New releases abound!

Hi everyone, this is one of the best blog posts I've written in a while, because it's not a groveling apology...

We've finally got a release of Flux out the door , which addresses a lot of known issues, and maybe best of all, there is now a PDF manual! The manual is an ongoing work, which we'll update along with Flux releases. We've also overhauled the website, and new screencasts are on the way.

In other great news, we've released a new product! It's called Shadow, and it's multiple clipboard manager, which lets you copy on one computer, and paste on another. It's all done with network trickery and Bonjour. Right now, it's in beta and it's free, so grab yourself a copy on the house. We've made it free right now, because a zillion apps on the Mac use copy and paste, and we need to make sure there are no gotchas we've missed.

We see Shadow as a great partner app for Flux, and was initially built in-house exactly for that reason, we got tired of emailing each other stuff, having to save everything down to a network share. I've forgotten who said it first, in a fit of frustration : "Why can't I just copy here and paste there, is that so much to ask!?".

So let us know what you think, drop us an email or write on the forum.

Cheers!

An update on developments at The Escapers

In the past few weeks we've had a lot of emails and posts on the forum asking us what's going on with the development of Flux. As most of our users will note, by our standards, we've not done a release in a little while, and to make matters worse we've not been very vocal in explaining why.

Well, while we've been working to make Flux use Core Animation, and along with it, make Flux go a whole load faster, We've run into a few problems along the way which we did not anticipate. Most of the problems relate to Core Animation not behaving in quite the way we expected, and also different behaviour on machines with varying amounts of video memory. Personally, I think that Apple has done a wonderful job of abstracting the idiosyncrasies of each GPU and making very different processors appear the same to the programmer, but there are still nagging problems which has made progress similar to wading through treacle.

We've also been overrun with work relating to other aspect of The Escapers and Flux, all of which will become apparent in the coming weeks.

So, please bear with us during this quiet time of updates, we're working hard to make Flux as great as we can and sometimes we forget to tell everyone what's going on, for that I can only apologise.