Two months ago I released Aurora 3, which has been the most successful major release of Aurora ever. Front page coverage by digg and TUAW, among others, led to an amazing 10,000 new users in just a few days. The release of Aurora 3.1 and 3.2 shortly thereafter brought an overall improved and stabilized application and two new localizations, again leading to another 20,000 new users. Thanks to everyone who is using Aurora and helped improving it! I’m happy that most of you use Aurora on a daily basis, rapidly making it one of the most used Mac alarm clocks. If you own an iusethis account, feel free to click Aurora’s iusethis button.
The pace of Aurora’s development has slowed in the last few weeks, though. This is because I am working with two other guys on a completely new and exciting Mac application, which is gonna be at least as helpful and good as Aurora and which we hope to release in a few months. I will work on this new project most of the time now, but I’ll make sure that Aurora is ready for Leopard (bringing you higher resolution, a smaller memory footprint and improved reliability). In addition to that, there are a few other nice things in the back of my mind for future releases of Aurora, so stay tuned.
Lastly, I’d like to thank all the fine Mac folks who donated to the project. I’ve so far received a total of 500 EUR in donations, with individual contributions ranging from 50 cent (thanks, dude) to 20 EUR (big thanks!). It’s great to see this kind of support for a free application in the Mac community. 500 EUR is still some way to go towards a new development machine, though, so everyone who thinks Aurora is worth more than nothing, this is your way to show it. Thanks!
On a side note, I released a tool that switches to Front Row’s “Now Playing” section (just as Aurora does) on my code page. Some people requested it, and I thought it might be useful to some more of you. For more instructions, follow the link.
