I’m glad to announce that starting 1st of July, a designer, specializing in interactive design will join Apparent Software. She will join me for about 3 months to take ImageFramer to the next level.

She’ll be working on usability improvement, UI design for the planned features of ImageFramer 3, illustration work on icons and on the design of new frames.

She’ll also produce more screencasts to compement the one I’ve prepared earlier.

I’ve come to this decision after realizing that I’m not the best UI designer around and certainly not a great graphic artist. This will also leave me more time to actually program.

I hope her involvement in ImageFramer design will take it to the next level.

ImageFramer version 2.0.2 was released today. There’s only a bug fix (important one) and a usability change.

BUG FIX: Crash when renaming variation was fixed.
NEW:  Variation names are in editable mode when adding a new variation.

Download ImageFramer

My application is localized in English and in Japanese. A Japanese company (ACT2), who sell ImageFramer in Japan also does the localization. We worked together and it is a good experience. One of the things I’ve added in version 2.0.1 is a default startup image that loads in ImageFramer, when user launches it.

Below is the picture that I selected for this task. It’s a photo I took in Spain about 8 years ago.

So, I sent the Photoshop file with to the Japanese team to replace the text with the Japanese one. They did. Same apparent font, same effect but something changed .

Yes, the whole image was translated into Japanese, it seems. 

Actually, I qute like the image.

I’m glad to announce release of ImageFramer 2.0.1.

These are the release notes:

• Added default startup image when launching without image
• Design files (.framing) can now be loaded from Finder or by dropping on ImageFramer icon, in addtion to dropped to the main window.
• Updated drawing code for faster resizing
• Some bug fixes and a memory leak
• Added “Buy ImageFramer” menu item under ImageFramer menu.

I’m glad to announce a 30% discount on ImageFramer, available until 23 June 2008, to celebrate my 30th birthday. 

Use coupon code 30BIRTHDAY on checkout.

Jacob.

I have added a new section to the ImageFramer site, called gallery. I currently display 13 different framing designs using the same original image to display the different abilities of ImageFramer. I hope this will clarify ImageFramer features in addition to the available screenshots. 

You can also see other people’s designs or post your own framed images in the Showcase forum of ImageFramer.

Wow, it took me a really long time to notice, and I feel almost stupid now.

I didn’t pay any attention but Google never brought any traffic to the Apparent Software website. But somehow it didn’t bother me as much, I was busy developing. A few days ago I noticed this and started to look into the source.

Looking at the server log files I noticed that all my responses for pages were HTTP status 404 (page not found). Apparently, Google doesn’t index requests that return code 404 (and it really shoudn’t).

I use Ruby On Rails (RoR) for my Apparent Software website and lighttpd with Fast-CGI to serve it. The easiest way to serve with Fast-CGI and RoR is setting the webapp to be the 404 error handler in lighttpd, using the following line of code:

server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi"

In the specific version of lighttpd web server that I was using (1.4.16) there was this nasty bug that stripped HTTP response header from the app in this case. So today I upgraded to the latest stable 1.4.19 and, voila, the response code is back to normal (200). 

Now, hopefully, Google and its lesser brothers will catch up, crawl the site, index and divert some search traffic into Apparent Software and another site I had with the same issue. I wonder how long it will take. I’ll keep updated.