Announcement : Phix Software – Reality Distorting Software.

UIC Phoenxsoftware is known to rise from its ash time after time. that’s why I picked the name in 2005. (Actually it should be phoenixsoftware, but the “i” got lost somewhere along the way.)
We rose from the ash when we dropped windows development almost completely and left a number of successful freeware products behind with it resulting in a stable and self sustaining business on Mac OSX and iOS. We rose from the ash when we were hit by a copyright claim from the nice folks at KONAMI for our most successful product at that time iDuelpro, resulting in a 70% drop in revenue. And now we are ready to reimagine Phoenxsoftware for the third time, this time by rebranding UIC Phoenxsoftware to Phix Software.

This giant step comes not only with a new name, but also with a completely redesigned website and more focus on our commercial products. It also means we will release more serious products and have a bigger budget for marketing and more focused management. With the Mac OSX application we will release in a few days we take a first step in this new era.

Not all changes are positive for everyone. Our Windows users will have to settle with a lot less supported apps and some are even completely removed from our website.

Only the following products will be supported, maintained and get their own spot on the new site: MonoPhix (lite), MonoPhix HD, FlashPhix (lite), GrayPhix, iDuelpro (lite), Lingi, iDuelpro for Mac, Duelpro, 36-image express, SpeedShut, ROC and hur.lu and of course our new app.

The following products have been put on a dedicated “archive” page for deprecated software but are still available for download: 36-image converter, LockPhix, LoadDown, FileTorment, CachePhix, MPhix. These applications are no longer supported so we can’t provide mail support for these and waive all responsibility.

The following products are declared dead and aren’t available for download anymore on our site: FileTorment Suite 2006, FileTorment Suite 2007, PhBrowser, Blastgen Beta, older versions of Duelpro, InfoBlaster IN4.

I am certain these changes will benefit the user and will also give us a competitive edge. You can head over to our new site for a look around and check out the products that you didn’t even know existed.

Black Friday sale on all iOS apps. 100% off MonoPhix, MonoPhix HD, FlashPhix, Lingi, iDuelpro!

All our apps are currently free for Black Friday, so enjoy. The sale will automatically end November 26th.

Here’s a list of all apps with download links:

Photography Apps

• MonoPhix (0.99$->0$) – The most powerful black & white app out there.
• MonoPhix HD (1.99$ -> 0$) - The most powerful black & white app out there. (for iPad)
• FlashPhix (0.99$ -> 0$) – Cross processing, automatic correction and lighting control in one easy app.

(There’s one app missing here, “iPhix” but the app has to be updated pretty badly and I highly discourage anyone downloading it)

Games and gaming aids:

• Lingi (0.99$->0$) – A language game for young and old to easily learn Dutch, French or English.
• iDuelpro (0.99$->0$) – The most popular Yu-gi-oh! TCG scorekeeper in the world.

So go and get your future favorite app for free while you can!

Apologies for the inactivity, clarification and how I’ll make up for it.

A few months ago I promised to release a Mac and Windows version of MonoPhix before the summer holidays and maybe some new apps and updates. Sadly it’s the first month of the summer holidays yet and I haven’t released anything yet.

There weren’t any hickups in the development process that caused the delays, I’ll explain what actually was the issue and it’s rather personal.
I’ve been developing software for 6 years now, completely on my own with once in a while a good soul as temporary aid. And that brings with it that the release cycles are rather quirky and dependent on the time I have at hands or on how I’m feeling. Personal issues have had a great impact on the release time of my software.

I just “graduated” less or more. (there are a few things which I still have to handle to get my degree) But this also meant that I had to get some things finished for school as well. A paper on digital image processing and an app accompanying it, I had to do a 3 month internship and there were some additional tasks. Now that’s what’s been delaying development from March and forth.

But that’s not the only thing. Lately there have been some drastic changes in my personal life which require my attention and which even made me lose track of sales and customer support. Some negative and some very positive but all and all a great shift which caused my concentration to reside somewhere at a sub zero level. Development has been halted for about 2 months now and is slowly coming back on track.

But of course it’s pretty annoying that you guys should suffer from this. Luckily I have a great community of users which kept sales alive and prevented bankruptcy during my “absence”. To thank you all for your patience I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. All apps will be free for an undetermined period of time (somewhere between 1-2 days). This means MonoPhix, MonoPhix HD, FlashPhix, iDuelpro, Lingi and iPhix all drop from their respective prices to 0$/0€ or whatever your currency is.

I would say, grab them while you can. If you don’t like them or don’t need them, don’t punch them into the ground with a 1 star rating and a rage comment in the App Store but just leave them be or drop me a mail on how I can improve them.

Enjoy the sale and of course the 4th of July for all Americans out there!

(download links to all apps can be found in the sidebar of this blog. If the apps aren’t on sale just yet, stand by it takes about an hour for the sales to be activated by iTunes)

iDuelpro – Yu-gi-oh! Calculator v4.7 live in the App Store.

We’ve seen the issues with the dice and coin in iDuelpro 4.6 pile up and it was time to take action of course. We can’t keep on supplying people with a useless dice and coin feature. So Monday we submitted a quick fix to the App Store which makes these features a lot more accurate an actually useable.

Together with the fix in the dice and coin simulation we also made some minor adjustments to optimize iDuelpro 4.7 for iPhone OS v3.1.2.

The new version is now available in the iTunes Store : iDuelpro 4.7

The Holidays and our apps!

During the holidays iPhone apps tend to do slightly better. How much? Well we’ve listed our apps and their increased popularity during the best day of December. Especially our Yu-gi-oh! calculator for iPhone, iDuelpro did excellent.

iDuelpro’s sales we’re up 400%. (Download)
iDuelpro lite’s sales we’re up 120%. (Download)
Lingi’s sales we’re up 120%. (Download)
iPhix’s sales were up 100%. (Download)
FlashPhix’s sales we’re up 60%. (Download)
GrayPhix’s sales we’re up 40%. (Download)
And MonoPhix was down… Maybe people aren’t looking for Black & White apps during the holidays. (Download)

This was on the 25th of December, makes me wonder what New Year will bring.

By the way, a happy 2010 to all of you!

iDuelpro Portuguese edition is available for download

Our Yu-gi-oh! calculator for iPhone, iDuelpro, is now available in Portuguese as well. This brings the most used yu-gi-oh! calculator for iPhone to Brazil where iDuelpro wasn’t available before because apps in the games section aren’t allowed in Brazil and hence do not appear in the Brazilian App Store. So we simply made a new version which is only available in Portugal and Brazil and does not appear in the games section. As a little extra we made a complete Portuguese translation of iDuelpro.

So to make a long story short, Brazilian and Portuguese people now have an iDuelpro in their own language!

A new Duelpro for Windows update has been pushed out as well today, this version already contains a download link to the (P) version of iDuelpro.

The normal iDuelpro and the iDuelpro (P) for Brazil and Portugal are both available in the iTunes App Store.

iDuelpro – Yu-gi-oh! Calculator for iPhone Download
iDuelpro – Calculador de Yu-gi-oh! para iPhone e iPod Touch Download

iDuelpro Yu-gi-oh! Lifepoints calculator soon available in Brazil

iDuelpro has been in all iTunes Stores worldwide for ages, at least we thought. For some reason, games aren’t allowed in the Brazilian iTunes Store and iDuelpro happens to be in this category. So to bypass this shitty Apple rule we made a special version for Portugal and indeed, Brazil.

This version will be in Portuguese and will be exactly the same as the current iDuelpro v3.6 for iPhone and iPod Touch. In this way we can provide the biggest market for the Windows version, Duelpro, with a great lifepoints calculator as well.

As a result of this we will also adapt Duelpro for Windows to display the two iDuelpro versions during install.

iDuelpro (P) (Portuguese Edition) will be available the 5th of January.

iDuelpro v3.6 Yu-gi-oh! calculator for iPhone/iPod Touch popular during the Holidays

Are it the dueling fanatics who get an early Christmas gift or are TCG’s becoming popular again? Anyway, iDuelpro was already popular, but it’s now even more popular and really becoming the killer Yu-gi-oh! App for iPhone & iPod Touch. The other versions for eg. Mac and Windows are also doing fantastic.

Especially the tons of extra features that the last updates brought are bringing a lot of extra Yu-gi-oh! and Magic! The Gathering players. We will even have to create a MTG variant of iDuelpro since the current version is more geared towards the Yu-gi-oh! TCG. But the fact that most versions except for the advanced iDuelpro for iPhone are free has something to do with the immense success and the nearly one million users worldwide.

Here’s an overview of all versions for several devices :
-iDuelpro Lite  for iPhone/iPod Touch (Free)
-iDuelpro for iPhone/iPod Touch (Price : 0.99$/0.79€/…) (Professional Version)
-Duelpro for Windows (Free)
-iDuelpro Mac for Mac OSX (Free)
-iDuelpro Widget for Mac OSX (Free)

iDuelpro for iPhone

Our iPhone app’s pages being translated to Dutch, French and German

Today we started the translation of many of our iPhone apps their iTunes Store pages. We are starting with the translation for the most popular apps to also translate the less popular apps later. So people of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, French Canadian, France and German iTunes Stores will soon be able to read the App Description in their own language.

The following iTunes pages have already be translated :
-MonoPhix – Black/White Image Editing App (Dutch, French, German)
-iDuelpro – Yu-gi-oh! Calculator (Dutch)
-Lingi – Language game (Dutch)

The two who aren’t translated to French and German yet will soon be translated as well.

When these translation are done, iDuelpro Lite, iPhix, FlashPhix and GrayPhix, will also be translated.

We might even translate all the descriptions to Spanish and Japanese as well to improve the internationalisation of the iTunes Store.

Phoenxsoftware halting Windows Development

We took the decision to halt the Windows development completely for the coming months. This decision is made because when developing for Mac and the iPhone I realized how bad Windows users are actually behaving towards developers. They come, download, don’t care and give a rant about how much you suck once in a while. The Mac community is much tighter and kinder towards developers. They give kind suggestions, they are understanding and they don’t care to pay for a well built app. The kind people at iPhoneography made me aware of this. When initiating iPhone development our monthly profit was multiplied by 30. By developing for the iPhone and Mac I made 6 new friends in 3 months instead of making enemies. So the decision is made rapidly when you have to choose between being disrespected and broke or being congratulated, aided and actually earning something.  No more rants for us!

This means that there will be no 36-image converter update anytime soon. Also Blastgen will be halted until further notice.

We are also going to stop the development completely for the next apps :
-FileTorment
-LoadDown
-SpeedShut
-LockPhix
-CachePhix

ROC will be continued and ported to Mac OSX. Duelpro will be integrated in the iDuelpro project and will be continued as well.

So Phoenxsoftware will downscale from a medium/big Windows developer to a small Mac developer. I look back in nostalgia to the days that Phoenxsoftware was big and that our servers were overloaded with downloads. Every month featured by another magazine, a million people using our software, and high hopes. But those days are completely over and Phoenxsoftware will be facing the future from now on. Which lies in Mac/iPhone development, shareware, services and technology.

We also wont be using the Mac & iPhone earnings anymore to fund Windows development but to renew our infrastructure to be geared towards Apple and towards the future.

I want to make clear that I have no hard feelings towards Microsoft as they are doing a fine job building great tools and making a platform far more superior to Apple’s when it comes to facilitating development, but the Windows community is a demon which has bothered me for years now.

Our new site should be finished soon to empower the change.