Minder Softworks Newsletter – November 2018

Welcome

It’s hard to believe but after being in business for 10 years, this is our first customer newsletter.

I tried riding the wave of social media as a means of keeping our customers updated, but I’ll be honest: I’d rather be writing software than the labor of maintaining a social media presence. And I also prefer the more personal touch of an email (even if it is a newsletter) to trying to make everything sound like a press release.

That said, I hate spam as much as everyone else. You’re only getting this email because at some point, you bought a copy of our software. If you can’t remember buying one of our apps, it might have been part of a bundle or a MacUpdate Promo. Regardless, I promise I’ll keep these newsletters to an absolute minimum, somewhere around 5-6 per year at the most.

Coming Soon: New support area

Since the beginning, I handled customer service requests entirely via email since no one likes to have to create and remember yet another website login. I tried several different means of organizing, tracking, and replying to customer service emails, but in the end I always felt there was a better way to ensure customer service issues were responded to (and followed up with) promptly.

I’m happy to say that a new customer service portal is almost complete, and will go live before the end of the year. This one will allow you to use email to reply, while still giving me a dashboard to stay on top of your requests.

Announcing: Photonium Access

Like most people, I love the integration Apple has with their products, both hardware and software. The problem comes when you want to use things outside of the Apple ecosystem.

For example: Photos.app offers quite seamless integration between your iPhone or DSLR and your Mac. And once your photos are in Photos, they’re easily available to iMovie, Pages, Keynote, Mail, and other Apple applications. The problem comes when you want to use those photos somewhere else. The first problem is that you can’t drag and drop directly from Photos to another application window. Instead, you have to drag and drop (or export) your photos to the Finder, then use them in your desired application. Then you have to clean up after yourself and delete the exported files. It’s a tedious process.

Photonium Access fixes this problem by giving you a menubar widget that gives you immediate access to your entire Photos library. Photos doesn’t even have to be running! When you find the photo you want, just drag and drop into your desired application.

For a limited time, you can get Photonium Access for the introductory price of $1.99.

It’s not in the Mac App Store yet, but it will be soon.

MYStuff, Mojave, and what's next

Yes, MYStuff 2 Pro still works with the latest macOS, 10.14 Mojave. (If you launch it and it crashes, make sure you’re running the latest version, which you can download here.) Admittedly, an update is long overdue, and it’s not just hot on our “to-do” list, it’s in-progress. We’re starting from scratch with a whole new… everything. (Don’t worry, we’ll make sure all your existing data is imported.) Stay tuned.

Up, up, and away

Many of our applications — both current and on the roadmap — rely on an embedded web browser. At the heart of them is CardinalKit, which takes Safari’s WebKit engine, adds tabs and bookmarks and history, and gives a full-featured (but stripped down) browsing experience to all of our applications that have an embedded browser. Photonium was the first to use it, and more apps are on the way. For a technology demo, we have released Cardinal. You can grab Cardinal for free from here. It won’t replace Safari or Firefox or Chrome — and it’s not supposed to — but since it has such a small memory footprint you might find yourself using it for lots of lightweight browsing. By providing us feedback on Cardinal, you’ll be helping us create a better browsing experience for all of our applications that use an embedded browser.

Giving thanks

For those of us in the US, November brings to mind thoughts of turkey, football, and veterans. (And for some of us, thoughts are also on hockey.) There are a lot of things I am thankful for: You, my customers, without whom this would be a hobby and not a business; for those in the armed forces, present and past, for taking the torch from prior generations and keeping the flame lit for the next; for my family, most especially my wife and kids; and last but certainly not least, I’m thankful to God for giving me life, for providing for my family, and for giving me the skills and talents to do what I do.

Here’s wishing all of you a safe and joyous November,