We’ve just started the Public Beta for Ulysses 2.0. If you’re interested, head over to the blue-tec forum, grab a copy, and let us know what you think.

I was born by the river…

When we started The Blue Technologies Group back in 2003 (yup), we were pretty naive. We looked at what other companies were doing, at the state of the Mac software market. The downfall of classic Shareware, the rise of official “beta”-releases, the trend of constant updates through .dmg-downloads or of half-baked full version cycles.

Lots of low-priced products that you ended up buying but not using, lots of feature add-ons that completely changed the UI and even some core functionality — to us, it all looked pretty messed up for the end-user, and we wanted to take an alternate route.

So we set out to do it all in the “right” way. Old-school, conservative, so to say.

Full-scale internal beta-testing. Don’t release until it’s ready. Don’t update unless it’s essential. Don’t go for a mass of price-happy users, but instead go for those who really want your product.

Concentrate support on your users, and not on those who want a totally different application. Make it a worthwhile purchase by releasing free updates, even years after the original shipped. Don’t fall for he who screams “feature request” the loudest, but instead double-check every feature addition every time for compliance with the app’s goals and intentions.

Yeah, we know.

(more…)

Hey,
did you notice that we had a promo running on MacUpdate on April 1st? Ulysses was discounted to $50, which is about 60%. If you missed just this date or wanted an extended trial before buying. Here you go:

mupromo

It’s a coupon that runs until Sunday night and gives you an extended rebate on the full retail version of Ulysses. It’s 42,10 € which is a bit more than the promo pricing, but I bet it still a fair deal!

Have fun,
Max

Happy new year, y’all!

There are big news swirling in the air. At the end of this year, the beloved Blue-Tec we once had will be gone. There will be a new Version – 3.0 if you want. We will have a new name, new looks, new power, new products and go to a new platform (you might guess what). Details will follow. But it would be quite funny to hear your guesses ;-)

Have fun,
Max

Just a quick note on proximi’s UI candidate for Copy & Paste on the iPhone.

While I pretty much agree with everything they say about selecting and copying, I would propose a completely different solution for pasting. Here’s my take on it:

• Apple should create a system-wide Clipboard.
• Whenever a user cuts or copies something, it should be added to the Clipboard.
• There should be a Clipboard button on the keyboard.
• When the user presses the Clipboard button, a list will appear which holds the last couple of copied elements.
• The user can select an element and paste it.
• Apple should provide a stand-alone Clipboard application, where the user can delete copied elements, or mark some elements as “to keep”.

Background:

The iPhone is a single-application environment. Copy & Paste functionality will most often happen between applications — copy some links from Safari and paste them into a mail message.

Having a persistent multi-item clipboard will enable the user to copy multiple items between multiple applications without constantly having to switch between said applications. A persistent clipboard could also function as a snippet library, e.g. for quickly accessig frequently typed passages such as the following.

Hope you like that idea.

Greetz
Marcus