January 2016
Contents
2015 was a good year, all in all, but it's time to say farewell and look ahead. January is usually when we share what we want to see emerge from the Morning Flight hangar in 2016.
You already know about the SkyPricer. Beta 1 is nearly complete. When it's done we'll invite everyone who has ever purchased Morning Flight Gold or Pixelblitz to download the beta at no charge. We're also working on expanding the Flight Engineer for Wide Format and Signs and maybe RISO Duplicators. The beta version of that plug-in, too, will be made available at no charge.
The holidays are always a good time of the year to catch up on reading. Never thought I'd read a book on punctuation from cover to cover. The #1 British Bestseller "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" made me do just that.
All the best for the New Year.
Hal Heindel
Unitac International Inc.
What's the Status of the Skypricer?
The U.S. Patent Office made good on their promise and published our application for the SkyPricer invention on January 14. It should percolate into the Google Patent Search in a couple of days. This means we can now talk about the invention in detail. If you're enough of a glutton for punishment to read patent legalese, click the link below to download the application from our website.
The SkyPricer is generic and lends itself to a variety of retail products. The section of the application that deals specifically with print shops begins on page 45, paragraph [0179]. The relevant figures are 21-32. Don't say I didn't warn you about the language.
Last year, the SkyPricer product migrated from proof of concept (something we needed to do for the patent application) to Beta 1. That beta is now nearly complete. Development will proceed in stages, from producing a manual worksheet for a single shopping cart (BigCommerce), to generating a CSV file for that cart, and finally to CSV files for BigCommerce plus one alternate cart. The alternate will most likely be WooCommerce, a WordPress plug-in. That decision is still in the air.
Wide Format and Signs and maybe RISO
Okay, so printing price estimating for RISO Duplicators is a bit of a long shot, but there isn't much to it, so why not look at it. I know someone in upstate New York not far from Rochester who would definitely like to see it happen. Wide Format and Signs are already on the drawing board and will follow the SkyPricer into beta.
Book of the Month
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. "Why?" asks the bewildered waiter. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife book and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, heading out the door. "Look it up." The waiter reads the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Seeing that punctuation was invented in the age of printing, by printers, we ought to have this little book sitting on our shelf, right next to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. The author's examples are hilarious. "If it's not extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts." So it is, Lynne, so it is. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
