Last year we made a decision to double down on the apps we have, focusing on ensuring that each app is sustainable and able to support our small team. Today I wanted to give you an update on things as 2015 kicks off in earnest!

Clear

We’ve been busy working on an update to Clear that adds support for the Apple Watch. A lot of apps aren’t suitable or don’t make sense on the Apple Watch, but from what we’ve done so far, it’s obvious Clear is going to be a perfect fit.

We’re hoping to ship it at the same time as the Apple Watch (whenever that may be - the rumour mill currently points to March!). Apple Watch support will arrive in the next (free!) update for all users, and also includes interactive notifications for reminders on iPhone and iPad too!

Ember

Ember for Mac 1.8.3 is awaiting App Review, and features a new GIF category to make managing your LULZ that much easier along with that a bunch of fixes to make it work even better on Yosemite.

Everyone here at Realmac loves Ember dearly and we all use it daily. The app’s core user base remains on the Mac, and Ember for Mac earns an overwhelming majority of the app’s revenue. Unfortunately, Ember for iOS has never done as well as we’d like, and simply doesn’t earn enough revenue to pay for a developer to work on it (never mind sustain the handling of support queries for the iOS version). We’re doubling down on the Mac version, which has been profitable and sustainable from day one, and will soon be discontinuing the current iOS version.

One of the biggest challenges we faced last year with Ember was sync. Once you start using Ember, it’s incredibly easy to build up a substantial library - and customers upgrading from LittleSnapper have sometimes many thousands more images imported! Multi-gigabyte libraries are not uncommon, and combined with (in particular) iCloud customers have found sync to be problematic. It especially doesn’t help that iCloud is a very hard-to-inspect black box, and there’s no progress shown to you as to the uploaded (or not) state of your library. It’s tough to say it, as iCloud’s robustness has continued to improve each year, but right now iCloud isn‘t a good fit for apps like Ember, and our future product direction will reflect that.

With the bad news out the way, here’s a sneak peek at what we’re working on for Ember on the Mac! Later this year we’ll be launching a major upgrade to Ember for Mac with some of the most requested features, new Mac-centric drawing tools, a masonry grid layout, and more. Follow @realmacsoftware on Twitter for news!

RapidWeaver

We’re continuing to release updates to RapidWeaver 6, and we’re just putting the finishing touches to 6.0.5. Alongside the usual enhancements and fixes, we’ve added a great new feature to 6.0.5 to help users on OS X Yosemite quickly view their published site using Handoff. As soon as your site has published, RapidWeaver makes the website available via Handoff, so you can simply swipe up on iPhone and iPad to view it live.

Typed

We’ve been thrilled with the feedback for Typed, and currently busy working on a nice update that implements one of the most requested features (more on that soon). We’re also working on something else Typed related, which we’re incredibly excited about. Before you ask, it’s not an iOS version (just yet), but we’ll be making a big announcement later this month - so stay tuned!

That’s All For Now

Finally, I just wanted to say thank you for all your support over the last year. I love coming to work everyday and building software, and it’s only because you guys buy our products that I and the rest of the team can do that. Thank you again - and here’s to an exciting 2015!