As of today Sleepy has moved to a new website which will be the home of Sleepy going forward. Find out more here:

http://www.sleepysoftware.com

At Iconico we've offered our free ColorPic for years. It's so popular that it is the number one downloaded colorpicker on the web, however we thought it was time we went 'Pro".

The all-new ColorPro has the same great color manipulation abilities, but with so much more. We've added webpage and image color extraction and manipulation, and advanced palette management, import and export. Once you go Pro you won't go back.

With ColorPro, you’ll be able to store collections of color chips as palettes, with the power to create new palettes or modify existing palettes to meet changing design needs. Using an intuitive user interface that loads web pages, HTML code, and graphics files in their own tabs, ColorPro gives you an easy way to precisely identify colors and acquire them for your own projects. With three options for creating your own color chips, and complete control over RGB values as well as hue, lightness, and saturation levels, ColorPro is the easiest way to integrate color management into your web development workflow.

ColorPro also excels at color management for existing websites, allowing you to set new colors for various elements of your site with just a few clicks. Now, trying out a new color scheme for your website doesn’t involve hours of manual recoding!

Read More about ColorPro
Download Now

We're thrilled to announce that UltimaCalc has come to Iconico.com! UltimaCalc represents a new turning point in the evolution of calculator applications, letting scientists, engineers, researchers, and students tackle complex and sophisticated computations that simply aren’t possible using other calculators.

Other calculator applications suffer from limited functionality due to lack of scope. UltimaCalc delivers the superior calculator experience by allowing you to open new UltimaCalc windows that are specifically designed for specialized calculations. The results obtained using these tools can be saved and opened in the main UltimaCalc window.

UltimaCalc isn't just a numerical calculator, it can also plot functions and draw charts:



Using these dedicated tools, you can:

• Perform symbolic algebra
• Calculate standard deviation
• Calculate regression and least squares fit
• Solve simultaneous linear and non-linear equations
• Minimize or optimize the values of any given expression
• Plot up to eight functions at a time, with export to image file
• Calculate the real roots of polynomials
• Solve for the solution of a triangle
• Create many types of charts, with export to image file
• Calculate navigation routes between two points

And that's just an abbreviated list!

UltimaCalc runs on Windows XP and Vista.

• You may download the feature limited trial, and evaluate the software for as long as you need
• Single User license is only $29.95
• We offer a risk free 30 day money back guarantee

Download UltimaCalc Read More

Version 2 of the Line Reader has been released. The line reader turns your mousepointer into a line, making it extremely easy to read through long paragraphs of text. With this release we've added some new features to speed your reading.

The application now includes saved profiles, a muli-line capability, keyboard nudge control and auto scrolling lines. We've also added the capability to change the way the line itself functions, inverting the text beneath it, or using a number of graphical effects. Just take a look at our new movies of the Line Reader in action and you'll see how useful this application really is.



Line Reader runs on Windows XP and Vista.

• You may download the feature limited trial, and evaluate the software for as long as you need
• Single User license is only $19.50
• We offer a risk free 30 day money back guarantee

To see screenshots check out our Getting Started Guide.

Find Out More about Line Reader.

We all love ColorPic's ability to quickly and easily capture colors from the scxreen and make palettes, but wouldn't it be great if we could easily see those palettes in a web browser. Well thanks to "l u c h y x", a ColorPic fan, we now have that ability! You can use the ColorPic Web Palette Generator plugin to automatically create html previews of all your palettes, and also check how the text and background will look.



Find out more about the Web Palette Generator for ColorPic

What if there was one simple application could help guide your eyes while reading, making digesting long electronic documents easier and more efficient? That’s the core reason behind Line Reader, along with a few bonus features that will make this app an indispensable part of your user experience!

Line Reader addresses a dilemma that we all face at some point – how to manage reading long documents online. If we were reading a book or printed article, we could use an index card to mark our place and guide the path of our vision. Since holding an index card up to your computer screen is impractical, we’ve created Line Reader to navigate you through the rough waters of electronic documentation.

With Line Reader, your mouse cursor transforms into a handy reading aid, taking the form of a horizontal line that you use to track your spot in any online document or web page. You can customize the length, width, and color of your line, as well as invoke a secondary helper line that serves to further emphasize the location of your cursor. One click, and your line flips to the vertical, which is convenient for highlighting entire paragraphs, steps in a recipe, or assembly instructions.

Line Reader runs on Windows XP and Vista.

• You may download the feature limited trial, and evaluate the software for as long as you need
• Single User license is only $19.50
• We offer a risk free 30 day money back guarantee

To see screenshots check out our Getting Started Guide.

Find Out More about Line Reader.

The Screen Protractor is a fantastic teaching aid for mathematics and geography as it can be used to measure angles on top of any other image. We've used the protractor in Google Earth allowing students to measure angles between real-life geographical locations.

Download the Lesson Plans

Nico Westerdale Accepts Nomination for a seat on the Association of Shareware Professionals Board of Directors.

I stand before you here today, addressing all my fellow members of this great Association, with profound gratitude and great humility, I accept this nomination for a place on the Association of Shareware Board of Directors.

Many of you watching may not know this junior entrepreneur from England, and I'd like to spend a few moments to introduce myself.

My journey is an improbable one. Being born in England, of American parents, I learnt programming at an early age on a ZX81. I was schooled in art, and came to New York to participate in the great experiment that only America could forge, the dot com boom, and then inevitable bust. Born out of this I formed Iconico.com and set about to produce my own shareware tools and sell them over the web.

Now our economy faces a similar collapse, and during such times it's every member's responsibility to change, to think anew about the role shareware plays, and I believe that my skills learnt through hard times and hard work will help the Association through these dark times.

A year ago I took over the running of BitsDuJour.com and worked as a community organizer with developers, ISVs, and ecommerce providers alike, helping them to promote, market, and sell their products. We rebuilt the infrastructure, eliminated waste, and forged new partnerships whilst never pandering to the special interests, all in the cause of giving developers a global audience for their products.

As we stand at this crossroads in history the ASP has a choice. To continue the same failed policies of the past which have resulted year on year in falling memberships, or to embrace change. We must look hard at the $100 membership fee and find new ways to market the Association in order for fledgling developers to come on board in these tough economic times.

We must look hard at the ASP website, and our marketing efforts. Our organization is one that still produces a printed paper newsletter, when great financial savings and even greater exposure could come from blogs, rss feeds and wikis. We must embrace this change for the future, not in the quality of what we are doing, but in how we get our message out there.

I believe that despite our best efforts the ASP has lost respect amongst the professional software community. As a member of the board of directors I will be prepared to sit down with leaders of the OISV, and Joel on Software, at a time and place of my choosing. Isolationism in the recent years have only lost us members, and by negotiating without preconditions, and starting face to face talks with our competitors I believe that we can forge new alliances and regain respect for our organization on the world stage.

As small business owners and developers we all share a hope for the future. I've seen that hope in the developers who work long nights and weekends, with the dream that one day they can give up their day jobs and devote themselves to their business full time. I've seen hope in the eyes of people in conferences from Denver to Boston, and this great Association that we have built together serves that hope, that dream for a better future.'

Fellow members, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone.

At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that independent Shareware promise, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the Association of Shareware Professionals.

We're happy to announce today the release of Clipstory. We all use Copy and Paste all the time, but the problem is that you can only copy and paste one thing at a time.

What's needed is a way to copy and paste to the clipboard, and see the history; and that's why we call our new application Clipstory!

Clipstory gives you a huge extension to your copy and paste abilities, you can quickly cycle through your entire history of copied text, files, images, audio and binary data. Through use of the keyboard shortcuts a preview popup is shown in the corner of your screen, and this works with any and all applications.

Clipstory's full list of clipped items is easy to search and scroll through to find something that you've clipped a while back. You can save, restore and even set up custom filters to automate your clipping and save items. Clipstory's powerful functions are sure to save you time every day, and never interrupt your normal work.



The software is available on trial download and can be purchased for $19.50. Feel free to download and give it a test run.

As a developer, if you've ever tried to interface with desktop email clients from your own applications you would probably agree that at best it's a pain. Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora have totally different APIs, so it means a lot of code rewrite each time to interface with each of them.

If you've taken a look at our Mailbox-SDK you'll already know that we've simplified the task of doing all this communication, providing just one API so you can pick your email client and let us do the hard work. Well we've just released the latest version of the Mailbox-SDK which has a couple great new features which now come included.

First up is our EMLtoMSG and MSGtoEML email converter API. This lets you convert between the .EML and .MSG email message formats used by different email clients. We've even supplied a drag and drop demo application, written in Delphi, that demonstrates this ability. You can drag and drop an email from Outlook Express and the application saves it to disk in the Outlook format, really handy for making email aware applications, converters and more.

Next is our new Mailbox Restore API. As you may know Outlook and the other email clients save emails as part of a single mailbox file. It's all very well being able to pull out files from a mailbox and save them to disk, which the Mailbox-SDK already does, but what if you want to restore those emails back into a mailbox? Well that's what the restore API is for; perfect for writing email archiving and backup applications.

If you've taken a look at our Email Extractor application you'll know that it was written on top of the Mailbox-SDK, and uses it to extract, backup and restore emails from any email client. As we've been selling the Mailbox-SDK for some time now we thought it would be a great idea to also offer the source code for the Email Extractor as one of the purchasing options. The Mailbox-SDK already comes with demo apps, but if you want a fully fledged example you may want to buy the Email Extractor Source too.

A couple days ago I had the displeasure of calling a major communications company about a small problem I had. After wading through a phone tree, holding, dialling in my inside leg measurement, being told that my call was extremely important to them, waiting, and finally speaking to an operator who needed my inside leg measurement again, misheard, misunderstood and finally summarily dispatched with I felt a little like this:



I hate having to call companies on the phone. I hate having to email them. I get a sense of foreboding every time my mouse hovers of a 'Contact Us' link when I can feel the next hour of my life being wasted dealing with overburdened underpaid staff who often fail to understand my problem.

When I started a company I didn't want to put other people in this type of position and, out of my own frustration with the status quo of customer service gradually ended up at a few good rules.

1. Make my cellphone number available online
2. Stop what I'm doing to answer emails promptly, if possible
3. Keep up to date with my message forums, and reply
4. Reply to my uninstallation survey comments if appropriate
5. Help people with their problems, regardless
6. Don't get hung up about money or who bought what

These are pretty simple rules and from what I've heard from my customers there are not a lot of other companies out there that do the same. Now I've seen on message forums many people bemoaning the fact that they have to deal with their customers, and some software developers plainly profess to having hundreds of unanswered support requests in their inbox; I'm glad that I didn't purchase their software!

The software industry is rather unique in that the actual product, assuming that you're selling over the web, costs nothing. This might be a bit hard to swallow for your midnight-oil burning developer. "What do you mean nothing, do you know how many hours I put in building it?"

It still costs nothing. Think of it this way, if your sales doubled tomorrow the actual cost to your business to produce twice the material goods to be sold would not double. The cost is in the upfront work.

So when someone is buying a product from you, what exactly are they buying? Well if they buy from Iconico I'd like to think that they're getting a bit more than just a digital download, and that's why I go out of my way to try and help people when they contact me.

I have some free software on my site, and if people call up about it I treat them just the same as if they had purchased one of our larger software titles. I routinely recommend competitors products if I think it will help, after all I don't want to give the hard sell and then have a customer turn around and be annoyed that it won't do the job. I've gone off on tangents and helped one lady find therapy for her back pain as she happened to mention it in passing.

So why do this? Why waste my time/money on non-billable work. Because by following these rules you, from time to time, will get customers for life. People who see what you're doing, trust you, and wish that the rest of the world ran the same way that you ran your business. These people remember you, tell other people, and I think that creates more impact than spending the same money on an advertising campaign.

This is an actual email thread from a few days back.

Nico,

You, You, You...Your Good!...
Thank you,
Please, send me the serial for the "Screen Tracing Tool"..!
Customer for ever...!

James
>
>
>
> James,
>
> Not a problem. Probably the easiest is if I send you the serial number
> for the application you want. Let me know which one.
>
> Nico Westerdale
>
>
>
> Hello Nico,
>
> I made a mistake in my order yesterday, and would like to if possible
> get credit for "Data Extractor", a program, that's not going to work
> for me. I should have look closer, I really can't get into the
> javascript, right now.
> I know the program will just waste away on my computer. So, if you
> would help me get credit for another program instead, I would be
> much obliged!...
>
> Thank you
> James

We've just released an updated version of the Email Extractor. The application, which backs up emails from Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora, now has included within it an Email Hunter plugin for Internet Explorer, allowing you to quietly collect email addresses as you surf.



You can also use the app to extract email addresses out of emails that you have saved in a folder. Very handy if you want to build up a mailing list out of a group of purchase receipt emails. Included are configurable filters so that you only get the emails that you want.



The software is available on trial download and can be purchased for $29.50. The software also comes as part of the Extraction Pack, containing our Data Extractor and HTML Text Extractor.

To those of you who frequent Iconico.com and BitsDuJour.com you'll know that we've never had a blog, well with the launch of icoBlog.com we're very happy that that has all changed! The release coincides with our new site redesign, which we're sporting here.

We've got a lot of plans for icoBlog, starting off with all our latest news and updates, but we're also going to be giving away marketing tips for software developers and publishers, technical articles on web design and usability and our own 2 cents on everything related to running a web-centric software company.

So lets kick things off by a few introductions and a little back story if you're new to the site. Iconico, Inc. was formed several years back by myself, Nico Westerdale, and came from humble beginnings. Our initial piece of design software, the Screen Calipers, and the free ColorPic kicked off Iconico.com, and over the ranks our range of software titles has swelled to include a whole host of indispensable applications. Over the recent years we've concentrated more and more on the marketing side of software, and we started to partner with developers and sell their software through Iconico. Iconico's focus has always been on software that's effortless to use, and of course we do our fair share of consulting too with a host of top-notch techies on tap here in New York City for the larger projects we get involved with.

This was all going very smoothly until last year I got an email stating that BitsDuJour.com was for sale. If you don't know BDJ (or "Bits" as we affectionately call it) offers daily discount deals on software, getting those deals straight from the developers. We took on BDJ, and totally re-wrote it using ASP.NET, providing a platform that we've been promoting in all types of interesting ways. Of course all this promotion requires a full time editor, and Roger Thomasson fills those shoes, selecting software and writing reviews for BDJ and has some great tips that I'm sure he'll share here on micro-marketing.

Well that's the overview, welcome to icoBlog. We'll have much much more on what I've touched on here, and we'll be sharing the lessons learnt on what can be a tough business. As always feel free to comment or get in touch.