• Minor modifications to the license management engine.

Download

I would like to use this public forum to thank everyone who donated money to me while TuneSleeve was free. Without you, I would probably not have decided to take TuneSleeve to the next level. In every donation I saw a token of appreciation for my work, like a friendly tap on the back.

Everyone who donated will shortly receive an email with a free, perpetual license for TuneSleeve. This means that every version of TuneSleeve to ever be released will be free for you!

I will be sending out those emails before the end of the week. If you have donated money and have not received your free license by the end of May, please contact me and I will make sure to send you your license.

Once again, thank you!

[Update: 2007-05-24] The emails have been sent. If you have donated money and don’t see an email from Polkapps in your inbox, please contact me!

During the past few weeks, I’ve been busy evaluating eCommerce solutions for selling TuneSleeve. I finally chose eSellerate, as their processing fees were not so bad for the services they offer. And one major selling point for me was that their product licensing engine is available for Windows and Mac. Why is that important, you ask? Well, I’ll let your imagination work a bit here until I have more to say about it.

So Polkapps now uses eSellerate as its online store provider, and trial/registered manager for TuneSleeve. From all the testing I did, everything works just great. I hope that the experience will be as smooth for my customers!

Now that this administrative task is behind me, I’ll be able to focus on the new features that I have planned for TuneSleeve, as well as some new projects. More on that later!

Since I announced that I wanted to sell TuneSleeve instead of offering it for free, I have had a few comments (on this blog and via email) about how bad a decision that was. Those comments generally mention how bad this is for the freeware movement, and that it is sad that such a great product won’t be free anymore.

I don’t want to get into a religious debate here, but let me clarify my decision: I was pleased to offer TuneSleeve for free, as it had initially been done as a hobby. But during the past year, I have received a lot of feature requests, most of which are pretty interesting and which I believe would please many people.

Unfortunately, I was not able to commit any time to work on TuneSleeve as a hobby, as I have 2 young kids, a full-time day job and a house to renovate that all keep me pretty busy. In the end of the day, having close to zero time to spend on hobbies, I preferred to spend that time on something else. In order to allocate quality time to improving TuneSleeve, I had to free up a couple of evenings a week.

So, I was faced with 2 choices: either leave TuneSleeve as it was, with no new features and no bug fixes, but free. Or start asking some real money for it, and in return provide some real development time on it to make it better and better.

I really wanted to see TuneSleeve improve, so this is why I chose the second option.

Will it work and be worthwhile? Only time will tell. But for now, I am thrilled to start this new adventure of having my own company and “real” paying customers to whom I am commited to providing great customer service, and a great product that will evolve over time.

• First commercial release of TuneSleeve by Polkapps.
• Now presenting a user-friendly message when iTunes is not installed on the computer running TuneSleeve.

Download

• An error that occurs while downloading album images no longer prevents the user to save the images that have been successfully downloaded.
• Improved stability when used with a dial-up or unstable internet connection.

Download

It has been nearly one year since I’ve published TuneSleeve, my album art importer for iTunes, on the web. I had originally developped this application for my own needs but figured that other people might find it useful as well, so I decided to offer it for free and accept voluntary donations.

Today, I can say that the experience was very positive and worthwhile. Not necessarily from a revenue stand point (I won’t be leaving my day job any time soon), but I have gathered quite a few happy users who expressed their appreciation of TuneSleeve.

Of course, I also got feedback from a lot of users about things that did not work quite right for them in the application. My typical response to them had been “this is a known problem in the current version of TuneSleve and will be fixed in the next version”, without promising any release dates for the “next version” in question.

And weeks became months, during which I pasted my canned reply to user after user submitting the same bugs or feature requests, without actually doing anything about it. I do have good reasons for letting the TuneSleeve code rot on my hard drive for so long (young kids, busy day job and major renovations being top of the list), but as I got more and more daily downloads (and more and more bug reports), I felt like I should really do something about it.

So last week I fixed the most frequently reported problem in TuneSleeve, which affected users on a dial-up or unstable internet connection. There was a problem in the error-handling code of the image query/download process which prevented users from saving the images that had successfully made their way when a single image would fail.

As I was posting version 1.0.6 on the download page, I realized that I did not have a place on my site to advertise this new version and post the release notes for it. This simple problem triggered a series of thoughts and ideas which ultimately led to Polkapps.

Polkapps is the name of the company that I’ve just started, under which I will continue the development of TuneSleeve as well as some other projects that I have in mind. Starting a company represents a commitment, to my users as well as to myself, that I will spend serious time on TuneSleeve, adding cool features and fixing bugs on a regular basis.

It also means that TuneSleeve won’t remain free forever, as my goal is to move beyond the “application-developed-during-my-spare-time” state and provide professional-grade applications with prompt technical support and everything users can expect from a serious software company for applications they paid for.

My plans are not quite set in stone yet, but one thing is for sure: it won’t take another year before you see an update to TuneSleeve!

I invite you to keep an eye on this blog to follow the history of Polkapps as it is being made!