I have create a page for TuneSleeve on FaceBook, so you are welcome to come by and visit!

Hint: you’ll find a coupon code for a discount on that page.

It’s been a little more than 3 months since I said “this summer should be dedicated to TuneSleeve”. The summer being over, I feel it is now time for a status report.

First and foremost, I must admit that I did not work on TuneSleeve as much as I had intended to during the summer. But the good news is that I am heads down in the code right now, and intend to release a new version before Christmas, and another one shortly after.

Here is what can be expected in the short term (version 1.1):

• Ability to set a minimum size for downloaded images
• Ability to specify which international Amazon catalog should be queried
• Support for Windows 64 bits
• Display the size of each downloaded image
• Ability to cancel any ongoing operation
• Local caching of images that have been downloaded so they don’t need to be downloaded again when TuneSleeve is restarted.
• Better resilience to errors returned by iTunes
• Diagnostic logs to help me troubleshoot problems
• Better download performance
• Better image saving performance on Windows Vista

This will be a free upgrade to existing users.

Stay tuned!

As you are gearing up for school, filling your backpack with all the essentials to help you get through the semester, it is the perfect time to use TuneSleeve to download all that missing artwork in your iTunes library so you can enjoy your iPod or iPhone at its best!

Even more so with the TuneSleeve back-to-school promotion: use the coupon BACK2SCHOOL when buying TuneSleeve and get a 10% discount on your order. This offer is valid until September 16th, 2007.

Have a great semester!

Although Blogger has been a great host for this blog, I have decided to move it over to the main Polkapps web site.

The new site is not quite ready yet, but Polkapps News already has it’s own space over there.

Since the feed for this blog is provided by FeedBurner, current subscribers should not have to modify their settings unless you have subscribed in the first 2 days of this blog’s existence. If that is the case, please update your subscribtion to the feed address listed below:

The official URL for the feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/polkapps

The official URL for Polkapps News will now be: http://www.polkapps.com/blog

Well, it has already been one full month since the first commercial release of TuneSleeve! So far, the experience has been very positive and the results are encouraging. I am more motivated than ever to work on version 2.0 of TuneSleeve, which will include many of the most frequently requested features. I should be able to start working on version 2.0 as soon as I am done with the non-programming tasks that kept me busy during the past month:

• Paperwork
• Shopping for web hosting
• New website design
• Submission on download sites
• Feature roadmap

Most of these tasks are already behind me, so this summer should be dedicated to TuneSleeve!

• Now excluding audiobooks from the list of tracks to process.

Download

• 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