The older you get the quicker a year passes it seems. 2013 was a good year for us at Cocoanetics. Not really exceptional, we’re still waiting to get our great chance. But we cannot complain either, 2013 gets the “solid!” predicate.
Peer Assembly acquires Linguan
Drobnik KG, Austria and Peer Assembly Ltd., Ireland – We are announcing that effective today Peer Assembly has acquired the Linguan Mac app.
Linguan is a Mac-based tool for comfortably editing localization strings in iOS and Mac apps. It is used and loved by more than 10,000 users. Linguan also verifies that when new languages or features are added to localized apps that there are no translations missing.
Linguan was developed and marketed by Drobnik KG in partnership with Byte Poets GmbH, also based in Austria. Both companies had too much else on their plate to be able to put the amount of time into Linguan that it deserved. Therefore the decision was made to search for a buyer.
DTBonjour 1.1.0
DTBonjour is a convenient wrapper that lets you send NSObjects over a Bonjour connection. This is the first version of DTBonjour that has added features over the initial 1.0 release.
DTRichTextEditor 1.6.6
This is a maintenance release for DTRichTextEditor. It contains only updates for the involved submodules.
DTCoreText 1.6.10
This maintenance release of DTCoreText fixes some minor issues. I’m releasing it in preparation for a maintenance release of DTRichTextEditor.
Aviation Authorities Allow PEDs On Plane
The safety of airplanes travelling is generally overseen by two major agencies: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). The country where airplanes are registered – the so-called “tail number” – decides which of these administrations’ rules you need to follow. There are many more, almost each state has their own, but these are the ones that everybody is copying the rules from.
The FAA being the oldest such agency announced on October 31, 2013 that they are going to relax the rules on the use of personal electronic devices. So it came as no surprise that the EASA essentially copied the recommendation and published their own press release on November 13, 2013.
A Logo for Product Layer
Two of my friends and me have been working on an idea for a startup in our spare time. The idea for this came to me when I started to experiment with applications using barcode scanning and when I found that there is really no good API on the web that would allow me to get some basic product details for a scanned bar code.
Granted there are several data silos around and the 500 pound Amazonian gorilla, but the general problem remains. Generally those services only want you to use their product infos for helping to sell more products. My idea was that there should be a neutral service that lets you get product names and images for any kind of product and you should be free to do whatever you like with this data.
I was using the name PAPI (Product API) internally until Jonathan Libov suggested to me to paraphrase Mr. Foursquare himself, “the product layer for the internet”. This name immediately caught on with all people I told about it, it stuck. So I went with it and also reserved the name on Twitter as well as .com and .net domains.
The next step was to have some sort of cool logo. A project name is step one to make it “more real”, step 2 must be to have a logo that inspires us. This is the story of how I got a logo designed on 99 Designs.
Linguan Acquisition Update
Earlier this year we announced that we are now looking for somebody to acquire our Mac app Linguan.
We had half a dozen interested parties inquire, but in general our initial price target of 10000 Euro was too steep for all. So my partners at BytePoets and I discussed this matter and we are now dropping the price.
