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Glimpses App Icon

Glimpses 2.0 for Mac

After a lot of hard work, I’m very happy to finally be able to announce the immediate availability of Glimpses 2.0 (formerly known as Briefly) on the Mac App Store.
The app has undergone some major changes, and I wanted that to be reflected in the app- name and icon (wonderful work by the very talented Alexander Käßner).

What Does Glimpses Do?

Still Motion videos typically show photos for not much longer than the fraction of a second.
Glimpses is designed to let you create these videos with just a few clicks, with stunning results.

The app produces high-quality video with a resolution of up to 4K and lets you add a soundtrack to make your video really sing.

Glimpses with soundtrack selection

What’s New?

– Soundtracks: Glimpses 2.0 makes it much easier to add multiple soundtracks. It also lets you select the parts of the soundtracks you really like to make your Still Motion video really shine.
– Face Detection: Glimpses analyses your photos for faces and places the photos in your video accordingly for much nicer and more personal results.
– 4K Resolution: Going beyond 1080p, Glimpses now renders your videos with a resolution of up to 4K.
– Projects: You can now save your projects. Up until now, the app only remembered the last used photos and soundtrack.

… as well as many more, minor improvements (like improved support for panorama photos) and fixes.

Details

Soundtracks

Soundtracks are a vital part of a Still Motion video. Glimpses makes it so much easier to add and edit one or several soundtracks.
With its new selection feature, you can select just the part of a song you like best that should be used for your video.

If a soundtrack is too short, you can either loop it or add another one. The order of appearance can be changed at any time.
Should a soundtrack be longer than your video, Glimpses will automatically fade it out at the end without you having to do anything.

Face Detection

In earlier versions, Glimpses used to center your photos within the video’s frame.
Glimpses 2.0 is much smarter and analyses your photos for faces and if detected, moves them into the video’s frame, resulting in much nicer and more personal videos.

Briefly without and with face detectionA still from a video created with Briefly 1.5.2 (top) compared to the same video created with Glimpses 2.0 (below)

Resolutions and Video Settings

With cameras getting better and better, it was only logical to include new resolutions in Glimpses 2.0 – the app now goes beyond 1080p and adds support for 2K and 4K resolutions. You can set the resolution manually or let Glimpses decide, based on the smallest photo.

Glimpses Video SettingsGlimpses Video Settings

A photo’s duration can be set from 0.1 seconds up to 4 seconds in 0.1-second-increments, an improvement that allows for more fine-grained control over the resulting video. Glimpses can also automatically do it for you, based on the duration of the soundtracks you selected.

Pricing and Availability

Glimpses is available exclusively on the Mac App Store (click) for the introductory price of $9.99 for a limited time (about 60% off), after which the price will revert to $24.99.
A free, 15-day trial can be downloaded from the website (click) (direct download). If you’re from the media and would like to get more info about the app, please download the press kit (click), thank you.

Glimpses Website: http://eternalstorms.at/glimpses
Glimpses on the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/glimpses/id637565340?mt=12
Glimpses Demo Download: http://eternalstorms.at/glimpses/Glimpses.zip
Glimpses on Twitter:https://twitter.com/GlimpsesApp
Glimpses Press Kit: http://eternalstorms.at/press/Glimpses-2-Press-Kit.zip
Glimpses on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/glimpses

Thank you for your time, I hope you enjoy this great new version of Glimpses 🙂

If you have any feedback or questions, please be sure to let me know via twitter (click) or eMail (click). I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

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In an effort to bring some personality to my apps, website and blog and make them easily recognizable by “connecting” them visually I rolled out a minor re-”design” of my website and blog yesterday.

The Color Scheme

The entire color scheme is based off the Eternal Storms Software logo.
Up until now, neither the website nor this blog reflected those colors. As a matter of fact, the only place that had some of this personality was the iOS part of Transloader. In its “About” screen, you’d see this:

IMG 9025Screenshot of Transloader on iOS

It’s immediately recognizable – and not only by the logo.

The Website and Blog

It was about time I brought that over to the website, because it looked like this (please excuse the missing text and bezels, I took this from the Wayback Machine as I stupidly don’t keep old websites around):

Old eternalstorms.at websiteeternalstorms.at before the re-“design”

At the time, I had a good reason for it. I wanted the user to be able to see all my apps at once, without any distraction. But it lacks a certain “je-ne-sais-quoi”. It has no identity. You don’t know who it’s from. Heck, there’s not even a logo anywhere to be seen.

Lo and behold, the new website looks like this:

Untitledeternalstorms.at after the re-“design”

It’s probably not the best website you’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly an improvement over the old one.

The Apps

Now I can’t go in and make all my apps purple. That would look ludicrous (or would it?). But I still want to carry over some of this into my apps, and I believe the best place to do this is in the apps’ About windows. Currently, they look like this:

Briefly's old About WindowBriefly’s About window before the re-design

It has all the necessary information in there, but it could be more personal, more fun, if you will. Here’s what the new one will look like:

Briefly's new about windowBriefly’s About window after the re-design

It will roll out in all apps with future updates. The nice thing is that it’s very much a drop-in replacement for the standard about panel Apple’s providing in Cocoa. It takes all its information from the app’s Info.plist file and additional information (like twitter, Facebook, Acknowledgements, Credits) can be provided in a strings file which will then be used in the about panel. So I just drop it in, change some strings in the strings file and I’m done, I don’t need to touch the xib in Interface Builder. Perhaps I’ll do a blog post about it some other time.

App Store Screenshots

All this kind of raises the question – should I brand my App Store screenshots as well? I’m leaning toward “no”. Definitely no logo or slogan, though. That would just distract from the product. Perhaps I could color explanation text accordingly, or put them in colored overlays. Or create an Eternal Storms Software Desktop Background Image that will be present in all App Store screenshots, that would definitely be a more subtle way of doing it. I might try it out on an app and see how it does.

But in general, I am against branding of App Store Screenshots. They should present the app. A description of the company could always be put into the last paragraph of the App Store App description. That’s a nice place for it.

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That’s a question I’ve been asking myself ever since I started releasing software to the public.

Googling “When to send a press release”, I get articles talking about on what specific weekday to send it or at what time of day.
Or “send a press release when you have something newsworthy”.

Although that is good advice – never send anything not newsworthy, you’ll just alienate people – that’s not the subject of this blog post.

What I mean by ‘When’ is: should I send a press release a couple of days before I release an app or on the same day?
And yes, it is an “either – or” kind of situation. I’ve been told by journalists I asked if it’s cool to follow up a week after (or send the press release again) – definitely don’t do that.

Non-Embargoed Press Releases

To issue press releases the same day I release the app itself always felt natural to me. I’ve been doing it for as long as I’ve released software.
No advance notice, no follow up – just “send it and forget it”. I want to get the news out when it’s fresh and hot and when it’s available for everyone to download.

Control Is An Illusion

Front and foremost, it gives me this feeling of ‘control’. When sending out a press release the day of, I feel like I’m on the mind of the journalist and like they’re more inclined to write about my app since it is “fresh off the press” and just happened. And there might be some truth to that as I’ve seen good results with that approach. But you never have any control to speak of. That’s an illusion.

Secondly, there’s the App Store Review process. It takes time. So once the review is done and the app has been approved, I’m usually very eager to get the app out the door as soon as possible and not have to wait around a couple of days more to be able to send out press releases ahead of time.
I also don’t want to send out a press release while the app is still in review – that’s got ‘catastrophe’ written all over it.
If you send out a press release with an embargo only to have your app rejected some time later, you’ll have to issue a redaction and that’s just hideously tedious. It’s a one-way-ticket onto the journalist’s blacklist.
Even though there are apps for checking the average review times for the iOS and Mac App Stores, it’s just too uncertain in my opinion.

Forget me not

It’s not fun to spend hours writing a decent press release, send it out early to members of the media just to find out they forgot about it come the actual date of the app release. This is probably not much of an issue with bigger news sites and blogs that have systems in place for embargoed press releases, but smaller blogs run by independent reviewers might do all this by hand, so things might slip their minds.

Sending press releases with an embargo also has the risk of of the news leaking.
You send out your news with an embargo of one week, but that doesn’t mean that every member of the media is going to respect that – they might publish early to break the news first (a problem I assume only bigger companies face who’s news appeals to a broader audience than mine, a small indie developer’s press release; but nonetheless, it’s still something to be wary of).
I hear that embargoes aren’t legally binding, so be wary of that as well. 

Embargoed Press Releases

With everything you’ve read by now, you might think sending a press release beforehand might not be a good idea. And you’re right, a lot of it speaks against it (although it depends heavily on each individual case).

But there is one thing about it that appeals to me more and more the longer I ponder it – with a press release you send early, you give your potential reviewers time.

Time for Preparation

Imagine being a journalist, getting a couple dozen press releases each day (or more) and some of them are to be released on the same day. There’s simply no way you could check out all those apps and publish on the same day. Pressed for time, a journalist might be inclined to just post the entire or edited press release, publish late or not post about it at all. But a full review is out of the question, that’s for sure.

If you issue that press release a week early, though, you’re helping out not only the journalists you’re addressing, but also yourself.
You give the greatest gift there is: time.

Time to check out your app in detail, less in a hurry to get to the next press release, because they do pile up, I’m sure.
Time to use the app for a few days, should they decide to cover it and get a deeper look at how the app works and feels.
Time to experience details about the app that make it stand out over its competitors.
Time to get more details about the app, e.g. check out the app’s Press Kit; ask you for more details if something isn’t clear or if they have any questions in general.

I believe that is invaluable for all parties involved.

Testing Embargoed Press Releases

To put this to a test, for the release of Transloader 2.1, I sent out the press release one week ahead of the release and the result has been way better than I thought. As I wrote before, I sent out PR with the bad aftertaste of thinking it would be forgotten on the actual day of the release.

But that was not the case. Quite the contrary, actually.

After sending out an embargoed PR, I pretty soon received requests for promo codes to an extent I have not experienced before. That might be attributed to the extended time frame they had for reviews, given the embargo. I imagine journalists don’t bother asking for promo codes if they don’t have the time to really look at the app anyway.

The embargo itself worked very well, not one site posted early. I used the following wording (in bold print) right before the press release body

Embargo: Please do not publish before March 10th, 2015

I think I will take out the “Embargo:” part, though, it sounds kind of demanding.

Among others, MacNN, c|net and the german site MacGadget posted favorable reviews of Transloader and @MacTrast called it their iOS App of the Day.

All in all, it went very well and I’m very satisfied with how it turned out.

Conclusion

I will be moving to embargoed press releases from now on. The benefits of giving journalists some time to check out your app by far outweighs the disadvantages listed above and I think it engaged journalists more.

And that’s what press releases are all about.

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My name is Matt, I’m the developer of Eternal Storms Software. If you’d like to comment, you can catch me on twitter here: [twitter-follow screen_name=’eternalstorms’ show_count=’yes’] or by eMail.

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Apple is currently featuring Yoink on the Mac App Store, in the category “New Year, New You”, and it’s in great company with the very popular apps MindNode Pro, 1Password, OmniFocus and Evernote.
I couldn’t be more proud and humbled.

This certainly wouldn’t have happened without all of you, so

Thank you!

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My name is Matt, I’m the developer of Eternal Storms Software. If you’d like to comment, you can catch me on twitter here: [twitter-follow screen_name=’eternalstorms’ show_count=’yes’] or by eMail.

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