SmileOnMyMac Blog

I’m in New York City this week, and decided to take a detour up to Connecticut to visit with Shawn and Lesa King, co-hosts of Your Mac Life, the Mac talk show of which SmileOnMyMac is a proud sponsor.

I had the fun of being a live in-studio guest on the show, talking about SmileOnMyMac, how we got started and my favorite products. I also got to experience the thrill of riding around the backroads of Connecticut on the back of Shawn’s motorcycle. We took a long tour from Danbury down to Westport. It was a beautiful day, not too cold. I borrowed riding gear from Lesa, in which I felt ready for a cameo on Battlestar Galactica.

The show is available as a streaming audio file at the Your Mac Life site until April 22nd. You can also subscribe to Your Mac Life at Audible.com, which makes it possible for you to download episodes to load onto your iPod.

Earlier this month, I went to New York to give a demo of our products at two Mac user groups, MetroMac in the city and LIMac on Long Island.

It was a great chance to meet current customers and hopefully win over new ones. (And I got to pretend to be Britney Spears with the headset microphone.)

With Chris Bastian, MetroMac president, at the Apple Store in Soho

LIMac demo: “Better Living Through Software”

With George Canellis, LIMac board member and Your Mac Life fan.

(That’s like 50 in shareware years!)

PageSender was launched 5 years ago today. The “fax software that really works” was released by Smile Software (the “smile” in SmileOnMyMac) at a time before fax capability was built into Mac OS X. Though faxing was later added in OS X 10.3 (Panther), PageSender’s full feature set, stability and excellent customer service made it the favorite of reviewers and users. As Macworld put it, “one application is a shining light in a field dominated by dim products.”

What’s a birthday without a cake? And candles! And singing! (And exploitation of children for commercial purposes!)

(View the video at YouTube.)

Coming May 8th: PageSender 4 with some great new features, including spam fax filtering and PDF cover pages!

(Those who know me will recognize the sacrifice I made getting a photogenic white-frosted cake, rather than chocolate…)

Who knew that there was an Apple Store in Pentagon City? Who knew Pentagon City was in Arlington, VA? Our friend Patrick, that’s who:

TextExpander is featured on MacBreak. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders is a big TextExpander fan, and he shows host Leo Laporte what makes TextExpander so powerful and, ultimately, so cool. Leo actually says “It is the single best productivity tool on the Mac, right after Quicksilver.”

Check out the segment. It’s a little under 9 minutes long, and you get a glimpse of the wacky uses that Merlin has for TextExpander amongst his 700+ snippets!

Now that TextExpander is a big star, will deign to hang out with PDFpen and the rest of the gang in the Productivity Suite?

More PDFpen photos! Here’s Jessica in the Apple Store in Palo Alto:

Sean and Andy at the Apple Store in NYC:

Going to the Apple Store to pick up one of those cute color iPod Shuffles? Look for PDFpen on the shelves, and take a photo we can post. Send them to jean@smileonmymac.com.

We had a fantastic show this year! Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth to say “hi”! It was great to meet customers in person. Here’s a couple of pictures from the booth: (I’ve posted more at Flickr.)

The team photo, posed, before the exhibit hall opened. That’s Greg, Brian, Philip, Jean, Steve, Jane and Edward.

After the hall opened…. This is more what it felt like – busy!

OK, we might be getting a little obsessed with this… I’m down in San Francisco getting ready for Macworld, and made a little visit to the Apple Store while shopping for booth supplies in Emeryville:

And here’s Greg in Corte Madera:

Watch this space. There will definitely be sightings at Macworld–PDFpen will be one of the goodies in the Macworld Speaker’s Gift Bags! And Dr. Bott will be selling the box at their booth. (S1912)

When you have out-of-town guests, where do you take them? The Apple Store, of course. Over the holidays, my colleague Greg took his parents to The Apple Stores in Pleasanton and Walnut Creek, California, and look what they found:

Send your PDFpen retail photos to jean@smileonmymac.com — if we post yours, you’ll get the SmileOnMyMac product of your choice with our compliments.

Recognizing that not everybody buys their software via online download, we decided to take the plunge into retail this year with PDFpen. We worked hard with our wonderful designers at Active Media Group to create a package design that would be fabulous and informative at the same time. The incredible folks at Agilaire Print and Packaging took us through the process of making that package a reality, and went the extra mile to help us neophytes. Now PDFpen is distributed by Dr. Bott and has made its way to the shelves of an Apple Store near you!

Here’s Philip at the Apple Store in San Francisco. Send us a photo of PDFpen in your Apple Store–if we post it on the blog, we’ll give you a free SmileOnMyMac download product of your choice.

Thanks to everyone who helped us make this idea into reality!