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.

Mudbug Software is a brand new software development company with a goal of providing specific software for specific purposes. While we may be new to software development we have been very active in the Mac community for the past several years. You may be familiar with some of the other products that we have developed during this time (RapidWeaverThemes.com or Sandvox Web Designs).