illumineX

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’…

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 …

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 b…

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 l…