If You Love Something, Set It Free

Our Products

As of today, Enso is free!

Some say that it’s the destiny of all software to eventually become free. For Enso, that eventuality is today. By making Enso free we make it able to reach a much wider audience, much faster.

What this means for development and tech support

The fact that Enso is now free does not mean that we’re ceasing development on it. Quite the opposite: we have a bunch of exciting new features lined up, which will be going into beta testing in the near future. So good, in fact, that internally we’ve been calling it “Enso 2.0″.

However, the change does mean that we have to phase out our current system of customer support. Up until now we’ve given a lot of attention to each individual bug report, feature request, complaint, or suggestion that we’ve received. Now that Enso is free, we expect the volume of correspondence to grow so fast that we may not be able to keep up with it all. We still want your bug reports and feature requests; the difference is that we can no longer promise to answer every email or to help every user with troubleshooting.

An exception will be made for our customers who purchased Enso licenses prior to January 15, 2008. As a way of thanking these customers for their support, we will provide six months (from now to August 2008) of dedicated tech support.

In the long run, we’d like to find a way that Humanized can continue to provide help to people who are having trouble, without having to personally respond to every email. There are several ways of doing this, from a troubleshooting forum to a searchable online knowledge-base. We’re not sure yet what form our eventual support system will take; we welcome your input on this issue.

Functional Changes to Enso

Functional changes to Enso are minimal. For the most part, the free version works exactly like the previous version, except that it will never complain about commands being expired. However, there are two changes that deserve mention.

First, Enso updates no longer happen automatically. Using the”Update” command will now let you know whether or not there is an updated version available and, if there is, will take you to the page where you can download it. We are sorry to see this feature go, but it was costing us a disproportionate number of resources to maintain.

Second, the Define and Thesaurus commands now make use of online resources instead of a built-in copy of the Oxford American Dictionary. The current version uses answers.com but we are open to suggestions if you know of a better resource for dictionary or thesaurus information. The downside of this change is that define and thesaurus no longer work if you’re offline; the upside is that the vocabulary is now much bigger while the Enso Words download is now much, much smaller.

What’s Your Excuse Now?

Now that Enso costs you literally nothing, there’s even less of a reason not to give it a try.If you already use Enso, give a copy to a friend or coworker and show them how to use it. Help us spread the word far and wide that Enso is free!