Big Day
Where Keith steps off the edge
Yesterday was a big day in the life of Helium Foot Software. I gave notice at my day job in order to devote more time to Helium Foot. Although i'll be staying on at Catylist for one day a week, i'll be able to spend a LOT more waking hours building this little indy endeavor. So what do i plan to do with that extra time?
MercuryMover v2.0
For those of you new to this blog, MercuryMover is our application that enables you to move and resize the windows on your Mac via the keyboard. I was hoping to get the v2.0 public beta out by the beginning of July. Now, i'm publicly committing to getting it out by the end of August (which according to my calendar is 11:59:59pm on Sunday 31 August). Here is a list of what will be in this release:New Features
- Shortcuts: a mechanism to save the size and/or position of a window and then reapply to other windows
- Display the height and width of the current window as well as its screen position
- Nicer arrows
- More interactive Heads Up Display (the arrows react as the different modifiers are pressed)
- Updated Preference Pane design
- Means to change the key bindings via the command line defaults utility (ie, use hjkl instead of the arrow keys)
- Make the system wide MercuryMover hot keys both invoke and dismiss MercuryMover
Bug Fixes
- Support displays in a top to bottom configuration
- Fix screen edge bugs (ie unexpected behavior when centering or maximizing a window along the left or bottom edge of the screen)
- Fix bug associated with multiple different sized displays
- Remove small memory leak
Press Hack
In order to get the word out about MercuryMover i'm planning a very decent press hack.Mystery Product
During the MercuryMover public beta, i'll be working on a new product. This one should be relatively easy to develop and will be targeted at anyone who uses more than one web browser. I like to call this my experimental product; not because i don't think that it will work, but because i plan to do a lot of pricing and marketing experiments with it.Mysteryer Product
Like so many Mac users, i'm always hopeful for a fine Finder fix. After almost 25 years, i'm ready for something different. Something that's faster and more fluid. Something that works for me instead of against me and gets my mind closer to the metal. Think Quicksilver only silveryer. I hope to have a public beta of just such an application out in the first half of 2009.For now, cutting my hours back by 80% is just a working sabbatical so i may need to ramp those hours back up before Helium Foot would be successful enough for me to leave the man in the dust. But with stuff like this on your plate, wouldn't you rather be working here?