Fuel Collective

Updates!

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 10:46:00 -0500

Hey Everyone,

We have quite a few updates to announce! First is Eon 2.0! Eon 2 will be for now Mac App Store only. When upgrading from Eon 1.0 in the Mac App Store, this update will be free, however services are now in app purchases. This allows us to keep the price down on the core app which can still be used as a standalone app for tracking time.

If you’re upgrading from a paid web version of Eon, we’re kicking Eon 2 off with a 50% off Sale for only $9.99! We hope everyone will Enjoy the new Eon we’ve worked really hard on it!

Next up we have Kousek formally Snippet 2, also 50% off for a limited time at the great price of $9.99! We’re re-launching Snippet 2 with it’s new name Kousek, We hope you enjoy it!

Finally we have a new website! http://fuelcollective.com We might run into a few bugs here and there, but overall this paves the path for a much better experience for everyone!

Please note we tried very hard to create an awesome upgrade path to Eon 2 with the limited resources we have in the Mac App Store. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support at fuelcollective.com

*Update*
Since releasing the Eon update, we have received some mixed feedback on the approach we took to updating. So to try and make thing right, we’re working on releasing Eon 1 again in the app store as a Free app. So users who do not care to upgrade or use the pay per service model may simply download “Eon Free” (coming soon) .

State of the Union 2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:29:00 -0600

Hey Everyone, long time no see!

What’s been going on? We’ve been quietly working on new things and continually updating our current line of products. So let’s talk our existing products first.

Snippet - has been in a bit of a rough patch lately and we’re working very hard to get it out of one. Snippet will be getting a new name, Kousek. Kousek is Snippet 2.0 and we have already launched Snippet 2.0 but haven’t completely announced it yet due to the name change, working on our new store, and rejections from Apple that we’re working on. Once we get to a stable place with Kousek we will let all our users know and have a proper launch. We’re terribly sorry for this and we hope to have Kousek out to everyone soon.

We also owe an email to users who have purchased Snippet during the Valio Bundle. Sorry for the delay but it will be sent out as soon as possible.

Pochade - Not too much to annouce here but we have been giving Pochade some minor updates here and there. We have some ideas for a Pochade 3.0 but nothing in the works at the moment.

Permute - We’ve been giving some love to Permute behind the scenes with some nice little updates and bug fixes. We have started thinking about what we want to do for Permute 2.0 and we have so cool ideas and I think it will make a great app even better!

Eon - Eon 2.0 is arround the corner so we’ll talk about Eon more when the time comes!

So that’s our quick update on our current apps. I’ll talk breifly about what’s in the works.

We have a new app we’ve been working on called Regextor. We’ll be finishing up this app next week for a release ASAP. We have a few app ideas floating around in the lab but nothing that we can share right now.

Hopefully this clears up some ongoing questions or concerns. We’re alive and well and working as hard as ever to bring you some awesome stuff this year. A giant thank you to everyone who has supported us by buying our apps and spreading the word. It means a lot to us! Thank you!

Best,
Stephen Korecky, CEO

p.s. Next week we’ll have some open discussion in one of our Campfire rooms. So follow us on Twitter @fuelcollective so you can get our updates!

Discontinuing Contents

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:38:13 -0500

Dear Fuel Collective Fans,

After a bit of thinking and looking at the future of Fuel Collective and were we’re headed we have decided to discontinue Contents. We still love contents but we feel it no longer fits in with the plans that we have for Fuel Collective and so as of Today March 24, 2011 Contents will be removed from the site and web store.

If you have purchased Contents we will still be supporting 100% and will try to address any issues as best as we can. We’re sad to see one of our apps go but this will allow us to focus on the new and exciting apps we’re working on.

A quick update to everything else, Snippet 2.0 is in beta and Fuel Collective’s new web store will be launching soon! This will make purchasing apps on our website much easer.

As always, if you have any questions, please email us at support@fuelcollective.com

-Stephen Korecky
CEO, Fuel Collective, LLC

I was wondering why you are switching away from paypal.

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:37:38 -0500

We may keep it as a secondary option but we mainly don’t agree with their practices.

Mac App Store & Updates

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 16:40:43 -0600

Hello readers of the Fuel Collective Blog! We’re going to take about a few things including the Mac App Store and some updates that we’re doing.

Mac App Store

Okay, so unless you live in a cave without internet, you have probably heard about the launch of the Mac App Store. We haven’t talk much about our position on it because we weren’t sure what we thought. However after the launch and getting to try it out, it just made sense to try and be a part of this great platform that would expose our apps to thousands of new users.

What apps will be in the Mac App Store? Well to start Eon is the first one in! We’re currently working on getting Pochade (formally Swatch) in (waiting for review at the time of this writing). We will then be working on Permute, Snippet 2.0 and code name Contents 2.0.

Long story short, we’re trying to get all our apps into the Mac App Store.

As for users that have purchased from the website. We are still continuing to sell our apps on the website and will always support them. There will be little to no difference from purchasing from the website or the Mac App Store.

Updates

We finally unified our site! All the app pages now all look about the same and are using the same layout. This took way longer than we wanted it to, but this will make updates much much easier.

Speaking of stores, we’ll be launching our new one this year! We are actively developing it and should be able to launch it soon. We are going to be moving from PayPal to Credit Card processor. We probably will not accept PayPal at the launch of the new store, but may add it back it later.

So that about sums things up. If you have any questions, please contact us at http://help.fuelcollective.com

Pochade

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:21:32 -0600

Hello lovers of Swatch,

Today over the next few hours we a preparing to change our application named Swatch to Pochade. Why this name change? Well to be clear and honest we got a Cease and Desist from Swatch AG for using the name Swatch. While we feel that our Swatch application doesn’t fall into the same category as clothing and accessories we have chosen to comply with their request. We just want to make awesome applications that users love to use. We can’t do that if we’re spending all our money on lawyers and fighting legal battles.

So now what? Well to start, we have released an update for Swatch that will help you migrate to Pochade. All your color swatches will remain intact, you will only have to manually update any alias and the Dock item. We’re trying to make this as easy as possible, so if you run into any trouble, please contact us at http://help.fuelcollective.com and we’ll help you out.

Didn’t this happen before with Eon? Yes.

What are you going to do about naming future apps? Well since Eon we’re being extra careful with naming our apps and have been looking at Trademark entries on the official trademark website.

If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact us at http://help.fuelcollective.com

Updates, Contents 2.0, and New App

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:29:00 -0500

Hey everyone, time for an update from Fuel Collective! Boy, have we been busy, working on updates, new apps, updating apps, and support. Now I’ll start off by saying we’re sorry for the support delays that we have from time to time, we are working really hard to keep support queue times at a minimum and we’ll continue to work on this and try to being on some help as well, it’s still just the two of us for now.

Now let’s talk about the new app! Well, we don’t really “talk” about new apps, but we’re working on our first web app! We have brought in Chris Hallendy another Software Engineer to help us out with this task. It’s coming along nicely so far and we hope to have a very small beta by the end of the year and launch Q1 next year. We’ll keep you updated, but that’s all we’re going to share for now.

Contents! Now Contents is a great app, but it could be better. It’s starting to fall short of our growing standards for Fuel Collective apps. So what are we doing with Contents 2.0? Well for starters it’s going to be completely rewritten, redesigned, rebranded, and rereleased. But wait I just bought Contents! Not to worry, Contents 2.0 (code name for now) will be a completely free upgrade to all current and future owners of Contents 1.0. We are making Contents 2.0 better than ever with a new focus on cleaning your Mac.

What about other 2.0’s? They have not been forgotten and we are continuing to work hard on them as well. But we often shift focus to what we feel is most important and what’s best for our users.

Thanks for reading our blog and we’ll keep the updates coming!

Stephen Korecky
CEO & Designer

Where is Swatch 2.0!

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:26:00 -0500

It’s on it’s way! But before it gets here, let’s talk about it (behind it’s back!). What has changed? Well, we completely redesigned Swatch to use a more “Mac Like”, cleaner, easier interface. There are now 6 ways to select the color you want, Loupe, CMYK Sliders, Color Wheel, HSB Sliders, RGB Sliders, and manually entering the color.

What else? We have added support for CMYK, new output templates for Mac and CSS3 developers, fixed all the bugs that were in Swatch 1.x and much more. You can now synchronize the Swatch library on the run with your colleagues by saving the library to a network share or Dropbox as well.

We can’t wait to share it with you August 23, 2010 at 12:00 CST.

Love,
Fuel Collective

Developing Swatch 2.0

Thu, 27 May 2010 09:06:00 -0500

When you start developing a 2.0 version of your app, it’s like your kid graduating from high school. Either nothing really changes and the kid just goes to work, or you send him to college and then receive him a few years later, nearly unrecognized by his own mother by how much he changed.

As we love our apps we want the best for them, so we send them to college. For Swatch this meant starting with a completely new Xcode project, using 0 lines from the previous one. No matter how experienced a developer can be, when he comes to his project a year later (or even less), he sees immediately where he’s done some internal-design mistakes, what could be done better, etc. He evolves, learns new techniques, his coding style changes a little.

Since we started this company, over 100,000 lines of code went into our projects, which, of course, tought me a few neat tricks.

First of all, don’t be afraid of the paper. I’ve seen many developers scared of this, nowadays, weirdly looking white sheet, however, use it. Draw it out. Draw bubbles with class names, link them with arrows and write the functionality above the arrows. Write rough method names to the class bubbles.

Then let it sit on your desk and come back to it after a week. You’ll see that there are better ways to do it, forcing you to reorganize it and redraw. That’s fine, actually it’s brilliant. Now wait another week. The changes you make then will be less radical. If not, take another week, otherwise settle with your plan.

Now that you have your plan, get to coding. Here I have some tips, too. Even though you don’t immediately need all the methods, declare them, implement them with a #warning statement that doesn’t just say ‘implement me’, but is more descriptive about what the method’s supposed to do. Believe me, when you get back to the method in a few weeks, you’ll have no idea what it was supposed to do and what special conditions should be taken into account. I have had less success using the #TODO’s and #FIXME’s as for the release builds you (should) almost always make a clean build which makes the compiler compile all sources, and if you’ve forgotten to implement the method, the compiler will give you a warning.

If you decide to use unimplemented methods, add logging to them. Something simple like NSLog(@”-[MyClass myFunction:] argument: %@”, arg0);. This way you’ll be able to do some fixes even before there is a bug. Imagine you’re asumpting some method won’t get called too often, therefore may be complex, but in early alpha testing you might find out it gets called too often, which would mean lags and high CPU usage. Rethinking the way it should work now is less work then later on, which would most likely break a lot of functionality in your app.

Sometimes you need to reinvent the wheel - it’s better than to start making a square out of a circle. This is a really hard part to decide. For example Swatch 1.x had some issues with picking a color from a screen. Generally the issue was with the colorspaces - device RGB and calibrated RGB. In Swatch 2.0 we use our own FCColor instead of NSColor. FCColor has, just like NSColor, the -set method, +whiteColor, etc. Note that FCColor’s superclass is NSObject, not NSColor. However, remember you need a really good reason to do this. Reinventing everything is time-consuming and probably won’t work well.

These are a few tips I can give devs thinking about going 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0, etc. During my early developing I had an app, which I then moved to 2.0 later on and now have moved to 3.0. And even now looking at an app that I was writing from the scratch a year ago, I can see some mistakes I’ve made. Don’t get scared. This how you learn.

Krystof Vasa
Software Engineer

Swatch 2.0 - News

Fri, 14 May 2010 09:27:00 -0500

You may have seen our tweet (http://twitter.com/fuelcollective/status/13809299828) the other day with a little preview of what Swatch 2.0 will look like. We still have a ton of work to do on Swatch 2.0 but we wanted to share some insight with everyone. Swatch 2.0 has been completely rewritten from the ground up and has a few new features that I think everyone will enjoy. Some of which have been asked for some time now.

We realized that swatch is becoming a more feature rich app which really separates itself from other screen color pickers. We’re working really hard on redesigning the collections feature to make it much easier to use and in general the user experience has also greatly improved.

So what about upgrading to 2.0 and pricing? We felt like this is Swatch done right, so for all our users that currently own or purchase swatch 1.X before the upgrade will get a free upgrade to Swatch 2.0! The price for swatch 2.0 will be changing, but we’re not sure how much. We’ll get a better idea when we get closer to launch.

We know you’re going to love Swatch 2.0

Stephen Korecky
CEO & Designer

Making Permute

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:30:00 -0500

I’d like to talk a little about making Permute and what the process was like. Why Permute? I think it has been by far our best executed application in terms of both design and functionality. We did a lot of things right and learned quite a lot in the process. What was different about Permute from the others? We had a much more clear vision, we went to the people, and we had experience.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted Permute to be a video converting app, but what would make it different from the others? Why would Permute be worth paying for? It clicked, simplicity! So to get a better idea of what was wrong with the current market of video apps, we setup a survey and asked people a few questions, mainly “What do you hate about current video converting apps”. As you may have guessed, most said “confusing controls”, “hard to use”, etc.

From that alone we learned two really important things. One, people are usually pretty enthused to take a survey and have their opinion listened to. Two, we knew what Permute had to be: Easy to use, naturally good looking, and pleasing to the eye. So we had a clear vision of what Permute would be and I set off in Photoshop to create what would become the interface for Permute.

This was the first time I had ever used Photoshop to create a full mockup of one of our apps. Usually I just put out a few good ideas and we go from there. This time, everything you see in the app was mocked up first in Photoshop to get an idea of A. How should it look and B. How it might function. This was very important if we were going to keep Permute easy to use.

So once we had an app that we fell in love with using, we have learned the hard way in the past that a 1.0 is never as good as you think it’s going to be. So this time we decided to have a private beta of about 50 users. The feedback and ideas that we had gotten from everyone was so amazing and helpful. With that we had a really solid and stable 1.0 release that everyone could enjoy using without any major problems.

So as we learn from successes, we will continue to build on them and keep offering new updates to our apps that will make them even more amazing. I’m excited to see what we can do in 2010 and I hope all our uses will stay with us to enjoy great new things.

Stephen Korecky
CEO & Designer

Adding Features

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:53:00 -0500

One of the hardest things to decide when we’re working on our apps is what features get added, which we hold off on, and which we just don’t have room for or don’t fit in our vision of the app. Lately we have been trying to take the approach of 37signals and take in all suggestions and then delete them or resolve the issue with a nice reply.

Now I don’t want to give the wrong impression of “we don’t care” we do, really! But now that our apps are getting more popular, thus many more feature requests, if we added every feature request, our apps would get bloated pretty quickly. Instead of catering a feature to just one or two people, we would like to be useful to the majority of our users.

So when we see the same feature request coming up over and over again, that’s usually a good clue as to what features should be added. Now some requests we get just make sense to us, and we feel the need to add it right away.

What we hope to accomplish with this is more streamlined apps that are easy to use, with features the majority of uses would want in our apps.

Stephen Korecky
CEO & Designer