illumineX Announce email list

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

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

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!

Contact us today. We would love to help you modernize your iOS and macOS software.

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

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.