Enso dead, back to launchy?

It sounds like from Jono’s posting that Enso is effectively dead, in the sense that no one is working on it full-time, let alone getting paid for it. The main changes I’ve seen on the code front look related to getting Enso to work on Mac, which is pretty ironic because Enso was one of the few pieces of software that made my PC borderline likeable. I was drawn to Humanized’s ethos - a slick combination of Python, UI, and a vision for how the computing world could be different. Unfortunately, their business model wasn’t forward-thinking enough. I believed in them - after all, they made a big splash on release with Mossberg giving a good review, and the founder is the son of the father of the Mac - and I even sent some money their way. I was hoping Enso would develop into a beautiful layer on top of Windows, hiding all the warts and bringing some coherency to the whole experience.

Hopefully, their vision finds its way into the real world through Mozilla. Seems like an excellent deal for them to be able to reach millions of users. For me, should I just go back to Launchy (which got a nice rewrite using Qt in 2.0, btw), or keep using my purchased copy of Enso that I’m adapted to. Or should I stop writing about productivity software and start producing software?:)

Wednesday, May 28, 2008