Server downtime

October 30, 2009 - Filed in Inside the company by Felix

Our server's hardware began to fail this morning at 7am. At least Linux decided at that point, that it'd be a good idea to remount the server's root filesystem read-only to prevent data corruption.

Now lacking the ability to write to disk, the website's database was no longer able to save incoming support inquiries and contact form messages and the mail server couldn't store any new emails, either.

Therefore, please resubmit any support inquiry and resend any mails you sent between October 30th 2009 07:00 GMT+1 and October 30th 2009 15:30 GMT+1, if you don't receive a reply within the next few days.

If you accessed the IOSPIRIT website during the downtime, you got to see a static HTML page informing you about the reason and linking to @IOSPIRIT for more information. Yes, IOSPIRIT is using Twitter and you can follow me here.

Last but not least, I'd like to send a huge THANK YOU to our hosting partner Hetzner Online, who have replaced the server hardware in record time. Their service has been truly exceptional over the past years and they haven proven it once more this time. If you're looking for a dedicated server in Germany, I can strongly recommend them.

On Picture Arena

December 29, 2007 - Filed in Status updates, Mac Development, Inside the company by Felix

Due to the lack of demand for Picture Arena and a much different market situation for photo management solutions compared to when Picture Arena had originally entered the market, I've decided to abandon all plans to develop new versions of Picture Arena for the time being. Picture Arena will stay available through the Picture Arena Website, so those in need of a license can get one.

I've not made that decision light-heartedly, but after carefully considering all of the pros and cons, I believe it's the right and only responsible decision.

There's the changed market situation (Adobe®, Apple® and Microsoft® entered the market), the low demand for Picture Arena in general (in 2007, less than 3% of the sales at IOSPIRIT were Picture Arena sales; development costs have never been recovered to date), the fact that no sufficient amount of time is available for intense Picture Arena development (all of my time is currently going into Remote Buddy's development and taking care of my obligations as IOSPIRIT's CEO) and lots of work would have to be done before new features can be added (stabilize the new core framework I've been working on for over a year, rewrite all user interface and database code to use modern Cocoa APIs and the new core framework - Picture Arena is all Carbon-based currently).

A lot of additional time and money would have to be put into the development of future versions, while it has little to no chance to sell any better than before because of the market situation. The problem with saturated markets is this: unless the existing solutions are totally miserable, you'll need to pump a lot of money into promotion efforts to raise awareness for your product. Plus nobody who is relatively satisfied / has arranged with what he has will seek for alternatives by themselves or switch from a solution he's already comfortable with using. In this case, none of the available solutions on the market are really miserable, one of them ships for free with every new Mac® and all competitors have a huge amount of money and manpower available to them that they can pump into promotion and development efforts. That's not exactly a good position to start from.

Some of you may wonder what has happened to Picture Arena since its last public release in November 2005. The answer is: a lot. I've developed a new, Cocoa-based framework that eventually should become the basis of future versions of Picture Arena. By now, it can handle all relevant color spaces (RGB, CMYK, ..), is fully color managed, offers fine grained control for loading, saving and manipulating metadata, completely abstracts the filesystem, is entirely thread-safe, integrates efficient APIs for working on image data from multiple threads at the same time, embeds a thread-safe SQLite-Cocoa wrapper, a highly efficient, transactional, but very simple database engine of its own, runs on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs, offers memory- and CPU-efficient links to Quartz, Core Image, ColorSync and more. I've also worked a lot on Picture Arena's user interface, localizations and the editing tools available in Picture Arena.

Yet, stabilizing that private build and bringing it in a state where a public upate can be created from it would still require a considerable amount of time. Please don't ask me for a copy of the private build, as I won't hand out software that has known stability issues. I have attached a few screenshots of the private build for public consumption, though. And while I won't exclude the possibility that I'll find the time to finish that last update to Picture Arena at some point in the future, I can't promise it, which is why, for the time being, officially version 1.3.5 of Picture Arena is the last release of Picture Arena.

While the development of Picture Arena has officially ended for the time being, the development of Remote Buddy couldn't be any more active. Remote Buddy has covered its development costs and generated profit since the day of its release and is by now the product at the heart of IOSPIRIT. It has brought IOSPIRIT an amazing second half of 2006 and an even more amazing 2007. Looking at the (secret) roadmap for 2008, I see frequent updates to Remote Buddy and a lot of extraordinary gems being part of them. The next update to Remote Buddy, which - among other things - features a set of completely new drivers and fixes the few remaining glitches when used under Leopard, will of course be a free update and is out soon.

Photos from the Mac Live Expo 2007

November 22, 2007 - Filed in Inside the company by Felix

Rethinking support - differently!

October 18, 2007 - Filed in Inside the company by Felix

So, back in 2001 I started writing the suite of custom software that has been powering IOSPIRIT ever since it existed. In 2003, I started a new project called "Callisto", a website engine that is completely object-based and that powers IOSPIRIT's website to date.

Over the years, it has become very, very powerful and extremely flexible allowing IOSPIRIT to be very reactive to new marketing and sales techniques as well as new web technologies.

But then I haven't touched or updated some of its parts for quite some time. The contact form is a nice example for that. It began to look dated and actually became a real efficiency problem as the interest into the products began to grow rapidly: as a dedicated suport desk coexisted with it, many visitors could not decide which one to use. So, what had to happen did happen: the support desk interface was used for general pricing inquiries and support inquiries would be transmitted through the contact form. Many visitors would submit their question or comments to both.

I've then put up a gentle note below the contact form that users should use the support desk for support inquiries, but not everybody would see it. And even if they did, I'd still receive a lot of inquiries that were already dealt with in the FAQs or for which a dedicated web interface exists (i.e. the license code remailer).

The core message I gathered from all this is: customers see the contact form as the primary place of getting into touch with a company - regardless of subject.

So if I wanted higher efficiency and customer satisfaction, it was time to rethink support!

This is what I ended up with:

• The contact form now asks customers to pick the topic of their inquiry.
• Depending on the topic, either more or less fields are displayed that ask for information that would otherwise have required an additional Q&A mail exchange.
• In the case of problems receiving order-related mails, users are now directly informed about the two main causes (bogus spam filters - huhu Hotmail! - and delays in receipt that we're not to blame for, for example if greylisting is used on the receiving server)
• The support desk has been integrated into the contact form.
• As a special gem for both our customers and us, the integrated support desk interface now uses AJAX techniques to do a live search in the FAQs. While a customer is still typing to describe a problem or ask a question, possibly relevant FAQ entries - if any - will pop up below. So if the user is about to ask a frequently asked question, he'll likely already be presented the answer before he even finishes typing the question!

The key benefits of the AJAX based support desk as I see them:

• customers asking FAQs have a high chance to receive an answer - faster than ever before
• the number of inquiries containing questions that were already dealt with in the FAQs has dropped significantly
• everybody saves precious time without having to accept any kind of tradeoff

Being the object oriented system that Callisto is, it was easy to integrate the context-sensitive FAQ into other services, so I integrated it into the forum as well.

Enjoy! :-)