Official launch: Phix – Photo and filter sharing service.

Today we are pleased to announce the official launch of our Phix photo and filter sharing service. Phix has been online for quite a bit longer and iPhix for Mac users could enjoy it during that time, but today we feel it’s mature enough to launch officially. Especially since the redesigned homepage went online yesterday. At the moment only two apps support Phix, iPhix for Mac and MonoPhix HD for iPad, but the iPhone version of MonoPhix and others will follow very soon. It’s not out of beta yet, but that’s just because we are still improving the service every day.

What does Phix do that other photo sharing apps don’t?

Phix is not only a photo sharing app, but also allows people to share their complete history of changes they made to the original opened image in a “recipe”. In this way you can show people how you got the result you uploaded and how they can get the same result on their pictures. The online photo viewer automatically detects which app is used and shows the right recipe for your picture. Additionally you can also decide to display EXIF and location data. (Only supported by some apps) But the biggest strength of Phix is that it allows you to upload images without hassle and that you don’t need log in information and that it doesn’t ask for Twitter or Facebook credentials. It just “Share” > Add description > “Upload”. Phix will then return a short link to share back to the app.

How will people find the picture I upload to Phix?

Very simple, you get a shortlink to the viewer page of your picture which you can share on various social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Phix keeps track of all views your picture has and displays them at the bottom of the info box. Additionally, if your picture is nice or artistic enough it can be featured on the homepage mosaic where people can click on your picture and are redirected to the viewer page.

What improvements will be made in the future?

In the future people will be able to leave comments on your pictures and you will be able to create an account on the site where you can add the apps you are sharing pictures from. You will also be able to download recipes straight to your apps and they will automatically be applied. Of course there will also be a greater number of apps you can use to upload pictures.

If you want to try Phix for yourself, head over to the homepage and download one of the supported apps or you can check what other people uploaded.

iPhix for Mac free for one whole day. Grab it while you can and prepare for the Friday giveaways!

Since we are going to start our TGIF competition very soon and we need as many competitors as possible iPhix for Mac will be free one entire day the 7th of June.
More information about the TGIF twitter competition will appear in a later blogpost, but we can already tell that you can win a 15$ iTunes gift card or comparable price with it each Friday.

In the meanwhile download and enjoy iPhix, show it to your friends and prepare your best pictures and filter picking skills for the competition.

TGIF tradition, week 1: iPhix is off 75% to 0.99$ for one day.

Today our social photography app for Mac, iPhix is off 75%! This is the start of a tradition we’d like to get going on which requires people to post their pictures on Phix Cloud each friday to win great prizes.

So get over to the Mac App Store and grab it while you can -> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iphix/id513779082?mt=12

Or check the product page for more info about iPhix for Mac: http://phixsoft.com/iPhix/

Note: It can take some time for the price change to be reflected in the App Store. 

Apologies and story behind the Phixsoft/hurlu/iPhix Cloud issues of the past days.

Over the past few days a lot of twitter updates flew by warning people of downtime on the side and services that could become unreliable or go offline.

Here’s the story on what’s causing them:
The hosting of our sites hur.lu and phixsoft.com/phoenxsoftware.com is in the hands of a Belgium firm. They recently updated their product line and upgraded to more modern servers. So we send them a mail asking if they could transfer our hosting to a new server with more capacity. About 3 months later (2 weeks ago) we got a mail back that they could transfer the site. We were informed by colleagues that this would only take a few hours. In the end it took 2 weeks and about 20 emails to get them to transfer everything. But that’s not all.

All passwords and logins of our databases, the place where we keep our hur.lu links and your iPhix Cloud images, were all changed. So we had to change the service to use the new passwords a few hours ago. After those changes hur.lu worked again, but we noticed the hur.lu dependent iPhix Cloud upload service didn’t work at all. We believe they didn’t activate certain features we demanded that iPhix Cloud needs to store your images to a remote cloud server.

Another issue is that anything uploaded or changed after 04/25 has gone lost because they used a backup dating from 04/19 and we luckily made another backup of the old site a few days ago and manually restored some of the data.

This is all a horrible mess which also caused a 2 week delay in the release of iPhix 1.1, and we’d like to apologize for all possible damage that has been done and for the downtime of all services. All we can do is wait and hope that our web host will fix the issues. We hope to get iPhix Cloud back online by tomorrow.

New App: iPhix for Mac – Create art with every snap. (Filter/adjust/share)

We are proud to release a product that has been in development for half a year now, iPhix for Mac. iPhix is an app that allows you to easily apply a multitude of filters or adjustments to pictures and share them online in a matter of seconds. It’s build to be easy and fun to use for everyone. iPhix provides enough power for professional photographers but can also be used by beginning photographers with almost no editing experience.

Adjustments
There are a huge number of adjustment possibilities present in iPhix. In the adjustments window you can change brightness, exposure, saturation, tone, contrast and apply posterization, cross processing, vignetting, grain, a tilt shift effect or blur to your pictures. All these adjustments can be combined to create magnificent effects. Examples of these are in the preset filters window.

The filters
iPhix currently contains 10 preset filters and one preset filter you can customize and save and 7 so called “solid” filters. This amount will increase with future updates. Preset filters are filters which control the adjustments mentioned earlier and are used to quickly apply vintage or flashy effects on pictures. You can always finetune a preset filter in the adjustments window. With the custom preset filter you can record and save a number of adjustments to create your own preset. The preset filters are called: Vivant, Deep Colors, Aged, Toned, Vintage, Mono, Noir, Expired, Daguerre, Sepia and Custom.

Solid filters are filters which are applied on the image and aren’t adjustable. Some solid filters can be adjusted in intensity though. These filters are much more invasive and transform your picture into a drawing for example. The solid filters are: Bizarre, Dots, Pop, Lithography, Edgy, Cutout and Inverse.

Sharing
Sharing has never been faster with iPhix. Most people have their social networking apps or pages open at any time, so why bother people with a “Log in to Facebook to share this picture”-dialog?
What the iPhix sharing options does is upload your picture to our iPhix Cloud servers instantaneously and provide you with a short link to your picture an online iPhix picture frame. All you have to do is copy the link to TweetDeck, Twitter, Facebook, Mail or anywhere you want.

Saving
When opening a picture for adjusting you expect everything to stay the same, except for the things you change. Therefore iPhix remembers your EXIF data and saves it along with your adjusted image. Your lens, aperture, flash settings, camera type, … all will be saved. iPhix also cuts the process of selecting a save filetype for you, all files are saved in the same filetype as the one they were opened in. Additionally it restores corrupted image orientations to ensure that your picture is always the right way up.

Device requirements
iPhix for Mac should run on any Mac built after 2008 running Mac OSX 10.6 or Mac OSX 10.7. iPhix is tested on Lion and is also optimized for it. The executable is only about 12Mb in size. An internet connection is also required for the sharing options.

Pricing and Availability
iPhix 1.0 is currently $3.99 (USD) and available exclusively through the Mac App Store in the Photography or Productivity categories. Interested writers, reviewers and editors of recognized sites can always request a promo code to check it out for themselves.

Download link : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iphix/id513779082?l=nl&ls=1&mt=12

Screenshots 

The iPhix aperture logo, the names "iPhix" and "iPhix Cloud" are property of Phix Software.

New 36-image converter, new iPhone apps, new everything!

As you all know, the development of 36-image converter is almost at end with the Beta coming at the beginning of November. But that’s not the only thing that’s coming. We have started development for 36-image converter 5.0, which comes with a new engine, a new interface and a completely new set of features.

We are also going to renew all our iPhone apps. GrayPhix, FlashPhix and MonoPhix are getting an engine update to support all image formats, iPhix will hit version 2.0 with support for large resolution images, transformations, more effects and a new interface. iDuelpro and iDuelpro Lite will hit version 4.0. And iDuelpro for Mac OSX will hit iDuelpro 2010 and will be a direct port from the iPhone.

Maybe the biggest change will be that our site will be completely revamped and pushed to the edge of design and browser standards. Remember the old 3 year old site and its ads, frames and flaws as it will disappear somewhere next month. If you want to see how progress is coming along with the new site you can go to http://www.phoenxsoftware.com/mainsite_new/

After this everything will be as it should have been from the beginning, a 36-image converter with no flaws (except for flaws people are creating of course), a whole bunch of worthy iPhone apps, a Duelpro on each platform which takes a huge leap forward from many other yugioh LPC’s and a site which has the design our users are used to.

After this, the road is open for completely new apps and features.

Happy Birthday UIC Phoenxsoftware!

Today UIC Phoenxsoftware can blow out three candles as it was founded as Phoenixsoft on 21 October 2005.

Many things have changed since that wet day three years ago. We started as a freewebs website with only 5 visitors a day. Our software collection consisted of Duelpro 2005.5 the first Duelpro, Atom Disassembler a scientific tool to disassemble atoms into neutrons/protons and PhBrowser. We registered a .com domain after a few months and that was the beginning of UIC Phoenxsoftware. Our first releases then were Duelpro 2006.2 and 36-image converter 1.0. 

Now those first releases have more than 500.000 users worldwide and are amongst the top in their category. The 5 visitors a day have evolved into 500 visitors a day over the past three years and our software collection now consists out of 12 applications SpeedShut, SpeedShut lite, 36-image converter, Duelpro, CachePhix, Mphix, LockPhix, FileTorment, PhBrowser, FileTorment Suite 2006/2007, InfoBlaster IN4 and LoadDown. They all contributed to the massive amount of visitors.

Now that we are at the dawn of a new era with new products as have been never seen before, we will totally refresh our strategy and once again develop in a way we like instead of working hard to finish a version every few days to maintain popularity for a public of users who are hardly satisfiable. 

As a present to our users we will release add the License key of LockPhix to the LockPhix DashBoard, making it free.

You have enjoyed the last three years as well as we, let us enjoy the comings years even more!

Kind Regards to all our users,

Renzo Verleysen
Head Development and Administration
UIC Phoenxsoftware and iPhix Development