Stick Software News 

February 2004 edition.  Copyright © 2004 Stick Software. 

A service of Stick Software, http://www.sticksoftware.com/
Contact Stick Software at our support email address

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Howdy! We've recovered from the holidays here at Stick Software, and we've got a little news for you!

We updated two products since last newsletter: Eyeballs and Trisection. The update to Eyeballs is the biggest, both because Eyeballs is our most popular product (really!), and because it is a major update worthy of a spanking new whole-number version, 3.0:


Eyeballs 3.0:  Eyes that keep you company

Download Eyeballs (1.5 MB)   mirror
More Information on Eyeballs
VersionTracker's Page on Eyeballs
Price: $10 (Kagi) (PayPal)

Eyeballs is a fun Mac OS X application that gives you a set of eyeballs in your menu bar or on your desktop. The eyes watch the cursor move around as you work. They get sleepy depending on how busy you're keeping the cursor, and they blink periodically. They are extremely configurable, in terms of the colors they use, their eyelid and pupil style, how sleepy they are, and a bunch of other things (see the configuration panel snapshot below). If those configuration options aren't enough, custom skins are also supported! Here are a few examples:

This is a skin called "Aqua Blueberry" that shows a very simple skin design. The eyeballs are living on the desktop in this image, but they can live in your menu bar, too!

This is a more unusual skin called "JetBlack", with stylized eyebrows and non-circular pupils.

These skins, called "Eyegor" and "Cobweb", illustrate just how wacky skins can be!

There are more skins built into Eyeballs (including eyes in all five Aqua colors: Blueberry, Strawberry, Grape, Tangerine and Lime). The skins in Eyeballs 3.0 were designed by Max Rudberg of MaxThemes and Kevin Husted of Swizcore Studio. If you like their skins, please let them know! Right now we don't have any third-party downloadable skins, but when we do (maybe from you!), we'll link to them from Eyeballs' home page.

If you want to design your own eyeballs, but you're not enough of an artist to draw your own skin, you can make a "personality" by just choosing colors and settings. Here are three personalities, named Zaphod, Kermit, and Twitch:

      

By the way, version 3.0 of Eyeballs adds the use of registration codes. Users who had registered for previous versions of Eyeballs may not have a code yet (we tried to email codes to all our registered users, but often such emails get classified as spam and never get seen). If you find that you need a code once you upgrade to 3.0, just use our registration code request form, or drop us an email!

New from the previous version:

  • Added skin support (and nine built-in skins!)
  • Added several new personality controls
  • Fixed a few minor bugs with right-clicking, window layering, etc.

Trisection 1.2:  A fast-action puzzle game

Download Trisection (6.3 MB)   mirror
More Information on Trisection
VersionTracker's Page on Trisection
Price: $15 (Kagi) (PayPal)

Trisection is a game for Mac OS X that was inspired by Tetris. You have to rotate and position the falling triangles to try to make areas that are all one color. It takes more thought than Tetris, and it has more variety. Tetris will make your hands hurt; Trisection will make your brain hurt. It includes lots of sound effects and background photographs.

New from the previous version:

  • Adds localizations for French and Dutch
  • No bugs fixed because no bugs were reported!

Our RSS feed

If you'd like to hear about Stick Software news as soon as it happens, instead of waiting for the next newsletter, you might want to try the Stick Software RSS feed. If you're unfamiliar with RSS feeds, you're not alone. But they are rapidly growing in popularity as a way for users to stay on top of news items from diverse sources. In general, an RSS feed is a stream of news items that users around the planet can watch. Whenever a new item is added to the feed, the user watching the feed is notified by a service running on their machine. It also has the added benefit of not depending upon your email address, so when you change your address, your RSS subscriptions still work.

If you're interested, download an RSS-compatible newsreader (we suggest NetNewsWire Lite), add Stick Software's RSS feed link to the list of feeds you are subscribed to, and you're good to go. Don't click on the feed link below (it will look like gibberish in your browser); copy and paste it into your RSS newsreader instead.

    http://www.sticksoftware.com/news/rss.xml   

Enjoy!


Until next time...

We hope everybody enjoyed their holiday season. We're looking forward to the end of the rain here, and the beginning of spring! Those of you under six feet of snow are probably looking forward to that even more, though... we can't really complain. My wife and I went for a nice walk today, in-between rainstorms, with our housemates' two-year-old daughter, who has a fascination with palm trees and wants to be shown all of the palm trees in the neighborhood (but is afraid to touch them)!

If you've got ideas, comments, bug reports, or anything else you'd like us to see, send a note to our support email address.

Thanks for your support. Word of mouth is essential to our survival as a shareware developer. If you can help spread the word to your friends, your co-workers, or your favorite Mac OS X websites and newsletters, it would be greatly appreciated!

 
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