Currently, none of our products are enabled to work on Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion". The core APE component part works, but that's useless without haxies and it's disabled because of it. So it'll be a few weeks or a few months before we get these into beta.

Some haxies require significant work to "fit-in" with the rest of Lion. As such, haxies that require significant work will not be a free upgrade to registered users of earlier versions. However, the upgrade discount will remain at 33%.

However, every person that uses the 45% discount coupon (LION-PREPARE) on our store will not have to pay again on haxies that will require a upgrade charge. And there will be more than one haxie with an upgrade charge.

We are also tracking the usage of the LION-PREPARE coupon discount code and which products it is applied to. We will release updates/betas in order of the number of times LION-PREPARE was used for each product. VOTE EARLY, VOTE OFTEN!

Again, currently, nothing we sell is enabled to work on Lion.

You can follow the betas for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion progress by following @haxies or @haxiesbeta on the Twitter.

We do not currently have a time table for releases. Our ETA is based solely on how often LION-PREPARE is used as a discount code. LION-PREPARE currently expires on December 1st, 2011.

To get a 45% discount on purchases, Just use coupon code LION-PREPARE (or go directly to https://www.unsanity.com/store/coupon/LION-PREPARE to have it automatically filled entered) when checking out. Final discounted price is shown right before purchase. Do not combine with lower discounts.

45% is a larger number than 33%, so use this discount instead of any upgrade discount for which you may currently be eligible.

On another note, our products will likely never be on MAS unless Apple allows software that has its own installer, software that installs plugins, and software that asks for admin privs to install.. I mean, they allow the Mac OS X Lion installer, Xcode 4.2, and Final Cut Pro X, which violates all of these, but that's ok, it's Apple doing it.

Please to not hesitate to contact us if you have questions. But please note responses may be slow while we work on getting the betas ready for Lion.

I closed comments on other articles due to spam.

 Posted by rosyna at 06:23 PM | Comments (104) | TrackBack (0)

I've seen some complains from people about us seeding betas on Twitter and how it is inconvenient for some of you.

Why are we bothering with the whole Twitter thing? Mostly because… it saves us time. With the recent addition of @haxiesbeta Twitter account it's now easier to seed these betas — you sign up, we approve your request, and then you instantly see the links to all the current versions of stuff in testing. With e-mail lists it was fairly tedious to manage, prepare and send notifications. So yes, I guess we're just using the opportunity to save the time to do something more productive.

We don't expect the beta period to be long. We also don't urge everyone to jump on the beta train. Pre-release versions of the software tend to be buggy and may cause instability of your system (we try really hard to not allow that, but it's software, and it's fairly complex). After all, in 2-3 weeks we will release everything publically (hopefully) and it will be a much more polished experience - thanks to our testers.

Meanwhile, Xounds for 10.6 is preparing to enter the beta stage, and we've seeded FruitMenu and Labels X updates, with WindowShade X beta update to be out later tonight.

Thanks for sticking with us!

 Posted by slava at 08:47 AM | Comments (238)

Just a quick (Extended Twitter style) status update on the current state of haxies.

Labels X beta has been seeded to the testers who has volunteered on Twitter.

Tomorrow, WindowShade X will be seeded, followed by FruitMenu and Xounds (both next week if everything goes as expected).

Then we'll work on finalizing these haxies, release them publically and will switch to other titles requiring attention.

Thank you, this is it for now. :)

 Posted by slava at 06:03 AM | Comments (287)

When I look out to the window, all I see is snow. And cars. And people. And lots of other things, but the snow prevails. It's not too unusual for this time of the year - the white substance naturally comes as a part of the bundle the nature calls "winter" here (by "here", I mean St.Petersburg, Russia, of course).

I can't say I am a big fan of the whole snow thing. Yep, skiing is fun, but the overall "freeze your butt off for 4 months of the year" experience is getting old and boring very, very fast.

However, there's an animal that enjoys snow (or at least that's the common concept about it - who knows what it thinks about snow in reality). By coincidence, the name of that animal have been picked by Apple for their last edition of Mac OS X - 10.6 - the one many of us already use and love. Or hate.

Either way, this brings us to the topic of… haxies. They haven't been updated for ages. Some have not even been updated for Mac OS X 10.5 (for a reason). And we're taking this opportunity to rewrite some of our most popular haxies for the latest and greatest OS ever.

While they are not yet ready for public consumption (even in the public beta form), I'd like to share what we've accomplished so far and also clarify on our plans.

First of all, future versions of our haxies will be compatible with 10.6 only - we're dropping 10.5 and below. If you still use an older version of an OS, you can keep using the versions we currently have out. The reason is simple - many haxies have ancient and scary code dating back to 2002. The APIs in the system have changed so much during these 8 years the code became increasingly hard to maintain - heck, some of it is no longer used because the OS has evolved but it is still there. Granted that we're now moving into 64 bit space, with lots of system calls being deprecated, it's a good time to re-engineer the code. As a side effect, we lose compatibility with the older revisions of the Mac OS X. On the bright side, however, it gives us a chance to clean up code and use more modern technologies, where available - such as Core Animation, for example.

Second, our team got bigger - we welcome one of the experts in the Mac OS X low-level programming, Cyril Murzin, to our team.

So what is the current state of things?

We got Application Enhancer working solidly under Snow Leopard - in both 32 and 64 bit modes. Obviously this was the first thing that had to be done - without it, other haxies just won't work. This part is considered done, and it ate most of the time to accomplish.

WindowShade X was largely redone, with the MIP system rewritten from scratch. It is currently in the internal beta, and requires some more attention before I could consider it "publically consumable".

FruitMenu is now in caring hands of Rosyna. It will tell you about it later, I guess. From what I can say, it runs, yet some things still have to be fixed about it.

Labels X was rewritten from scratch, and this one is probably the one closest to the public beta stage at the moment. Yes, it can colorize icons, change label colors (and they change live in the Finder), turn on and off these label bubbles -- basically, everything you expect.

Mighty Mouse is due a renewal -- Jason is rumored to work on it in February when he gets some spare time from his insanely busy schedule.

Other haxies are currently on hold. As soon as we're done with the above mentioned ones, we'll switch to our other paid haxies. I am not yet sure whether it will be possible to keep Xounds or ShapeShifter alive, however, we will keep you posted here.

You can also follow us (@haxies) on Twitter - it usually contains more inside and up-to-date information. You can also communicate with us there.

And last but not least, thank you for being here and being our inspiration. You guys rock.

 Posted by slava at 12:13 AM | Comments (410)

Here's a bit of the ol' ThemePark 4, now with Snow Leopard compatibility. If you're tired of Aqua, you can use ThemePark 4 to change your UI to whatever you'd like. ThemePark will even apply your changes safely to your operating system for you.

• ThemePark 4.1 (925kb)
  

ThemePark 4 can:

• Safely apply themes created by other ThemePark users;
• Edit the ArtFile, SArtFile and Extras files that underlie the appearance of Mac OS X;
• Easily merge multiple themes together to mix and match appearances;
• Integrate with Adobe Photoshop^™ and Illustrator^™ for easy editing;
• Convert between the Snow Leopard and the Leopard versions of SArtFile;
• Edit many theme images at once for easy modification;

Oh, and ThemePark 4 is also completely free, at least for now!

So what about the rest of Unsanity's products?

Unfortunately, I won't be updating ShapeShifter for Snow Leopard, nothing has changed since Leopard was released and so my previous rationale still applies. Fortunately, ThemePark 4, which is free, still allows some level of theme creation.

However, Unsanity is still hard at work on Snow Leopard compatibility for the rest of our stuff and will be announcing availability as things become ready. Look for posts from Slava and Rosyna about WindowShade, FruitMenu, FontCard, Labels X, Menu Master, and Xounds in the near future, and watch for something from me about Mighty Mouse.

In the meantime, happy theming!

 Posted by jason at 11:03 AM | Comments (329)