Free Books 1.1! Resizeable font, color schemes, and loads of small improvement.

I’ll be honest- the response to Free Books caught us totally off guard! Initially we were thinking 10-15 sales a day would be beyond awesome. Within a week we were getting 200, and, as we watched the sales counter grow and grow, our initial shock turned to a realization that we had some serious scrambling ahead of us to get Free Books up to a condition we can be proud of.

This new update gets to that condition and then some, and we hope everyone loves. The feature side has loads of goodies, like a vastly improved reader (color schemes and resizable fonts), and a better all around interface. A lot of the changes took place from emails from our customers, things that weren’t clear, parts of the app we didn’t call out well enough, and labels that were confusing- thanks to everyone who emailed us!

On the bug fix side of things, we fixed all the crashes folks were reporting, creating a much more stable reading experience.

Massive, massive apologies to everyone that was crashing out in our first release- we’ve tested this version to kingdom come and back again, as we should have done with the first. Lesson learned- you can count on every future release from Spreadsong being much more thoroughly tested before release onto the App Store.

And, finally, we embedded a Contact Us button into the app- so far it’s getting us some great feedback, so don’t be shy in using it.

To get the new update just pull up the App Store, click on that big red Free Books link, and upgrade.

Opening Salvo

Most corporate blogs start with boring stories about their genesis story- oh no! a problem! I better raise six million in venture capital and create a UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION!

Undoubtedly at some point Zsolt or I will be feeling pressed for blogging material and write that very post, with a sly reference to this post.

So, instead, I’m going to write about just how awesome writing this post is.

We’re looking out at this absolutely… perfect view of Budapest. To the right, the downtown of Buda with the spires of Parliament lit like a fairy tale castle, to the left the hills of Buda, streetlights twinkling in the distance. It’s midnight, a cool breeze is wafting against a perfect 60 degrees, and it’s 1am as we work out on a terrace overlooking all of this in the open air.

What can I say? We’re about to release our first real product, everything is lining up, and life is a Modest Mouse song- everything will fall, fall right into place. To wit, I’m listening to Frank Sinatra- always a good sign.

So that’s post one. Self-aggrandizing, vague, and just a little bit too long-winded. In other words, absolutely perfect. I’ll post soon about what the first product is, what our main product is, travel, how having a virtual company works, how having a traveling company is, how much better working in person with your co-founder is, and more on just how fucking awesome Frank Sinatra is.

A hint: very.