Until the 25th, Notae and a whole lot of other software is 20% off over at Mac Santa.

And yes, the developers are getting paid on this one. ;)

I’m going to serialize Notae. This comes after 700+ downloads of Launchd Editor, links to it in over 40 forums, and several personal support requests and a grand total of five registered users (whom I thank profusely).

I’d like to believe we can have honest shareware these days, that the days of an innocent and honest “try before you buy” period aren’t entirely dead. I’d like to, but I can’t.

No, the program was not life-changing or world-shattering, but it’s useful and it’s being used a lot. In and of itself, that’s good. If you don’t feel it worth money then it wasn’t. Frankly, I expect a lot of the downloads were just to look at it and perhaps one in ten used it seriously. Even then, though, that’s 70 people, not five.

Don’t take this the wrong way; I don’t care about Launchd Editor. It was both a pet project to make life easier for me and others and a test to see if cheap shareware was still viable. For the former, it works. For the latter, it showed me that honesty-based shareware is dead, if it ever really lived.

And so, Notae will be serialized. Yes, another serial to keep around, sadly. I hate it, you may or may not, but it’s where we are.

On that note, the “where we are” bit, we’re closer to the goal. Notae’s major bugs are gone and I’m working on adding a few items to it at this point (NSTextView does not play well with others all the time). Status message later in the week on that note, including a partial feature list.

For the record, I’ve settled on Tiger and Core Data for it and it has a Spotlight importer and integration with it in the same way Preview does such that if you do a Spotlight search on “pony” and a Notae file matches, Notae’s entry filter will be pre-set to “pony” and so will the Find term. It’s quite fun. :)