Hi! Some of you may have been wondering what happened to us, as our last newsletter was back in March! Well, my wife quit her job, and since it is very rare for her to be able to get any time off from work (she's a chef), we decided to take advantage of her unemployment. We travelled to Japan for one vacation, and then took a road trip around the American Southwest for another. If you're interested, you can see photos I took on both trips at my photography website, cloudphotographic.com.

So I was on the road the whole summer; but I've been busy since I got back! We've got a bunch of things for you this newsletter. Probably the one I'm most excited about is an update for Aquatint; but I've also updated PhotoReviewer and Jiggler, and if you make it to the bottom, there's a little survey I'd love to hear back from you about.

Aquatint assists you in creating images that fit in with Apple's Aqua user interface appearance. The glossy, liquid appearance of Aqua looks great, but it places a burden on users and software developers who are not trained artists, since images like that are not easy to make. With Aquatint, you'll be cranking out your own custom Aqua icons and images effortlessly.

Aquatint is shareware, with a price of $15 for non-commercial use, $50 for commercial use (defined as using it to produce art for any commercial or for-profit purpose).

New in 1.1:

• Stencils are much, much easier to create; no more crazy fiddling with alpha channels
• All of the sliders now have numeric textfields so you can get exact numbers in and out
• Added a Preferences panel for greater configurability of a few things that annoyed people
• Added the ability to copy or save the final image "flattened" onto a white or black background
• You can now easily adjust the margins of the stencil to accommodate your chosen shadow effect
• Lots of little bugs and UI flaws fixed; notably, high-dpi stencils now work properly

Please note that Aquatint 1.1 requires OS X 10.3 to run.

PhotoReviewer is a photo management app that helps you to sort through your incoming photos, whether from your digital camera (including raw images!), your scanner, or your internet connection. Quickly view your photos and choose which ones are "keepers", sort them into different folders, delete duplicates, and more. PhotoReviewer belongs between your digital camera and iPhoto, weeding and sorting your photos before iPhoto gets bogged down by them.

PhotoReviewer is shareware, with a price of $10.

New in 1.3:

• Added support for more digital camera raw file formats
• Improved image preloading for even faster reviews
• Added support for JPEG thumbnails, for easy emailing and uploading
• Added support for display of .THM (digital camera thumbnail) files
• Improved and fixed support for external image viewers & editors
• Fixed a bug with display of non-72DPI images
• Fixed thumbnails to reflect the rotation of the image being thumbnailed

Jiggler is a little freeware app with one purpose: to keep your Mac awake. When you have some lengthy task for your computer to do, it's annoying to have to turn off your screensaver and turn off the sleep timer, only to have to turn it all back on again when you're done. (The "never sleep" corner will keep your screensaver from kicking in, but still won't prevent your machine from falling asleep.) What you really want is a little helper who will bump your mouse every once in a while to keep your machine alert. That's Jiggler.

Jiggler is freeware (which means use it freely with no charge). If you like it, please check out our shareware products, and pay for the shareware you use. Thanks!

New in 1.1:

• Added a timed quit feature so you can jiggle for a chosen time and then stop
• Added the ability to jiggle automatically when your processor is busy working
• Added the ability to jiggle automatically when burning a CD or DVD
• Added the ability to jiggle whenever a given application is running
• Added an onscreen indication that Jiggler is actively jiggling the mouse
• Constrained the jiggling so it stays close to the original cursor position
• Fixed a bug that could cause hangs on multiple monitor machines
• Fixed a bug that would eat keystrokes while a jiggle was in progress

We have a survey about a screensaver idea that we'd appreciate it if you responded to. We would like to hear from users who are not interested in screensavers as well as those who are; please respond if you have the time. Thanks!

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. It's easy to use, and it'll keep you on top of all our latest updates and news!

We hope this newsletter has found you well. Things are good over here; I've been enjoying work a lot lately (vacation can be revitalizing, I guess!), and it is a huge load off my mind to have finally updated Aquatint to be the app that it ought to have been for its 1.0 release. Ah, hindsight.

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!