The PimpFish Blog

2007-02-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

New Windows Vista compatible PimpFish BETA released!

That's right kids - We've released a BETA version of PimpFish 2007 for our registered users and a Vista compatible PimpFish Basic. To get your hands on this cool new version go here:

http://pimpfish.com/download/pf2007-beta/

And as you may notice we are using our new design and layout on those pages - expect BIG changes on our website and SLAPfiles area very soon ... Take it easy y'all!

- The Zabersoft Dudes

2006-12-24T10:02:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas and happy Holidays!

It's that time of year again. The holidays. If you celebrate that sort of thing, then Zabersoft wishes you an excellent holiday and whatnot. As always we're busy, and at the moment things are still on track for our big new update in February. Which is going to kick ass (as usual).
I wonder how the inhabitants of Christmas Island feel about all this...

Best holiday wishes, n' have a happy new year!

- The Zabersoft gang of idiots

2006-11-22T16:39:00.000-08:00

The Good ... The Bad ... The Ugly ...
Whew! we thought we'd come out with a small update for all you freaks out there, and give out a little sneak preview goodness on our upcoming version: PimpFish 2007 Vista Edition

Yep, that's going to be the official name for the thing untill the next update when we will most likely drop the "Vista Edition" part. Of course we will still work on XP and Windows 2000 - But we will be dropping all Win 9x support (98/Me) - Anyway, I have a few news to bring today and some are good and one is bad. But first, the good news:

We have finalized the feature set of PF 2007 and can now show you some sneak preview pictures! Check this out yo....

Wow, check that out... The toolbar looks... Like... So much cooler! And what is that "Plugins" button you see there? Well the new SLAPfiles plugin integration of course! What this baby does is enable us to do custom serverside processing of all grabs... Meaning, grabbing from Youtube, Google, apple.com/trailers etc. ad nauseum will be completely integrated and seamless! Just surf to the page where the video is playing, hit grab movies and BLAMMO! It all works out... And the best thing is: We can now continuously just update, tweak, fix and whatnot on our server and you will never have to download an update to the plugin stuff.... More sites will be supported automagically!

How will this look in the downloader...? Well, something like this:

Cool, huh?

Also we have of course taken full advantage of the new UI features on Win Vista (as seen on www.pentafish.com) and put in a few more of those cool task dialogs:

Looks friendly doesn't it? :)

What other cool features will be in there? Well...

- Firefox toolbar update (a lot of good stuff coming up)
- Better Image Grabbing (CSS now supported to a certain extent)
- Plenty of bugfixes and improved downloader logic
- Better error reporting and feedback
- Bundled free FLV player with no adware/spyware/crap so you don't need any additional tools other than PimpFish to download and view video from e.g. YouTube

This is just a partial list of the highlights...

The bad news: Spidering will sadly not be part of the recipe this time 'round :

Yep, you heard right. Unfortunately due to insane time constraints we have had to cut that feature out of this release - as we are racing to meet the January 30th deadline for a simultaneous release with Windows Vista. Not only that, but time allotted for development is pretty much over as we need to spend the next two months on working on getting this thing Certified for Windows Vista, do all our Quality Assurance, create cool new walkthrough stuff (This time around it's all video based!) and create a whole new PimpFish.com website almost from scratch.... The bright side of all this though, is that now that we had actually started working on it, then this will be item no. 1 to be added to the following version.

Greets form the Zaber dudes...

- Mike n' Arni

2006-10-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

Hey there!
We thought we'd do a quick update and inform you all of our superior geekyness and fill you in on what's going down these days.

PimpFish 2007 sneak preview!
Yep, it's that time of year again where everything kicks into high gear as we are getting ready to release another MAJOR update to PimpFish. This time we have a bunch of neat goodies in store for you, and to just name a few that are in development:

* SLAPfiles Plugin Support (No longer a need to go to that pesky video downloader page to download videos from your favorite video websites)
* Spidering (oh yes... oh yes!! MWUAHAHA)
* Improved image grabbing (You can now get hold of images linked through CSS etc.)
* Huge Firefox toolbar update
* Windows Vista certified and spiffy UI
* Approx. 1 billion other improvements

We have been focusing a lot on making things cool for Windows Vista, as the friendly folks at Microsoft UK wanted us to do some stuff for them. So, to get a lowdown on just a few of the features you'll be getting in the next version then you should check out our special promo page for the Microsoft version:

http://www.pentafish.com/

This is just the tip of the iceberg though ...

The PimpFish plague keeps on spreading ...
As we are certifiably insane then we have kept on pushing PimpFish on unsuspecting (and quite innocent) populations all around the globe. The last to fall prey to this spreading malice is the fair country (and continent!) of Australia. So be on the lookout for lots more Kangaroo action in the near future!

Oh, and if you are thinking: "Hmm, I wonder how the next big website update will look like to go along with the cool new PimpFish 2007?" Well, wonder no more! you can get a sneak preview on that as well, as we actually used our basic new stuff to hook up the Australian PimpFish website. Check it out:

http://www.pimpfish.com.au/

Pretty isn't it? :)

New Zabersoft logo

Yeah, we redesigned that old thing... The tiger is scarier than ever...

Kind regards from the Zaber dudes,

- Mike and Arni

2006-09-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives...

Yeah, you 're right, that is the opening title to the fantastic show Days of our Lives. But errr, that's not quite what I wanted to talk about in todays update. Well, it has something to do with time I guess.

Lately we here at the Zabersoft worldwide HQ (which exists inside a tiny cardboard box with the lettering FEDEX on it, for some strange reason) put our heads together and decided on when we would like to release the next major update of PimpFish and more importantly what said update should include.

This is as always an ongoing process which takes a long time, but this time we have decided that we will be quick and dirty about things. This might prove as a challenge though as we have a lot of versions out there in the ether which will take synchronous development to get right.

All I can reveal now is that we will be releasing a brand new version of PimpFish Basic along with the full retail version of PimpFish (with mucho goodness of course) and that at least a few of the major features we have been promising for years will make their way in there.

Also, as you may have noticed here in the blog before, then the new version will be very much targeted at Windows Vista and we guarantee it will look smashing on the new Windows Platform.

And oh yes, we will be doing some fun stuff with a tiny American software company which nobody has ever heard of. But more on that later (Hint: The CEO of that company was quite a juvenile delinquent in his younger days...)

Well, that was that for now! Catch you later Bubba!

Arni J and Mike D (The Zaber dudes)

2006-08-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

New stuff all over...

As usual we are posting in our blog about new developments here at Zaber, and this time we are very happy to announce that we have finally finished our release in France, US and the UK through Avanquest and that our new Japanese release is almost all hooked up.

More video downloader goodness ...
As some of you may, or may not know, then we have been actively pursuing a way to include support for the more popular video websites out there into PimpFish. The basic problem is that many of these sites use Flash-based video which is shown in a container on the webpage itself - Which makes the job difficult, if not impossible for our toolbar and Floatbar (in the current incarnation of PimpFish anyway)

So, the future strategy is to use the coolness of our SLAPfiles format and create a plugin system to PimpFish for seamless download from these websites. So to start with, we have been working on first of all getting some support for these websites up and running so that we can merge it all into the next version of PimpFish and make it truly kick ass.

Where is all this heading? Well today we added support for 7 new popular websites in our SLAPfile video downloader tool which were impossible to grab from before:

Apple.com/trailers - IFilm.com - Bolt.com - Collegehumour.com - Grinvi.com - Vsocial.com and Blip.tv

This now brings the total count of supported websites to 14!

And we are pretty darn sure that nobody out there has the level of stability when it comes to grabbing those evil evil hard to get videos from Apple.com/trailers! :)
If you still haven't had a chance to check out our video downloader tool, then scoot on over and check it out now!

We'd like to thank you for your support and your time, and we hope you will stick around to see the next version of PimpFish which will have all this functionality directly integrated into the application :)

Zaber out .....

Arni J & Mike D (The Zaber dudes)

2006-08-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

It's official! PF Basic released - And a new goodie as well...

We've got a new flavor of PimpFish out for all the people out there who are simply too cheap to pay for software. It's called PimpFish Basic - And that's just what it is: A basic version with all the core functionality of PimpFish, but with certain fancy frills cut out.There has to be some incentive for people to give us money so we can fund the development of this darn thing!

Anyhoo, the Basic version can't minimize to the tray and doesn't have the cool thumbnail viewer, also we have disabled galleries, and custom download location (it only downloads to My Docs) and some other minor stuff. So, as you see, nothing crucial - But enough to make you feel warm and fuzzy about owning the fully featured Rolls Royce version (You are a registered customer right? Hehe, just messing with ya...)

If you are an unregistered user, and want to take free ride on the sleek chrome-covered PF-train, then go to our download page and get your hands on the Yugo of downloader software:

http://www.pimpfish.com/download.html#basic

New Video Downloader tool released!!

Finally we got our crap together and released something which is truly freakin' cool! We now have a nifty SLAPfile tool which will hook you up with goodness from all the leading video websites, including: video.google.com - youtube.com - myspace.com - break.com - dailymotion.com - metacafe.com and putfile.com !!

To try out this thing, check out:

http://www.pimpfish.com/slapfiles/video_downloader.php

What's _really_ cool about this whole deal though, is that we are working on implementing our online SLAPfile tool as a plugin system in the PimpFish application - What does this mean? Well, in a soon-to-come major update this will all be integrated so you won't even have to think about it! It will all just be click-to-grab and voila, we take care of the rest.

For now though, you will have to live with using our online tool - We hope that is OK with you ;)

Thanks for readin'!

Arni J and Mike (The Zaber dudes)

2006-08-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

PimpFish Basic on your doorsteps ...

We've been very busy these last few days at the Zaber camp as we are finishing up all the little details with regards to the upcoming PimpFish Basic release. We can now let you few but lucky Blog readers in on a little secret: PimpFish Basic will be released in the beginning of next week...

Also, we have a bit of a surprise on the SLAPfiles front - Let's just say that our tools just got a whole lot better...

Stay hip!

Arni J and Mike (The Zaber dudes)

2006-07-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

PimpFish for Windows Vista and PF Basic sneak preview

Hello everybody!

As you all know from a quick glance at this blog, then it is obvious that we are not the most prolific bloggers online.
I guess we are just too busy cooking up cool stuff that we have a hard time keeping track of everything. But at least we are trying to get better at this thing. So, we thought that with this update we would give you a little sneak preview of what we are playing around with these days.

First and foremost then we are coming out with a brand new, free, version of PimpFish (yeah you heard right: Free!) What's the catch? Well, it will be a slightly feature-reduced version of the regular PimpFish and it will have a few messages in the toolbar and downloader to encourage people to upgrade, and to give out news, tips and whatever mad ramblings we might feel like putting out there in the ether.

PimpFish Basic Thumbnail Viewer window
with the Aero Glass effent on Windows Vista

Windows Vista Stuff

As a part of our continuing, sick and twisted, urge to improve on PimpFish we have been doing a lot of research and development on the upcoming Vista platform lately. One of the things we will be introducing in our future release is support for the Aero Glass effect in Windows Vista (as you can see on the image on the left)

We probably wont go overboard on all that stuff though, as we predict that everybody and their mother is going to be doing the Aero Glass stuff as soon as Vista hits the streets (just look at the surge in Windows XP themed icons etc. in applications in recent years) - So what you can expect is spiffy new looks here and there, but still with some unique UI elements along with all that stuff. For example, our downloader remains largely unchanged on Windows Vista except for the border areas which have been glass-i-fied.

The PimpFish (Basic) Downloader on Windows Vista downloading some stuff

PimpFish Basic - Coming soon!

The other big thing coming out soon is our new PimpFish Basic (as I mentioned earlier) which is going to rock - a lot. Basically PimpFish Basic is a completely free but feature reduced version of the regular PimpFish. What we have "cut out" from the free version is the automatically generated galleries, the ability to save to any directory (PF Basic only saves to My Documents) and the mini thumbnail viewer.

We are hoping to release the new PimpFish Basic, and send out a newsletter to all you freaks within the next week or two.

On top of all that you can expect 7 new language versions of the regular PimpFish being released over the next couple of months... Exciting stuff!

Well, untill next time - Stay freaky!

- The Zaber dudes

2006-04-29T15:51:00.000-07:00

Wow... Do we ever suck at making updates!

Yeah, that's right. We suck. Huh? What? Oh, by that we mean suck at making updates to our blog dude... What kind of a person are you anyway?! Jumping to conclusions like that...

Hmm that was weird. Anyhoo. We have been tremendously busy at the Zaber camp - Which is awesome as always. Question is whether all this work is bearing fruit - And well, it looks like it is! :)

We have recently gotten some cool new distribution deals with people who are much much more qualified than any of us loosers over here at spreading software around the globe. I mean, we have no idea what the hell we are doing.

Hopefully that will eventually result in PimpFish becoming insanely popular. That is our goal anyway - And as things look at the moment we are getting there. Here's some stats:

1st month: 2.500 downloads
2nd month: 4.000+
3rd month: 8.000+
And this month it looks like we will hit 12.000 downloads!!!

That's pretty freakin' awesome if you ask us. Furthermore we have had a lot of great feedback from our users - suggestions for new features, comments and ALOT of praise. So, at least we are doing _something_ right :)

There's plenty of cool new things to look forward to - And thank you all for being so supportive! (Tell your friends... Or we'll send a big hairy dude over to your house and kick your ass!)

Thanks for reading :)

- The Zaber dudes

2006-02-11T12:06:00.000-08:00

New stuff!

Today we released a new build of PimpFish for Firefox, adding a few features and fixing a few small bugs here and there.

Furthermore we have added a new SLAPfile tool for users wanting to download video from Youtube.com - Check it out here:

YouTube.com video downloader

And finally we got around to shipping off our official "PimpFish is released!" press release. You can check out the full deal here:

Press Release: PimpFish with SLAPfiles released - Not your average download manager

Thats was all for now... Sign up for our newsletter at pimpfish.com to get this stuff in your mailbox ;)

- The Zabersoft dudes

2006-01-19T18:09:00.000-08:00

PimpFish for Firefox released!

Man oh man is that sweet or what. PimpFish for Firefox. We have now officially become Darth Vader and crossed over to the dark side. Open Source here we go!

Hehe. Maybe not. However kudos to the Zaberdevs and especially our Senior Software Architect Michael Dunn - Did an amazing job banging this thing together in a surprisingly short timespan.
It's all in BETA so far, so everything isn't hooked up yet. However we encourage you all to try it out and give us feedback so we can make it kick royal amounts of ass.

Another piece of interesting/exciting news that passed through our offices today: The Japanese version of 1ClickPicGrabber (what PimpFish was before it became PimpFish) might be heading off to a future as a retail product. Cute little boxes with cute little CD's and manuals in them in cute little stores which then cute little Japanese people can buy and make us all very happy :)

Thank you all for your support! More exciting news coming up soon....

2006-01-04T14:14:00.000-08:00

The end is near....

Hi everybody. Man what a hectic few days for all us Zaber devs, llamas and other more or less malicious critters we keep around the offices here. We are in the midst of moving to a new location in Denmark which is very exciting. The only drawback is that everything is a mess and that we are severely backlogged - Sorry about the slow response to support emails these days guys - Bear with us!

Anyway, the final release of PimpFish v1 or PimpFish 2005 as we call it in-house (as you can guess the next version will be officially labeled PimpFish 2006) has come and gone more or less smoothly. We are still struggling to finish up the last things on our website and stuff before we go completely live however. By this I mean adding PimpFish to download.com and other download sites and send out our press release.

This should all be fine and dandy sometime within the next few weeks however and after _that_ the real fun begins. I can reveal as much as there is a FireFox version of the toolbar in the works! Yep, we actually have a basic toolbar up and running and are working like mad to make it just as cool as the IE version. So, stay tuned and sign up for our newsletter to get news on that front.

Furthermore there will be tons of freaky and exciting things going on with the PimpFish website. Contests, weird new ways of paying for a license and more. We like freaky stuff, so why not share with all you guys? ;)

On another note then I would like to say a million thanks to all the folks out there who helped us out with the BETA testing phase. A lot of people wrote in with comments and suggestions and a lot of ground was covered in those few weeks. Hopefully this means a cooler, smoother product for all you downloader freaks out there :) - With that in mind: You top 3 reporters out there will get a small goodie from us. As soon as we figure out what it will be and get around to ship it off that is ;) ... You'll get a note from us by then.

Well yours truly is going to go back to the new office and continue setting up gear and painting the walls neon-green (research shows this is a very developer-friendly color... It keeps them calm and prevents unprovoked fits of rage which result in cola being spilled on our precious keyboards) - Untill the next time:
Keep sending in them emails - We love all the feedback we can get. Both positive and negative :)

Bye bye now...

2005-11-10T01:47:00.000-08:00

Feedback!

Last updated: Nov 19th

Wow, what a great response we've been getting from all you guys out there. Thanks so much for taking the time to help us out and improve PimpFish! I already received the first reports from people, so from now on this will be the main thread/post regarding all bugs and issues in this blog. I will continuously edit this thread as new stuff is added and resolved so we all can track whats been going on. Anyway:

New issues:

AutoUpdate not working

Status: NOT A BUG. This is a serverside "error" and due to the fact that we haven't finalized AutoUpdate implementation for PimpFish. This has no bearing on the functionality of AutoUpdate. It is simply a matter of us putting up an XML file in our servers and things will work again. Besides, PimpFish is the latest version out. No need to update anything yet.
New directory naming scheme not working out for some people

Status: The new naming scheme we introduced in PimpFish to solve the file overwrite problem is not working out for some people. We will look into improving our system.
Suggestion: Show direct download link in install downloader if it has gotten succesful reply from our serverside script, but errored out on the actual download

Solved issues

Download speed "invisible" in download statistics

Status: Under investigation. We think this problem may be related to large fonts/screen resolution. We could use some more info on this, if somebody could send us a screenshot of this in action?
Suggestion: When the user has hit OK in the registration dialog, show a message advising/reminding them that they will not see a confirmation in the about dialog untill they have restarted the downloader

Status: Many small improvements to the system in the upcoming update
FloatBar doesn't work for Real Media

Description: We don't plan on supporting RealPlayer with the FloatBar as it is a very tricky media format to handle. We will look into improving the UI (maybe show some sort of unobtrusive warning the first time you hover over an embedded RealPlayer movie)

Status: We investigated this and judged FloatBar was behaving appropriatly for Real video. Real is a streaming format, so it will be hard for us to support it. (not to mention the lack of _will_ to support it, as Real in our opinion is an evil empire)

Top reporters

Neu/Neu8
William
George

Keep hooking us up with that goodie info! :)

AHJ

2005-11-09T06:07:00.000-08:00

A minor update...

I thought I'd just throw a minor update on here regarding the BETA tester period as I forgot some rather important info in the last post. When you are trying out the BETA it might be a good idea to turn on our brand new logging system. This system is simply a built-in code debugging tool which helps us in pin-pointing errors. So if you have had a crash or something weird happened, then it will be a piece of cake for you to send us the log and we will be able to see what went wrong in 0.2 seconds (maybe a bit more... But not by much! :P)
As I am slightly less lazy today than most other days, I've been as creative as including some screenshots on how to do all this:

1. Enable debug logging in PimpFish

To do this, point to Control --> Options in the toolbar and switch to the new Troubleshooting page, there you click on Change troubleshooting settings:

Click here to edit your options now

2. Submitting debug logs to us
Whoooh mama... That was tricky, eh? :) Now here comes the fun part: How to easily submit debug logs to us?? Easy. First you have to keep this feature in mind when using PimpFish, and when you have encountered a problem you can then go to the same Troubleshooting page in the options and hit the Prepare log file for uploading button. When you have done that, go to the PimpFish website and upload your log along with a description - Easy as pie!

Click here to check out the Upload/Contact Form

Man, were those screensots awesome or what??? :P

Thanks for reading

AHJ

2005-11-07T22:58:00.000-08:00

The day has come!

Today we launch PimpFish beta. Man, has this moment been underway for WAY too long or what???
Hmm ok, you guys probably don't know, but today is the culmination of 8 months of super-intense hard work by the Zabersoft dudes. Love has been won and lost. Oceans have been crossed in jet-planes and much beer and wine has been consumed in late-night alcohol binges.
The result? Something which might just kick awesomely enormous amounts of ass. If we get everything right that is :)

With so much blood sweat n' tears invested in this we wanted to make sure everything came off to a good start and that stuff gets as close to "perfection" as humanly possible. That is why we call on YOU ye olde registered 1CPG customer! Step up young lad and become: The brave beta tester of much coolness!

From now on, if you decide to upgrade to PimpFish and try out all the cool new crap, (PimpFish is the next step beyond 1CPG, so if you don't do it... We will point and laugh) - It would be cool if you could help us out and test things out. Everything is not 100% finished as you may, or may not, know:

Our documentation is not finished
Testing has only been done in-house, so a bug or two might still be crawling around in there somewhere
The website(s) still need some work and polishing here and there

Being a beta tester is very easy. So don't be afraid of assuming a little responsibility ;) - All you have to do is:

Let us know if anything seems just a little strange, missing or stupid
Let us know if there is anything you cant seem to get working or don't understand
Let us know if everything crashes and explodes in a huge fireball

Thats pretty much it. Report your stuff here in the blog as comments to this post, or post your bugs in our forum. We will keep everything in the BETA stage untill we are satisfied stuff is perfect - Then we will tell the rest of the world :)

PS: The top 3 BETA reporters will get free upgrades when the final version is released and a special PimpFish goodie... Soon to be disclosed :)

Over and out

AHJ

2005-11-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

The first post ever!

Jesus. We have a blog. Look at that. Whoa! Its green!
Ok ok I should maybe stop ranting about the blog. I mean, its pretty obvious. You're looking straight at it after all. Isn't it cute though?

Anyway, I should introduce myself: I'm Arni Johannesson and I'm the Big Cheese around here. Bigwig. Head honcho. "The General" even. And I'll be your liaison throughout most of this crazy ride on this strange torpedo we call: The PimpFish Blog

This blog will be our main communication medium with you, the end-user, in the future. First we will start with using this blog to communicate with all our awesome beta testers while we tweak everything and get as close to perfection as possible before we tell the rest of the world we exist.

After that: Who knows. Probably we will be lazy motherfuskers and rarely post here. Maybe the opposite will happen and we will post goodies and tips n' tricks regarding PimpFish every 2 minutes. I guess we will see...

In the meantime, thanks for stopping by. And contribute if you can you lazy bastard!

AHJ