I was recently reminded of how I learned to use a stencil duplicator in elementary school, I’m dating myself but I’m pretty sure it was already obsolete when I was learning it in the mid 1970s.
It certainly was an inexpensive and (relatively) easy way to spread information, cheaply duplicating a stencil you’d compose with a typewriter and a stylus (!).
Nearly 50 years later people still want to share and spread information, and the web is the natural medium for that. And when it comes to publishing to the web, nothing comes close to Sparkle in terms of ease of use and affordability.
Sparkle is the only radically visual website builder in the world.
Today’s release of Sparkle 4.5, to coincide with Apple’s release of macOS Ventura, is all about smoothing out the Sparkle user experience.
It is interestingly hard to communicate what a focus on “user experience” actually means. Should we be describing all the hurdles that aren’t there? Should we talk about the needs we anticipated years ago, such as embedding Google Fonts in your website for privacy reasons, just because we’re always thinking really hard about what’s best for your website? Should we detail the hundreds of edge cases that will work just like you expect them to (the one or two you actually encounter), because we’ve been iterating for such a long time, engineering Sparkle with a strict no regression policy?
Simply put, Sparkle 4.5 capitalizes on 8 years of work, further refining the recent new features. Our customers experience the elation that comes from quickly reaching goals and results, and from being in “the zone” — a mental state of hyper productivity you get to when your tools work at the speed of your mind. And perhaps that’s it. That’s the very definition of a great user experience: fun and happiness.
As has become now customary, Sparkle 4.5 is a free update for all Sparkle users, and there is no new paid addition.
