am not willing to do so at the expense of getting caught off-guard again by such OS changes. I could risk breaking the working order of KEYBOX for everybody.

Having said all this, I appreciate everybody’s patience and Release 2, like all upgrades, will be free of charge, and a worthwhile one you’ll all love.

KEYBOX on Your Favorite Device

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As a result of prMac’s promotion of KEYBOX, the August 6-7 weekend was the best sales weekend to date since it was released a few weeks ago.

Thanks to all of you who purchased KEYBOX! And a special thank you to those who took a moment to rate KEYBOX in the AppStore for your fellow users!

This weekend showed an equal increase in e-mails from customers and prospective customers. The road to releasing KEYBOX to the public has been a long one and it’s great to be able to talk with you and hear all your feedback. One of the recurring themes from these e-mails has been when KEYBOX will be on the iPad/Mac/Android/Windows Phone? Although I like to keep things under wrap (so as not to disappoint anybody) I think it’s time to discuss KEYBOX’s future on different platforms.

Let’s start with the easy ones:

Windows Phone

Unless the market share for this platform grows I won’t be able to recoup my investment. As of today, it’s rapidly losing market share, not gaining it.

Android phones and tablets

Never say never but yeah, probably never. Among its many problems Android is too fragmented a platform (different display resolutions, memory and CPU specs, etc…). The original KEYBOX appeared on Vodafone Japan’s (now SoftBank’s) J2ME platform and was a victim of fragmentation issues. I am not keen on going back to that.

iPad

The iPad could be perhaps in some respects an even better device for using KEYBOX than the iPhone. I’m seriously considering supporting it. Currently KEYBOX works on an iPad in iPhone compatibility mode and if/when an optimized for iPad version is made it’ll be a universal app so that current iPad KEYBOX users won’t need to pay twice. If/When iPad is supported I intend to raise the price to reflect the benefits afforded by the platform.

Mac OS X

KEYBOX on the Mac would perfect the trifecta (phone, tablet, desktop/laptop) in that it could make backups/syncing all the easier. This would obviously be a separate download from the iOS version and the price would be inline with the features/benefit afforded by the Mac platform.

For now…

For the time being taking KEYBOX on iPhone further is the highest priority. Release 1 was about locking down the security and giving it in a simple and clean UI. There are so many great features that didn’t make the first cut and it was difficult to to draw the line but I had to ship KEYBOX at some point. There is a lot in store and I’m thrilled so many of you have joined along for the ride! I value your contributions, and continued feedback and your praise has been a source of inspiration for me!

So thank you! ありがとうございました！ Merci! Gracias!