Fortunate Bear’s Future
I regretfully announce that most of Fortunate Bear’s products have been discontinued and support ended effective immediately. Specifically the products terminated are Illuminate, Skyscraper, Pagesmith, and Log Leech. When I acquired these products I had big plans for all of them, which suffice to say didn’t work out. I will spare you the details, but in broad strokes I was unable to make them financially viable.
As with Hog Bay’s products, these were good apps from a very talented developer. He’s also written an interesting Postmortem of Failed Products. One of the common problems was the Mac app sandbox. Also:
I thought porting it to iOS would be a great idea. After all, there was no 1st party competition and a lot of the 3rd party competitors were crap. However, I ran into trouble on the outset. After submitting it to the App Store I got a call from Developer Relations saying they didn’t allow “that kind of app” in the store. I pointed out there were already half a dozen of “that kind of app” in the App Store, which they seemed genuinely surprised about. How were they supposed to know what got let into the App Store?
Update (2014-01-09): Brent Simmons:
It reminded me of my first go at being an indie developer.
