Lithoglyph

Hi there,

We realized that Mondrianum 1.0b5 had expired on June 14–just as when we were on the trip back home to Taipei. We know, we did that again–quite a disappointment to many, and we learned that it even caused some frustration. A software developer always feels glad that his or her work is being helpful in people’s daily work and life, but also feels the pain when it causes inconvenience–our sincere apology for our lapse in this matter.

So today we’ve released the next version of Mondrianum, 1.0b6. This version once again extends the expiration date to September 30, 2008. Its watered-down Tiger sibling is available at this link, please download and copy the .colorPicker bundle to the ColorPickers folder under the Library of your home folder.

We have received some inquiries on when we’re going to be real, i.e. starting accepting payment and issuing registration code and stoping all those endless expiration thingy, or whether we’ll make it free at all… honestly, it’s still a tough question, just like we’ve explained a while ago. Such is the nature of any desktop application these days that depends on a web service. The API provider’s rights and decisions are to be respected. And we hope to bring out the best for the user.

Once again, our apologies to any inconvenient caused. And thank you all for the support of Mondrianum!

A quick update of Mondrianum: the latest 1.0b5 (download here) extends the expiration date to June 14, 2008. The same goes for its Tiger version (download here and move the unzipped bundle to your /Library/ColorPickers).

We made a mistake when we were packaging 1.0b4, so the Installer script would tell you that the installed product would expire in end March, which was not right–although it didn’t affect the real function, it was indeed a bad thing that caused confusion. Sorry about that! Hopefully the next releases will be smoothier, and thanks again for bearing with us for the rough edges!

It’s been a week past April 1st. We know, we know–the last version of our color plug-in, Mondrianum, had expired on that date (and having used Taipei time, it was many hours ahead of many people’s timezone).

We have always liked to idea of desktop-Internet integration, and Mondrianum is one of the little ideas that turns out to be a very useful tool for many people. It makes Adobe’s kuler instantly available to many desktop applications on Mac.

We have been thinking of making Mondrianum a commercial product since Day 1 (Day 0 actually, being programmer speak). As kuler requires developers to obtain the permission to use its API for commercial purposes, we’re now working on the process of getting it.

We do have some urgent tasks at hand for the past two weeks, but we shouldn’t have let the expiration slipped in at the first place. We apologize if it has caused any inconvenience to you.

Ok, that’s the thing. For the Leopard version of Mondrianum, we have come up with yet another interim release that extends the expiration date to May 15, 2008 (GMT, not Taipei Time this time :). And also after some debating, we have decided to release a trial Tiger version–a functional version without the cover flow component that its Leopard sibling has. That is an intended omission as we have tried a few replacement ideas, none of which worked really that well.

So for Leopard users, just download the latest disk image from here. For Tiger users, please also download the image for documentation. As for the color picker itself, here’s the Tiger version. Just drop the decompressed file to your ~/Library/ColorPickers folder, and that’s it.

Thanks for everyone’s encouragement and interest in our humble plug-in.