Hey All!

It’s been rather quiet on the public front from Extendmac lately, but rest easy — that means it’s been everything but quiet behind the scenes!

For more than one reason, we decided to overhaul the Flow Preview page¹. We think this new layout makes better sense for the content, and also allows you to get a fuller scope of the application. Additionally, now that we don’t have to load up all that javascript to power the media-switcher, the page is also considerably smaller in size, allowing for acceptable load times. If you’ve got comments on this stuff, feel free to share — we are always listening.

While we’re at it, we may as well give an update on the private beta. Simply put, it’s going really really well. We’re getting tons of great feedback, comprehensive bug reports (which are, of course, promptly fixed), and insightful feature requests. We couldn’t be happier with the group we’ve selected.

In the past month or so we’ve received many questions from those of you who participated in the MacHeist/MacUpdate promotion. To repeat: after the private-beta is complete, Flow will be distributed to those participants. You will receive early access before the public beta once we feel we’re ready.

That’s about all we can share for now — as usual, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

¹ : Yes, those screenshots of Flow are from Mac OS X Leopard. We will be Leopard ready on day one!

Hello all,

As you can see, we’ve made the new Flow website live — offering a very close look at Flow itself, among a few other things. And yes, I’m aware we need to do some fixes for Firefox, which happens to render a few pages (namely features and preview) a bit oddly. As usual we’ll continue optimizing the site as time goes on.

While I’m busy with Flow development myself (which, as any beta tester could tell you, is going quite well), this design is thanks to the hard work of Adam Betts. Of course, you can also see Flow’s icon is prominently displayed throughout the site, which was designed by Sebastiaan de With. On that note, Sebastiaan has written a great blog entry on the process of working with me on the Flow icon. You can read it here. Over the past months I’ve come to know both Adam and Sebastiaan as not only great designers, but great people too. Cheers to you two!

The roadmap for the next space of time is fairly simple. Extendmac will continue knocking out bugs and implementing features in the private beta. Once Extendmac and the testers feel we’re ready to move public, we will move into a period of free-range public testing. This will be delivered first to those lucky enough to have participated in the fantastic MacHeist/MacUpdate bundle. Following this period of public testing, we’ll tie loose ends, and move to the 1.0 sale release. Of course, even then we’ll continue innovating, collaborating, and of course, communicating.

As usual, you can contact me using the information provided on the Support page. If you’ve got something to say, I encourage you to do so, or leave a comment on this blog.

Edit: It seems Glenn Wolsey has posted an interview with me regarding Flow and Extendmac. If you care to read it, you can find it here.

Cheers,
Brian Amerige.