illumineX

SEOjargonFile (an opinionated SEO glossary)

2021-06-27T16:22:00.000-07:00

illumineX has been working on a little project with SEOtipster that's more fun than it seem like it would be: an online glossary of terms related to Search Engine Optimization. We've been involved in SEO as part of our projects since before illumineX was founded in 1998.

Basic design and functionality of the website are more-or-less feature complete. We might tweak a few little things over the next few days.

SEOJargonFile.com

The site provides three interfaces to the glossary:

• A random vocabulary word picker (on the main page);

• An SEO glossary search field; and

• An SEO Glossary index browser with a super fun filter by key letter.

If you happen to have a blog, and if you're amused by one of the definitions (maybe hivemind, or maybe The Index) it would be really truly extremely awesome if you wrote a quick blog post and linked to the site at either the top level or directly to the full definition page.

SEO Jargon File — an opinionated SEO glossary

Feel free to use a copy of the image on this page, or an image for the word you like, for use (only) in your blog post, if you like.

The Best Things in Life are Free Birdseed

2020-08-16T10:22:00.004-07:00

This weekend we had a call with a prospective client eager to pay us to help them build out a new social media feature in their (very cool) software system. We turned them down.

They had an urgent deadline, but that doesn't scare us. They'd also already done some exploratory prototyping before they realized they needed some help, so they had a pretty good idea of what they needed help with.

After listening to them describe their current status, I asked a few questions and then realized they had run into a little snag with a non-obvious feature of the API used to talk to a particular cloud service.

They didn’t really need our help building and delivering the short term solution, they just needed an email briefly describing the shortest path from where they stood, to the goal.

I sent them the email they needed, right after the call.

They're running with the ball, now, and they're gonna make the goal.

We didn’t lose business, we made a friend.

A fascinating thing about this experience is that their deadline was so tight and they were already so close to the goal, that lessons of the classic software project management book 📖 The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks came into play on a really visceral level.

Here's the relevant portion fo the Wikipedia entry (the entire book is well worth reading if you haven't gotten 'round to it, yet):

"Therefore, assigning more programmers to a project running behind schedule will make it even later. This is because the time required for the new programmers to learn about the project and the increased communication overhead will consume an ever-increasing quantity of the calendar time available. When n people have to communicate among themselves, as n increases, their output decreases and when it becomes negative the project is delayed further with every person added."
• Group intercommunication formula: n(n − 1) / 2

• Example: 50 developers give 50 · (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.

Adding to the team introduces new communications interfaces between people. Even if it’s slight penalty under normal circumstances, there’s a definite cost to adding a new member or two, to a team, measured in communications overhead.

In the case of this project, the relevant portions of the teams seem pretty manageable, at first, the client team was lean and nimble, with three people.

3 (3 -1) / 2 = 3 channels of communication for the original client team

Our team would bring two people onto the task at hand, to meet the urgent deadline.

5(5 -1) / 2 = 10 channels of communication for the augmented team

More than three times the communication channels!

Adding a small number of people to a small team can be a big productivity boost, but given the other constraints of a very tight deadline there's a non-trivial risk of accidentally peddling backwards.

This project also has certain technical constraints and a few possible pathways to a solution that would work, but only one that could work in time to meet the deadline.

iBlogger 3 for iPhone and iPad available now on App Store

2020-07-14T18:30:00.001-07:00

Pulling iBlogger off the #iPhone #AppStore a few years ago wasn't an easy decision.

One of the first apps on the App Store in 2008, iBlogger had grown a loyal following of thousands of bloggers who had created over a million blog posts in the first couple years. Countless more after that.

To save the product, we had to kill it.

But iBlogger was always a labor of love for my team, not really a profit center. We didn't have the bandwidth to maintain the old Objective C source code and migrate the app to Swift at the same time.

Too many things were changing at once, new blog platforms being created, old ones being retired, new protocols, social media, and a strong demand for iPad support when the core of the app made unfortunate assumptions about iPhone screen sizes.

To save the product, we had to kill it.

So we did.

Today, that painful decision bears fruit.

iBlogger is back on the iPhone and #iPad #AppStore!

iBlogger 3 is a great new foundation for the future of mobile blogging, all new in #Swift 5 for #iOS and #iPadOS.

To assure a vibrant iBlogger ecosystem, we're switching to a subscription revenue model with a free download. Core text blogging features are included in the free download. You're welcome to use it in the free mode as much as you like.

iBlogger is a free download on App Store for iPhone and iPad.

We hope you'll like iBlogger as much as we like making it for you!

Working with David Cui (Zuizin) on EyeSpy for macOS

2020-05-26T07:38:00.002-07:00

Lately I've been working on various projects with several new #freelance #iOS#Swift #mobileapp developers, including David Cui (Zuizin).

David is helping us update the illumineX, inc. cartoon-eyes toy, EyeSpy (for macOS), which we've been ignoring for a few years.

David is enthusiastic, professional, and effective. He's the type of developer who likes to leave a campsite cleaner than he found it.

While doing routine maintenance on the product (updating it for Swift 5 and Xcode 11.5) he noticed there was a tiny bit of test code accidentally left in the product for years, and causing a little glitch. He brought it to our immediate attention, and fixed it.

David also cleaned up and modernized our In-App Purchase system, which hadn't had any attention for a few years. It turns out that even though our IAP store had been working in sandbox testing in the lab, it had been failing silently about 1/3 of the time in production. Doh!

The IAP system in EyeSpy is a well-oiled machine, now, thanks to David's attention to detail and thoughtful approach to what was originally thought to be a routine maintenance project.

I enjoy working with David and recommend him very highly to any iOS team.

#ThankYourTeam

Cartoon Lemon with Googly Eyes, from EyeSpy for macOS

Blogs: Not dead, yet!

2020-05-23T16:10:00.003-07:00

If you're a blogger, you might find this essay, recently shared to YCombinator's Hacker News from a blog, to be of interest. It's perhaps a little pessimistic, but has some fair observations about the state of affairs in the #blogosphere.

If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

It's almost impossible now to find a blog that's not on a focused theme because that's what search engines focus on and how websites profit. But you want the opposite, a blog that never tried to focus or even thought about it.

The observations about the role of the only search engine that presently matters, Google, in the state of the blogosphere are worthy of consideration. In the discussion at Hacker News, the author was criticized a bit for saying that Google Blogger was "dead" —which itself seems a pretty fair criticism if not strictly accurate in a pedantic sense. Google basically abandoned Blogger in place years ago. Sure, our own illumineX blog is hosted here but we're not in denial about the fact that Google is at best indifferent to their Blogger platform.

So Many More Choices!

The rise of social media "walled garden" platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and recently TikTok, have brought more options for self-expression and communication to an audience. Similarly the rise of podcasting and "vlogging" (video blogging, mostly at Google YouTube) have become more popular as more people have access to broadband.

Connecting With Your Audience

On the other hand, there have been writers on the Internet since people started connecting from home, and there are still lots of great bloggers writing thought-provoking essays, poignant heartwarming diaries, short stories, and fan fiction, as well as documenting news.

Some of the most interesting small businesses connect with their audiences by writing long-form blog posts, as well as short-form or microblogging via social media.

In Missoula, one of our favorite local catering companies pivoted their business model when they realized a potentially serious global #COVID19 pandemic was on the horizon, and created a gourmet prepared-meal CSA featuring locally produced, organic and sustainable ingredients.

Part of the True Food Missoula strategy to let their customers know about their new business is the Weekly Wellness blog where writers including Katharine Roggeveen write about their weekly menu (this one included lamb borscht and a wild morel mushroom and grilled asparagus soup!), local organic produce suppliers, and various health aspects of ingredients and other food choices.

New blogs created by interesting people every day, all around the world. People still find it worth doing, even though it's harder to reach their audience than it was when the Google Search algorithm was friendlier, and Google Reader existed to help readers keep track of things they wanted to read later, or had read and liked and might want to share, later.

It's all about connecting with your audience. The rise of both closed-ecosystem social media and the profit-maximizing algorithm has definitely altered the blogosphere, but other things have, too.

Not everything is bad news.

Carefully crafted, platform-specific use of social media can help bloggers reach a larger audience, faster, by cross-promoting their long-form blog essay. The blog platforms which have survived, like WordPress, are better than ever before at creating a good-looking, reader-friendly, mobile-friendly blog. Even Google Blogger updated some templates to allow a friendlier mobile experience for bloggers, like us, who have stayed with that decaying Hollywood mansion of a blog platform.

Let me tell one other small bit of good news in the blogging world.

iBlogger is back.

iBlogger 2 is dead! Long live iBlogger 3!

illumineX loves blogs and bloggers.

Our specialized editor for blogs, iBlogger, was one of the first apps on the iPhone App Store in 2008. Our last update was in November of 2017 — two and a half years ago.

That's a long time between updates, we know. There's a whole long sad saga of why we weren't able to continue updating iBlogger 2, while building iBlogger 3 in parallel. It involves a near-death experience of one of our colleagues, a key iBlogger developer at the time. Really, though, the interesting part is that we remained profoundly interested in blogging over the years, even though it has never been a money maker.

The Internet Wants to Be Free (or at least try-before-you-buy!)

Most bloggers, you see, wanted their blogging tools to be free, or a least be able to try them out for free to make sure they worked, first. For the longest and very frustrating time, there just wasn't a good way to do that, on the iPhone App store.

illumineX was a pioneer in the free internet download. We created what may have been the first secure and truly seamless In-App Purchase system on Mac OS X (maybe on any platform) in our labs in 1999 and delivery to market in 2000, iXRegistrar / iXLicenser was a feature of our Infinity Game PaX for Mac OS X from the very earliest days. (Those internal component names were never public. It was just the "Purchase a license" button.)

We understood the value to our customers of the try-before-you-buy model. But Apple didn't. Developers and customers complained for years, to no avail.

The Weird Intersection of Supply & Demand

Meanwhile, we had discovered an unfortunate quirk of the supply and demand intersection of the blogging community and the App Store marketplace.

Revenue for our product was flat, regardless of price point.

This is an odd phenomenon. In most markets, if you lower the price of a product which customers like, more customers will buy it. This was true, for iBlogger, too. But in most markets, you get lots more customers at lower price points, and revenue increases. The minimum price point is usually limited by the cost of production. You can't really lose a little on every sale, and stay in business due to volume.

Weirdly, though, the slope of the curve at prices between $0.99 and $9.99 was such that we would get almost exactly the number of new customers at a lower price to make revenue flat.

Above $9.99 and sales dropped to zero.

Below $0.99 (the Free price tier) we would get hundreds of new users a day. Many of them used the product for years.

Over a million posts were created with iBlogger 2 within about 18 months of its initial release.

But from $0.99 to $9.99 we would see a completely flat revenue.

Non-zero Tech Support Costs vs. Free Products

That might not have been too bad. Ordinarily the right response to this situation for software is to just put the price point at $0.99 and let it fly!

Unfortunately, iBlogger was an exception. It's not a stand-alone software system. In order to be useful to the customer, it needs to connect to their blog.

Bloggers sometimes wanted help making the product work with their blog (even if we gave it away for free.) This meant that we had a non-zero tech support cost.

So, in order to be able to help bloggers get going, we had to limit sales by keeping the price at $9.99, where it stayed for most of the decade that it was available on the App Store (before iPad interface requirements forced us to temporarily remove the product from the App Store about 18 months ago.)

Sometimes I would dedicate a weekend to tech support, and have a $0.99 sale, or even give away iBlogger for free, to get more people using it. That's why we build it, after all. The more people use it the happier we are.

Then on Monday morning, I would put the price back up to $9.99, which didn't affect the product revenue at all, but meant that we had only 10% as many technical support requests (usually bad passwords and misconfigured blogs, which were not caused by our product, but which stood in the way of the customer's ability to use our product).

Occasionally we would test different price points in between. Revenue was always flat.

New World Order

So, it's a bit of a challenge to make good blogging tools in a world that accidentally conspires for those projects to lose money at all scales, from the blogger to the platforms to the toolmakers.

But things are looking up, for blogs, I think.

There are more people thinking about the importance to free societies of independent voices like blogs and podcasts.

Apple became convinced that the try-before-you-buy model was good for consumers.

illumineX is bringing back iBlogger this week.

We have an all new iBlogger ready for TestFlight in a few days.

We hope that you'll try it, if you have a WordPress blog and an iPhone or iPad (iOS 13). Let us know what other blog platforms are important to you, and what features you would like to see.

We have great ideas for how to make iBlogger even better than the product that thousands of bloggers loved for a decade, and we've invested heavily in making a solid foundation for the future in Swift and modern Cocoa frameworks.

The core text blogging features are free and will always be. We hope you like the product well enough to subscribe.

We think blogs have a bright future, and we want to help make that happen, with iBlogger 3.

iBlogger 3 for iOS

iBlogger 3 Test Flight

2020-05-22T12:59:00.002-07:00

hey Bloggers! iBlogger 3 is ready for its first TestFlight on the iOS App Store.

This all-new iBlogger written from scratch in Swift for iOS 13 gives us a great foundation for the future.

Long live iBlogger 3!

To join the iBlogger 3 Test Flight public beta, download the TestFlight App.
Send us an email so we know you're using the beta release. If you like, you can include the URL to your blog, and feature requests.

email: support@illumineX.com
subject: join iBlogger TestFlight

New in iBlogger 3

This first release is compatible only with WordPress, but feel free to join the TestFlight group anyway, and tell us your blog type.

iBlogger 3 has been completely rebuilt from the ground up in Swift for iOS 13. The all-new product provides better performance, robustness, and security.
iBlogger 3 includes a dramatically improved editor.
iBlogger works fluidly on iPhone and iPad for all device screen sizes (iOS 13 and higher).
supports modern OAuth for secure and convenient authentication with your blog.
iBlogger now uses JSON/REST-based protocols for posting to your blog.
iBlogger's emitted HTML is now HTML 5 compliant.
iBlogger's financial model has been modernized to a free download and a subscription offering via In-App Purchase.

Known Issues

This first release of iBlogger 3 doesn't include photo sharing support. We think we can do better than iBlogger 2, so we've tossed out the old design. We'll bring new, improved photo sharing later this year.
iBlogger 3.0.1 is compatible with WordPress blogs. If you have another blog type let us know what you're using and we'll put it on our to-do list. If you can set up a test account for us, we'll get to it faster.
iBlogger 3 works on iOS 13 and higher. Older versions of iOS are not currently supported.

Valentine Hearts Sticker Pack

2019-02-08T11:33:00.000-08:00

Looking for a fun sticker pack with Valentine Hearts? Look no further!

The new Valentine Hearts Emoji PaX by illumineX is now available on the App Store for iOS Messages.

This pack features over 30 fun, silly, flirty, sexy, artistic Valentine hearts.

Spice up your text message game or sprinkle some more fun hearts as "likes" in your next chat.

Valentine Hearts Emoji PaX - the best Valentine's sticker pack for iOS Messages.

EyeSpy 2.2.5 localized to Japanese

2018-10-07T15:01:00.001-07:00

EyeSpy 2.2.5 for macOS (available on App Store) has been localized to Japanese. #GooglyEyes for Japan!

Let us know if you have suggestions for improving our translation.

EyeSpy 2.2.5 improves compatibility with macOS Mohave.

Follow @illumineX on Twitter for Promo Codes for the EyeScream ArtPaX, available via In-App Purchase, free with Promo Code. First come, first serve, each code good for one use. Please Reply with the code you used, so that other people can take the next code down the list.

Enjoy!

EyeScream ArtPaX for EyeSpy (macOS)

illumineX ships EyeSpy 2.2.4 — Googly Eyes for macOS!

2018-09-13T13:29:00.003-07:00

EyeSpy 2.2.4 was released today at the Apple App Store for Mac. This release includes a bit of polish to the drifting balloon #GooglyEyes character, Squeaky.

What's New in EyeSpy 2.2.4

• Corrects issues related to switching characters by normalizing the on-disk saved User Defaults for EyeSpy (which had accumulated cruft from old character IAP data)

• Corrects information in the IAP bundles for the balloon and pending zombie ArtPaX which fixes some character selection issues

• Fixes a bug with the balloon character which caused it to perform a “slide home” animation and sound effect when resizing the balloon

• Improves robustness of IAP system

• Fixes a bug which reset the user’s preferred “home” location if the ballon character was selected with hot keys (Command-Right-Arrow)

• Fixes a bug which led to the ballon occasionally not drifting when “Who let the dogs out?” was selected

Did you know?

When EyeSpy is the in-focus app (CMD-Tab to switch to EyeSpy from any running app) you can use hot keys to switch between characters.

• Command-RightArrow and Command-LeftArrow cycle through your available characters.

• Command-UpArrow and Command-DownArrow cycle through the character sizes (Itty Bitty, Normal, and Crazy Big).

We realized this week that EyeSpy is Big in Japan! Almost 40% of our downloads this month came from Japan.

私たちは今週EyeSpyが日本でBigだと認識しました！今月のダウンロードの約40％は日本からのものです。

Download EyeSpy for macOS today!

MacOSのEyeSpyを今すぐダウンロードしてください！

GamePaX for macOS updated (BabelBloX, RuniX, HoppiX, and HextriX)

2018-09-07T12:59:00.001-07:00

We released updates to EyeSpy and the first four games of our Infinity GamePaX series (BabelBloX, HextriX, HoppiX, and RuniX) this week.

Also this week, EyeSpy had twice as many downloads in Japan as in the USA.

I have no idea why, because this week isn’t any different than any other week, but I’ve been predicting since we came up with the idea that EyeSpy should be Big in Japan™. I guess Japan has noticed!

So I googled up the most popular hashtag in Japanese and sent a Tweet for Japan!

It supposedly means “love” but since I don’t speak the language there’s a non-zero chance it’s rather naughtier.

EyeSpy is Big in Japan (illumineX Tweet)

2018-09-06T23:08:00.001-07:00

We've updated our macOS games BabelBloX, RuniX, HextriX, and HoppiX this week, as well as the #GooglyEyes toy EyeSpy.

These update improve the stability and performance of the apps on macOS High Sierra. A bug or two have been fixed in EyeSpy which prevented the In-App Purchase system from working correctly for some people. In addition, a bug which sometimes caused a crash when switching to a new EyeSpy character has been fixed.

Enjoy!

2018-08-29T12:37:00.001-07:00

Ken Anderson has published an interesting article on Investigating the CQRS design pattern using GraphQL and SPQR at Medium.

Design patterns are what separate the geek from the alpha geek.

EyeSpy 2.1.0 ships with new drifting balloon character

2018-04-02T11:13:00.001-07:00

Heads-up, EyeSpy fans! EyeSpy 2.1.0 is now available on the Mac App Store (Click that link to view EyeSpy on the Mac App Store) including a new drifting balloon character. (Squeaky is available as an in-app purchase for $0.99, while EyeSpy is a free download with original cartoon artwork including several free characters.)

The drifting balloons character was a favorite with our focus group and beta testers. EyeSpy is way more fun than it has any right to be!

EyeSpy is an all new implementation of the classic cartoon eyes watching the mouse cursor toy, written in Cocoa/Swift for macOS Sierra (10.12) and High Sierra (10.13).

illumineX can help you develop, refactor, or modernize your mobile and enterprise cloud applications. Contact illumineX today!

EyeSpy 2.1.0 press release at prMac

EyeSpy - Squeaky (drifting balloon character)

Steve Jobs on life

2018-02-24T21:15:00.001-08:00

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.“— Steve Jobs

Today, Steve Jobs (1955-2011) would have celebrated his 63rd birthday.

Black Monday was the Big Bang

2018-02-11T15:42:00.000-08:00

On February 11, 1993 NeXT announced they would no longer make and sell their sleek black computers the NeXTcube and related family of "pizza box" workstations known as NeXTstation. Three hundred people were fired and the company reformed around a software strategy based on pitching their operating system and object-oriented software developer tools known collectively as NeXTSTEP, for various hardware platforms including PA-RISC, SPARC, and Intel x86. In addition to providing their OS on other hardware platforms, the company worked with partners including Sun and Microsoft to layer their developer tools on other platforms including OpenStep for Solaris and OpenStep for Windows (sometimes known as "Yellow Box").

Known by the community of NeXT enthusiasts wryly as "Black Monday" this transition led to some amusing footnotes in the history of computing. One Wall Street firm, AIG Trading, didn't pick up the advanced (but probably very subtle) hints offered by NeXT and proceeded with plans to build a trading desk with over 20 seats of custom built cabinets designed to hold and show off the attractive NeXTstation computers complete with 21-inch NeXT displays only to have the hardware program cancelled before they were ready to take delivery.

NeXT Cube computer

One colleague went to the NeXT "fire sale" of stuff from the highly automated factory and bought all the molds for the NeXT logo embossed plugs to use as chocolate molds.

Alex Cone of CodeFab and (co-author with Jesse Tayler of the recently published book Beyond Agile) decided the best way to ride out the transition to other platforms would be on the fastest original NeXT hardware he could find. The excellent cross-platform development tools made it possible to build on a NeXTcube and deliver on any of the other supported platforms. He scrambled to find a NeXTcube with a turbo motherboard and a NeXTdimension card and spent a small fortune on RAM to max it out for best performance. (He still has this and other NeXT related collector's items).

This difficult transition for NeXT from hardware vendor to cross-platform operating system and developer tools vendor wasn't exactly a raging market success, but it almost certainly extended the life of the company long enough to get the attention of Apple.

This could be considered an important (but not the only) Big Bang of the information systems and computing multiverse. It sparked a rebirth of creative energy in a community of programmers who stayed with the platform and went on to lead teams that built Mac OS X and the iPhone at Apple and many of the major products for Apple platforms at other companies. Key ideas employed by NeXTSTEP and Objective C in the late 1980s were considered quirky at the time but have come to be ubiquitous and remain the beating heart of the macOS and iOS platforms.

On 20 December of 1996, NeXT acquired Apple for a negative $400 million, and performed a brain-trust transplant over the subsequent months in which key NeXT personnel including Steve Jobs led the effort to breathe a new technology life and relevance back into the beloved Apple brand and corporate culture. The operating system and object-oriented development tools from NeXT live on today in the foundations of modern macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, Xcode, and Cocoa.

EyeSpy shown in Chick Fil A commercial on New Years Day 2018

2018-01-01T13:09:00.003-08:00

Random cool thing of the day: Chick Fil A is running a commercial today (New Years Day, 2018) which shows EyeSpy!

One of the EyeSpy Developers, Arlan Titchbourne, noticed it while watching a game on television.

If you have a Mac, running macOS Sierra (10.12) or macOS High Sierra (10.13) you can download EyeSpy on the Mac App Store for free.

EyeSpy for macOS is an all-new implementation of the classic "cartoon eyes" which watch your mouse cursor on your iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro and other Apple Mac computers.

It's silly. It's fun. It's free.

Additional characters are available via In-App Purchase within the EyeSpy app. Some are free, some are available for $0.99 to help support the continued development of the toy.

illumineX builds custom software for enterprise, government, and venture capital funded start-up businesses. Contact illumineX CEO Gary W. Longsine to discuss your project and see if we can help your team build app and cloud systems with machine learning, gamification, social media integration, and more.

Enjoy!

EyeSpy for macOS is a free download on Mac App Store

All Nippon Incident Embarasses Everyone

2017-12-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

"Today a weary random traveler and a super model with a Twitter handle made you and by association me, and our entire industry look like an under-practiced clown car act."

See why everyone in our industry deserves to be fired.

Chrissy Teigen Teaches Security Process Design

Connect with illumineX on LinkedIn

2017-11-06T10:51:00.000-08:00

Connect with illumineX on LinkedIn

Are you a freelance developer specializing in mobile iOS or Android programming? Do you love Cocoa/Swift, or Java?

Are you looking for unique opportunities and challenges?

Follow illumineX on LinkedIn and connect with illumineX CEO Gary W. Longsine on LinkedIn, too.

We'd like to get to know you. Start a conversation, today!

illumineX Announce email list

2017-10-30T17:51:00.001-07:00

illumineX is conducting our first email campaign—ever in the history of our company—to our customers. We want to let you know that we are migrating our software products to the Mac App Store, beginning with the popular games from our GamePaX series, HextriX, BabelBloX, HoppiX, and RuniX.

Some aspects of our first-ever email campaign seem (to us) a bit unusual, so we thought we should take a moment to let you know a little about what we're doing, and why.

All of the people on our email list provided their email address when they purchased one of our products. However, our current email list has a few special characteristics:

This is the first time that we have attempted to contact our customers. In 19 years of operation, we have never sent an email to our list, previously.
We have acquired a few companies & products over the years (including Softchaos and Freshly Squeezed Software), so customers may not recognize our brand.
Some of those products have been discontinued.
We don’t have “opt-out” information for all of our customers (it appears for some products our customers were not asked for their email preference).
Our customer list spans a period of 19 years.

Once we get through the first announcement our email list will be pretty clean, since we are giving people the opportunity to opt out.

We have included a link to our Email Policy at the bottom of the email we are sending. You may review it, here:

illumineX email Policy

If you receive an email from "illumineX Announce" and you don't wish to receive future announcements, please click the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email.

We intend to contact our customer typically less than once a month, and probably no more than 4 or 5 times per years, to announce product updates, new products, and sale pricing on the App Store.

Thank you!

illumineX Announce email header

As many as 5% of iOS apps still not ready for iOS 11

2017-10-26T16:39:00.002-07:00

A month into the #iOS 11 update, our surveys show the typical #iPhone user has seen from 1% to 5% of their apps become unavailable (because the app hasn't been updated for iOS 11). Just prior to the release of iOS 11, about 10% of apps were not ready. Users with large numbers of apps on their phones (more than 100 third-party apps) seem to see a higher rate of abandoned apps. Presumably users with fewer apps are generally using only the most popular apps, which are more likely to be updated. There are exceptions. Some abandoned apps are products of big name brands, including media companies, Fortune 500, Universities, and governments. What's going on, here? We have some guesses, based on issues we've seen over the years. Organizations may not yet be committed to carrying their app forward for several reasons: 1. Not satisfied with the market reach or ROI; 3. project at risk due to creaky codebase & a pile of urgent backlog feature requests; 4. app created as an experiment with unclear goals; 5. app not reaching other business goals (viral marketing). Contact illumineX today.

We'd like to talk to you about possibilities for the future of your app, including a deeper look at viral marketing, community building, gamification, and the business model.

Contact illumineX today:

RuniX is now available on Mac App Store

2017-10-24T16:05:00.001-07:00

illumineX has been working closely with Alex Cone of CodeFab (NYC) to migrate our suite of consumer software products to the Mac App Store. RuniX, the first game from our Infinity GamePaX Series just hit the App Store, today.

Our illumineX Infinity GamePaX is a series of several games including BabelBloX, MarbleX, RoX, HoppiX, and HextriX, which were among the very first games to appear on the Mac OS X platform in the early 2000s.

The games were much loved by fans but the Mac market at the time was pretty small, with fewer than 2 million people using Mac OS X in the early days of the platform. (Many Mac users at the time remained on Mac OS 8 or 9).

Including our free illumineX Screen Saver PaX, at one time we estimated that 10% of all users of Mac OS X were using some of our software!

The GamePaX continued to run fine on newer versions of Mac OS X over the years, so not much maintenance was required. Then along came a new release which didn't break the games themselves, but broke the software stack that we had built our own e-commerce system on. We elected to update the GamePaX and migrate it to the Mac App Store.

If you have products that need updating, we have recent experience!

illumineX: the App Store is our resume.

You can download RuniX on the Mac App Store.

RuniX - Game Options

EyeSpy 2.0.7 available now on Mac App Store

2017-10-23T18:22:00.001-07:00

EyeSpy 2.0.7 is available on the Mac App Store today.

This update slightly changes the design of the app in order to work around a fascinating "bug" in macOS High Sierra (10.13).

When switching between characters using the Command-RightArrow or CommandLeftArrow keys, EyeSpy on macOS Sierra (10.12) would correctly shrink the character down to a pinpoint, swap in the new character, then grow the character back to full size. This was a fun animation effect.

Unfortunately High Sierra (10.13) optimizes the graphics drawing a little too aggressively. The graphics subsystem doesn't swap in the new character until after the animation sequence is complete. We tried about a dozen different tricks to try to convince it that, yes, we really do want to swap in a new image before animating the character growing from a pinpoint to full size.

So, on High Sierra the animation sequence we want never does the right thing. Instead, it always does a clunky shrink/grow/swap-character (which looks odd).

We've replaced the shrink/swap-character/grow animation with a shrink/swap-character-pop-into-place animation. This is less clunky. It's not what we want, but at least it looks intentional rather than accidental.

We'll report this issue to Apple. With any luck we can bring back the intended animation, at some point.

Meanwhile, keep an eye on @illumineX on Twitter. We'll be dropping a few promo codes out there over the coming weeks. First come, first serve! These promo codes will let you get a free character via the In-App Purchase store in EyeSpy.

If you like our fun little cartoon toy, be sure to rate EyeSpy at the Mac App Store! Thank you!

illumineX is in the process of migrating our GamePaX to the Mac App Store! Keep an eye on this space for further details!

Contact illumineX for your mobile, desktop, and cloud development needs.

EyeSpy 2.0.4 available now on Mac App Store

2017-09-07T17:57:00.000-07:00

This release improves the stability of the EyeSpy application.

EyeSpy 2.0.3 would sometime crash when attempting to share on social media from the button in the About panel. This has been fixed.
The About and Character Preferences panels are closed when the user clicks on the “Share” button, so that the sharing panel isn’t accidentally hidden behind them.

illumineX makes fun and quality software for macOS and iOS including integration with cloud based services. We can help you with your project. Does your business or government agency need assistance with updating your apps for iOS 11? We can help you do more than update the software.

If you want to rethink the user experience to make it more modern, add gamification or social graph features to help build your user community, or viral marketing features to help your app reach more people, contact us today.

Send email to: support@illumineX.com

Updating for iOS 11 - a chance to rethink your app?

2017-09-04T15:15:00.001-07:00

Roughly 8% of the apps on the iOS App Store are not ready for iOS 11, according to Sensor Tower, an app intelligence firm. Our (illumineX) own informal survey indicates that for users with more than 50 apps on their device, around 15% of those apps are not yet ready for iOS 11 (it varies quite a bit, clustering between 10% and 20%). The technical challenges of updating for iOS 11 are perhaps non-trivial, but they're well within the reach of the typical iOS development team. So, why are so many apps on the verge of being abandoned? Some vendors might be waiting for the release of iOS 11 to update their app. But that might not be the only reason, or even the main reason, given that roughly 90% of app vendors have updated, already.

Something else might be at work.

I suspect some app owners/vendors aren't sure about how to move their app forward—not due to technical updates needed for 64-bit iOS, but because their app isn't performing as well as they would like in the market.

I'd like to know more about the challenges faced by organizations trying to update their apps for iOS 11.

If you have an app and would like to talk about the business and marketing aspects which will help you decide whether or not to update your app, feel free to contact me, directly via email: gary@illumineX.com any time.

Let's chat about your original goals for your app, changing technology and market conditions which affect your app performance, and whatever else you see as a factor in your decision to maintain or abandon your app. Maybe there's a better exit strategy, than simply abandoning an underperforming app with a great concept. Maybe our conversation will help you identify opportunities to refresh your app and meet your objectives.

Feel free to like, share, and comment on this post if you have thoughts about this. It strikes me as odd that so many apps are on the brink of being wiped off the app store. I won't accidentally shame anybody here by naming apps, but some of these apps were clearly intended as substantial marketing efforts of major organizations, including radio stations, universities, large companies. Others look like really good app ideas that might not be fully realized (suffer from poor UX (User eXperience) or which suffer issues with the monetization / business model.

Anyway, I'd love to chat with some folk who are wrestling with the question of whether or not to update their apps for iOS 11. Let's chat and see if we come up with a good idea for your team. This might be a great opportunity to deeply rethink your app, and boost your app performance.

More than 180,000 iPhone apps won't be compatible with iOS 11 by Avery Hartmans of Business Insider.

EyeSpy 2.0.3 update available now on Mac App Store

2017-09-03T14:00:00.001-07:00

We've released the latest update to EyeSpy on the Mac App Store. This release improves the user experience for the purchase process and improves the robustness of the icon badge which shows the available updates for your In-App Purchases. All EyeSpy customers are encouraged to update to EyeSpy 2.0.3.

This release improves the robustness and user experience of the EyeSpy update process for In-App Purchase downloads (ArtPaX characters).

New fireworks display upon in-app purchase
Fixes the spurious focus ring bleed-through on the purchase view
Fixes available character update count on the App Icon badge (a small red circle) which displays the number of available updates). In the previous release, this badge would sometimes indicate one or more available updates when there were no new updates available.

Got apps that need updating for iOS 11? Contact illumineX. We can help you update for 64-bit iOS and help you update the user experience for modern iOS devices. Send us an email: sales@illumineX.com