We have been working on Snippets for a long time. We had worked in private on the Snippets core for some months, then we published our first public alpha version on last October 2009. And now, after the app has been in development for about one year, we believe it is the time to release version 1.0.

Yes we are so excited: finally, this is our LAUNCH!

In this post, we are going to explain how our community helped us, announce our new company name, web site and logo, and of course announce Snippets price.


Thank you

Lots of things have been going on while we were working on our alpha versions. We added tons of new features and improvements. We got huge amount of feedback. Many users spent their valuable time supporting us on Twitter, in discussion groups, on Mac software trackers. You were sending emails to us, reporting issues you had with the Snippets App and helping us fix those issues.

So first of all, we would like to express our huge gratitude to our community — you guys have really been participating in Snippets App development. To do this, today we are presenting a simple page named Snippets on Twitter where we collected all of your tweets and also listed the folks who were our biggest supporters.

Next, we would also like to say another "Thank you" to the people who helped us in beta testing, reviewed our blog posts, and gave advice to us. The advice did not relate to the app directly but it greatly influenced how we moved to our first release.

To underline your support we are giving away free Snippets App licenses to some of you. Our gifts go to Andrei Dolgushin, Jack Welde, Brett Terpstra, Joel Levin, Jeff Shilling, Chris Rault, Craig Williams, Edgar Gonçalves, Nicolas Ruflin, Chris Coyier, Federico Viticci, Steve Ackerman, Greg DeAngelis, Jason LaRose, Pavel Zhytko, Eugene Kharitonenkov, Alex Tsayun, Aleks Nesterow, and Rick!

Feel free to email us at support@snippetsapp.com in case we have missed you in this list.

Lastly, Mac developers community helped us a lot. We can't say enough about how their Cocoa components, blog posts and hints have helped us. As we've been developing Snippets App, we got some valuable ideas that might be interesting to others, and we promise to share our experience with you in the nearest future.


Company Name

We've been thinking a lot on our company name that we will be running under. Our previous name, DV Group, is indeed not the best name for a company that develops Mac software :) We have been able to improve on this and we've created the name that we like much more... Please welcome our new name: Lucky ants!


Refined Site

In addition to the release version 1.0, we have improved our site significantly. We updated the screenshots on the main page, created a full-featured scrippets catalog, improved the blog and its comment system, added a Credits page, and — as it's been mentioned before — we published the full collection of tweets we received from you while working on alpha versions.

Another good news is we are now in sync with the latest technologies and we live on the cloud now :) The site has been transferred to Google AppEngine and all ZIP-files are now hosted at Amazon S3. Even if the whole planet wants to try our App, downloading and upgrading will not be an issue.


New Icon

What we have started with and what we have now look like 2 absolutely different applications. Snippets App has changed a lot since our first public alpha version. First, we integrated into the OS and learned how to drag & drop and copy & paste, then we significantly improved our UI with Snippets Inspector, then we conquered the menu bar and recently we have discovered an amazing mechanism we called Scrippets.

So now that we have a new vision of all the power that the application has got, we think Snippets App has deserved a new icon to reflect on all this!

Meet our new face:

Okay... And now it's time to talk about what is in version 1.0!


What's New in 1.0

In 1.0 we decided to focus on improvements rather than new features.

Most importantly, all major bugs have been fixed… yes we have bugs sometimes! Besides, new scrippets have been added (Share via Snipt.org, Run Snippet and Replace Placeholders), auto-save and auto-backup mechanisms are established, and support for licenses has been added. We are not mentioning many smaller improvements.

In other words, we are 100% confident in this release and we are convinced it is worth every single cent spent on it.


Price and Early Birds Discount

So what about the price?

Snippets App is a great application we created with heart. It has a great potential: we have a simple yet powerful UI that allows us add new features while still having the same simple UX. Lots of you have already downloaded the application and it has proven to be a high quality and highly effective solution. Each line of code has been crafted with love as we use Snippets daily ourselves.

And so, Snippets license is going to cost $39.95.

As we have promised, all "early birds" will be able to buy Snippets for the Introductory price with 25% discount. The Introductory price is valid until March 28, 2010.

UPDATE: ‘Early birds’ discount is ended. Thanks to everyone who purchased Snippets!


What's Next

You might be surprised but we have more than 50 features and improvements in mind for our “baby” :) And here's the list of major ones so you can get a sense of our ambitious roadmap: continuous UI improvements, support for Espresso and Coda themes in additional to the TextMate's ones, full-featured syncing via Dropbox, native and collaborative sharing, improved syntax highlighting, support for custom syntax highlights, localizations (German, Spanish, Japan, French, and Russian), even more new scrippets and APIs, integration with Spotlight and QuickLook, performance tuning, and many others.

We promise to keep going and create more cool stuff. The only thing we need to conquer the world is your support... and a few mojitos :) Time to celebrate!

Thanks folks and talk to you later.