We are committed to providing the greater Mac community a rock solid, application that will be very useful to a lot of people. Because of this commitment we have been very busy the last few days working out some of the bugs that only a public beta could point out.
The bugs include:
* The nasty bug that changed rectangle images to squares when using the “Scale” plug-in.
* The missing alpha layer
* Nasty cropping bug that would cause the handles to get stuck
* a couple of others that we noticed but have yet to be reported

New things to be added for the second beta:
* a registration system allowing folks to download the application and test it out with the option to purchase if they choose
* ability to pic a single page from a multipage pdf (this is so cool that you will be looking for multipage pdf that you can open up with Webify)

Neither the reflection plug-in nor the x axis rotation point be included in the second beta.

I am not going to tell you when the second beta will be ready but it will be soon. I will be sure to update this blog when it is ready.

Gary

We finally have a beta of Webify that is ready for public consumption. For those of you that were lucky enough (or unluck enough) to get your hands on the initial beta release more than 6 months ago you will see that there have been MAJOR improvements.

Now before you go running to get your download let me explain a few things that you need to know:

1. This is not a free beta release - It will cost you $10 to participate in the beta program. However, if you participate in the beta program you will get the full version when it is released. The full version will sell for twice that amount when it is available.

2. This is not a feature complete beta - This was done on purpose. The full version will include:

• reflection plug-in in the effects panel
• an option to apply your settings to individual images or to do batch processing and
• a public SDK for any developers out there that want to try to cash in on the openness of Webify.

3. This is not an unlimited beta - I simply mean that this beta will expire in 30 days no matter what. During that 30 day time period there may be some more beta versions that will replace the current one and will be available by clicking on the “Check for updates” in the “File” menu.

If a new beta has not been deployed within the 30 day limit then a new beta will be deployed at the end of the 30 days.
You WILL NOT have to re-purchase Webify at the end of 30 days!
4. We are looking for “good” feedback - We are not looking for feedback that is pointless or asking if we can make it into Photoshop. We are looking for feedback in the following areas:

• The image effects panel
• Problems with the Cropping feature
• Basic usability
• Exporting or saving images
• any other things that should have been obvious to us but might have gotten overlooked

If you feel that we should not charge for a public “beta” I understand your feelings completely and encourage you not to purchase the beta. You should wait until the final version is ready, but you need to know that the price will be considerably higher.

Now, if after reading this post you feel that you want to participate in the beta program and you understand that you will be charged $10 for doing so then please click on the button below.

There has been much progress on webify over the last couple of weeks. A number of bugs have been squashed, more refinements to the GUI have been made, and most importantly a final decision has been made as to whether or not to include an SDK.

We have been considering making an SDK for Webify since its inception but initially we decided to put it on the back burner and save it for a future release (maybe version 2), but the more that I thought about it the more I liked the idea of including it in the initial release.

The purpose of adding an SDK is to hopefully encourage some other developers to consider developing plug-ins that will work either as part of or in conjunction with Webify.

If you are a developer and would like to be put on a mailing list to stay up to date with the latest news regarding the SDK then just drop me an e-mail and I will be happy to keep you informed.

Gary

Just want to give a quick run-down as to the progress of Webify. I mentioned before that we decided to make the switch to Obj C as the programming language as opposed to REALbasic because of the greater flexibility that C will provide. I found that switching to Obj C did two things that I was not prepared for:
1. Much more time to develop and to test the application.
In all honesty, I anticipated that we would have a shipping project by this time. But everyone who is working on Webify is committed to providing a feature rich and stable application and that means that time allotted to complete the project has been pushed back a number of times.

2. The second thing that I was not prepared for was just how much of an improvement the Obj C version would be to the REALbasic version. Using the C language has laid a very good foundation to build more features on in future versions.

When will Webify be available? Well, I keep getting asked that question and I keep giving the same response ... “Soon”. So when exactly is “Soon”? I have learned to not give out dates because they will always come back to haunt you but I will re-iterate “Soon” ... “Real Soon”.

It has been a full week since I have given an update on Webify so I thought would give everyone a quick run down of where we are at.
I sent out beta's to 3 different sets of users (a professional type crowd, an enthusiast type crowd, and a total novice type crowd) The feedback that I got back from all three groups was pretty similar.
It seems that there were 3 main things that people wanted to see added:
- a real time display of the size of an image
- way to insert precise measurements to images in addition to the Scale/Resize slider
- an option to choose a directory other that the iPhoto library

Each of these three points will be addressed in the next beta release which should be ready in a few days.

There are at least two other improvements that we are making that will be completed before the final release. Overall, I am very pleased with the progress and look forward to making Webify available to the public real soon.

Note: I have corrected the "jumpiness that the slider was sometimes causing. It is now much much smoother and is a pleasure to use.


Gary

In my last post I mentioned that several of the beta testers had voiced their opinion that they wanted to see an easy way to use images that were not stored in the iPhoto directory. So we went back to the drawing board and added another button to the toolbar that lets you navigate to any directory on your hard drive.

It has been a few days since our last post so I thought I would give everyone a quick update on the status of Webify.
I have sent out beta copies to several people so that they might help me get a better feel for exactly where the application is at and also to help me decide what else needs to be done to the application.

One of the overwhelming requests was to also have a button that would open up a Finder window so that the user would be able to choose images from any directory and not just the iPhoto directory. I agree with that assessment so I will be adding another button to the toolbar.

There were several other suggestion and comments. Some of them will not happen until a future update, but a few of them should be addressed in the initial release so I will be working on those things for a few more days as they are not "big" issues.

I will not give out a definite date as to the release of Webify but I will say that we have already reached beta stage and are simply ironing out a few bugs.

With the feature set in place we are now doing some user interface clean-up. Most all of this clean up has to do with the Menu bar. If everything goes according to plan then we should have a few pre-releases and beta's going out on Monday.

Barring any major bugs being reported you should look for a release sometime next week.

The list of known bugs is getting quite small now. With the feature set and GUI in place there is one aggravating little bug that keeps popping up. It does not happen every time the application is run but it happens enough for us not to ignore it. I have all confidence that we will get this bug sorted out soon.
We are really striving to produce a very nice and usable application. While we want to be able to make Webify publicly available soon, we also understand that to release a buggy product would be suicide.
Please continue to be patient as we continue to work on this exciting application.

Our soon to be released image editing application "Webify" has seen some major improvements and enhancements over the last two weeks. For starters we have added the "iMediaBrowser" framework. This allows the user to push a button and open up the iMedaiBrowser that will contain all of the pictures in your "Pictures" folder. This will make things much easier for you when looking for an imae that you want to prep for the web.

Next, we have added the "Sparkle" framework to make updates very easy to deploy. Whenever there is a new version of Webify available a window will pop-up alerting you and you can either install the update right then or install at a later time.

Lastly, we have made the canvas size to be on a 4.5:3 scale when you first open Webify. Of course you can still resize the window if you like but having it open up on a 4.5:3 scale will give the GUI a more professional feel.

Finally, we are working on a method of adding a watermark to saved images for copies that have not been registered. Once the app has been registered then the watermark will be removed.