This is rather satisfying moment for us: we are glad to announce that today our app Essentials for Mac is released and live at the App Store. Its birth is entirely invoked because of pure necessity of our team. How to fight few Spaces with a whole a lot of the windows, few projects at the same time, different client strategy and few external discs and server? How to fight the urge to have dock full to the bone and desktop packed to its limits?! Not to mention constantly getting aggravated by constant file and document searching and finding a way through numerous folders and e-mail messages. It was hard as well to ignore one special, cold and obstructive mind cloud every time we had to go through some boring do-it-over-and-over-again-and-time-consuming actions: “I wish that I have an easy script making thingy….”. At first we wanted to make something small, light, customizable and fast that will suffice every member of our team, and of course, should be designed for Mac considering most of our work is done on OS X. You know the usual suspects: has to have groups, has to be customizable, has to be minimalistic to blend in beautiful OS X UX and must be “hot key thing”. And here we go…. Yup, that’s when the trouble started. And nooot in the good way. I’m joking of course.
Let me just say that THE THING or THE (HANDY) STUFF (we didn’t have the name for app ’cause each of us had its private little sweet name (oh, you don’t want to know it, trust me) that was unacceptable to anybody else, but those two code names were very clear) become some private project that was talked over our “real” projects. We knew that joke was gone when app customization came to moment when items and groups got to be colorized(!). After hearing us talk about it over and over again, our friends and business partners started to ask us “Wha…what is that STUFF you are talking about all the time? Is that some code name? Is…is that some project with non-disclosure agreement?” “Nah, that’s just….stuff.” we answered and showed the current beta version. Since everyone wanted to have it, we started to give it some serious thoughts. We actually searched the web for similar app so we might buy it and stop this nonsense that is taking all of our free time. At that time Mac App Store didn’t exist so we had to google keywords and whatnot. Surprisingly we didn’t find similar app right away and that took us by surprise. “The Stuff” appeared to us in a completely new light. We did not have time or resources to research more deeply about similar apps. To cut long story short, we decided to go commercial with the app.
We got good reviews from our beta testers, and tone of input. Bugs were fixed and then we heard that Mac App Store is coming….now that was a challenge. App was almost finished and then in some web surfing time (when we usually did our daily web research), we found two similar apps. BUT they were not what we needed. So, we were overwhelmed and continued to tweak “The Stuff”. The only problem was the name… After a few really good ones, that were already taken, name issue became saga that-I’m-too-much-sleep-deprived-over-it and I-swear-to-God-am-taking-telephone-directory-and-picking-first-name-I-poke ranting – continued. After 50 facepalms more, we finally got idea. Not for the name but how to get it, and what’s more important – how to agree about it. And that is closer we’ve ever been to actually having a real name. We asked ourself: if we’re doing it for OS X, it has to be like OS X in every way, so name would be simple, intuitive, clear, indicative, light, common, beautiful and one word. We got ourselves – Essentials. And that actually was the real beginning of the whole story. To be true to the end: it is past midnight here in Croatia, and rather exciting day is behind us. We released yet another baby into the World, so now it`s on its own… And it is going to grow, become real beauty and more and more skillful, adept, clever….
Hi. Just bought a copy of Essentials from the AS after trying the demo. Seems great. I used to use Overflow (a good app) but this appears to take things further. Many congratulations! GB