Hi! A short but sweet newsletter this month, since we've done updates to a few products but haven't released any new ones. We do have an announcement at the end that might be of some interest to you, though!

We updated three products since last month: PhotoReviewer, Fracture and Trisection. The update to PhotoReviewer is the biggest; we added a bunch of new features requested by our users:

PhotoReviewer is a utility designed to help out with the job of reviewing large numbers of photographs. Maybe you've got a digital camera that can take more pictures than you ever seem to have time to sort through? Maybe you download a lot of images off the internet? Or maybe you just find the available tools for choosing which photos are "keepers" to be slow, cluttered and bad at the job. PhotoReviewer will let you see all of your photos at full-screen size, flip through them quickly, and choose which ones you actually want to keep.

New from version 1.0:

• Even faster display of reviewed images
• A powerful new renaming facility
• Simpler review setup, with new drag-and-drop support
• Vetoed images can now be moved to the Trash
• Approved images can now be copied instead of moved
• Copy review images to the clipboard, full-size or thumbnailed
• Start a new review of your approved or vetoed images
• Reveal reviewed images in the Finder for quick access
• Revised registration processing
• Bug fixes, UI improvements, etc.

Fracture is a screensaver for OS X that creates a wide variety of fractal images. (You can visit Stick Software's gallery to see some!) It is quite advanced for a screensaver — it will use multiple processors if you have them, will antialias its images, and can be controlled by the user while it is running.

New from version 1.1.1:

• Added an option to save every completed image
• Added online version checking
• Revised registration processing

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 version 1.0:

• Fixes a rare crasher on launch
• Adds a speed control to adjust the difficulty of the game
• Revised registration processing

Some users have expressed dissatisfaction to us that they don't hear about updates and new products until the next newsletter comes out; they'd like a more timely notification of Stick Software news. To this end, we recently launched the Stick Software RSS feed.

If you're unfamiliar with RSS feeds, you're not alone; we hadn't heard of them before one of our users suggested, a few weeks ago, that we should have one. But they are rapidly growing in popularity as a way for users to stay on top of news items from diverse sources. Many of the news sites you surf to now may already have RSS feeds. They are also a popular way for people with weblogs (or "blogs") to notify their readers that a new log entry has been added. 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.

Our RSS feed will let you get up-to-the-minute news of product updates and new product releases. However, we don't intend to put everything that goes into our newsletters into our RSS feed, so you may want to remain subscribed to our newsletter as well. Items of more personal interest, items that are more chatty, and items that are more "service and support" oriented (like this one) will not be put onto the feed. It will only get items that have a more literal "breaking news" sort of feel to them.

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.

So what is our feed link? We've put off telling you, because a simple click on the link will try to load it in your default browser, where it will look like gibberish. You need to copy and paste the link into your RSS newsreader instead of just clicking it. But here it is:

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

Enjoy!

The rainy season has started here in Foster City, and Thanksgiving is on the way. We may not do another newsletter until after the holidays, so enjoy the holiday season (if it is a holiday season for you), and we'll see you in 2004!

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!