As we reported last week, Webshots, which makes photo wallpaper and screensavers, have confirmed that they’ve stopped development for the Mac version of their desktop software. And a planned Mac OS X version is dead in the water.
Jonathan Wight, the programmer on the Webshots Desktop product for the Mac offered some insight into the change in plans for Mac versions of the product.
“Excite@Home has been gone through two rounds of lay offs this year,” he told MacCentral. “I survived the first round, but was laid off in their second round at the end of April. As far as I know Excite@Home has one fulltime Mac programmer left working for them. I doubt Excite@Home has the resources left to develop the Mac Webshots client further.”
The Mac Webshots client was extremely well received by the Mac community, he said. It had over 1,000,000 downloads on download.cnet.com in it’s first year, and was almost always in the number one position on their chart in front of StuffIt Expander and Napster, Wight added.
“Unfortunately there were quite a few completed features in the version of Webshots that I was working on that never saw the light of day and I doubt ever will, including: a slide show feature incorporating QuickTime effects to transitions between photos, mostly working Mac OS X support (there was a bug in Mac OS X 10.0 that prevented the desktop from being changed, and I’m not sure if version 10.0.x fixed it) and built-in image download,” he said.
The programmer wishes that Excite@Home would have left the software available for download without any support. At least then they wouldn’t have totally alienated their user base and would have given them the option to continue development at a later time, he said.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to contact Excite@Home and try to convince them to change their minds, there’s an online contact form.
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