Public Notice
Posted December 30th, 2004 @ 03:47pm by Erik J. Barzeski
The home page of a company I'd only ever heard of a few times before today has taken a potshot at Apple for stupid things, and I'm bored enough to take a few pot shots back. My text appears in light grey.
The release of Black & Bleu™ v10 marks the end of our participation in the Macintosh software marketplace. So make sure you buy our products now!!!
The shrinking number of Mac users who can tolerate to look at our website enough to download software they won't need by a company that's given the Mac community a finger, the increasing reluctance of those users left to actually pay for software products that they do not need and probably never heard of and the apparently significant number of thieves willing to steal rather than pay at all (we found a serial number for our last useful version four years ago, we caught you!) coupled with Apple's seeming lack of concern about compatibility across its product versions desire to push the API forward and our reluctance to update our own applications to take advantage and the alarming problem with its software quality (over 100,000 new bugs reported during the months of October & November, 2004 alone, according to numbers we made up) has combined to render Mac OS software development unprofitable for us. It's either that, or our product is completely irrelevant now that Mac OS X is the best OS in the world, and one that rarely crashes.
So with this final release of Black & Bleu™, we will be exiting from the Mac application marketplace and focusing our attention on other areas of endeavor. Perhaps we'll whine about our inability to deliver marketable or useful products in those other areas of endeavor later, but writing this whole thing up has taken quite a bit out of us, so we may not be up for it.
Bleu Rose Ltd. will continue to exist but with a much different product direction in the future.
We will continue to make copies of our current products available here on our web site for the next several months. Buy now!! BUY NOW!!! [The End]
Puhhh-lease! Basically, Black & Bleu™ is a product that nobody needs anymore. Said one person on MacUpdate:
Comment by Anonymous: 30 bucks for a list of error codes that is free on Apple's site? WTF?
Comments on VersionTracker are a little more caustic:
Looking at the feedback for all titles available from - and presumably discontinued by - this outfit, it appears that the developer really doesn't have a good idea about how to make good interfaces and stable application design. He's got good ideas, but poor implementation across the board. I'm not surprised he's getting out of programming for OSX. It's too bad he's blaming Apple for his own failure.
They mean shrinking number of Mac users stupid enough to pay outrageous shareware fees. $22 is the smallest amount and that's for things like a VCR+ number generator. Good luck finding better reception on the PC side. Good ideas, horrible pricing. Sad to see a developer driving himself out of business.
So, there you have have it. This is almost as bad as the time that Proteron guy accused Apple of ripping off LiteSwitch.
Donate Life
Posted 30 Dec 2004 at 4:35pm #
leaving the mac community? see ya.
you wont really be missed.
...I'm sure the software quality you'll find from other companies will be much higher. o_O
have fun with your "other areas of endeavor."
(i hope one of those areas is "decent web design" ...yuck!)
sent 'em an email. 🙂 i like to annoy people.
Posted 30 Dec 2004 at 4:49pm #
Was that guy frozen in 1995 and just woke up today?
His website design makes my eyes bleed.
Posted 30 Dec 2004 at 5:04pm #
I was really pissed off about another thing until I read this. Now I am yet more pissed off. So the accumulation of all this madness is the motor to make me send this as-- guy an email and turn him into my object of catharsis. Wish me luck and stay tuned for furher inforation about the case.
Posted 30 Dec 2004 at 5:05pm #
How can a company that profited from errors complain about more errors?
Posted 30 Dec 2004 at 6:21pm #
Guys, I don't advocate emailing the guy. It's funny, but you don't need to be mean to the guy about it. And Kelly, yeah, that's the irony. 😛
Posted 30 Dec 2004 at 6:54pm #
Hey, at least the Proteron guy had a _little_ foundation for his claims. I say little because he still went off whining instead of talking about how his app was better (and because the market for the "pro" app switcher decreased dramatically).
Posted 02 Jan 2005 at 6:28pm #
What always astounded me was how blindly the new sites would post Black and Bleu's press releases, giving them some level of credence to anyone except those actually looking at their site, and seeing what they were offering.
The error and bomb codes became harder to find after Steve's return, when there wasn't really a lot of effort given to supporting Classic anymore (at one point, there were some plain english explanations that were lost between OS 8 and 9 or so). So B&B were always charging too much, for something that was once free, yet increasing harder to find, to a market that was needing it less and less as a new OS came into acceptance.
There were a few scattered examples of anti-X arrogance as OS X came into being, but none were as blatantly blinkered and pigheaded as Black and Bleu, nor given as much "pass along without a comment" press help from the Mac news sites.
Not the first to say it, but good riddance to bad rubbish. Quelle Idiotique!