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!

Instead of answers.com, you might try interfacing with dict.org for dictionary lookups. It makes use of a whole bunch of free and open-source dictionaries (as well as at least one thesaurus).

What about reference.com?

I have had their thesaurus search as part of my firefox search engines, and have been very happy with it.

This is great to hear!

But what about the betas? will they be available again to download? I get 404 errors when I click the download links.

Oh wait! I see the TeX and Remote control commands in the list of available commands!

nevermind :)

dict.org is the way to go. There are a variety of servers that implement the protocol, which has its own RFC, so it would even be possible for users to specify specific dict servers and dictionaries to use.

I saw “If You Love Something, Set It Free” in my news reader and thought you made Enso free software. Free as in the freedom to use however you wish, the freedom to study, freedom to distribute, and freedom to improve and distribute. Perhaps a foreshadow?

Alice, thanks for pointing out that the Beta products were inaccessible. I broke the links by accident when I was revamping the site today. They should be fixed now. My apologies!

Braydon, hang on a couple of days and we’ll talk about that.

Sources or a Linux version anytime soon? ;)

Great news. Has this got anything to do with the (rumored?) Mozilla purchase of Humanized?

Okay. I coocked up a nice little command (and I like it). How do I share it with enso users? Maybe a forum ?
Where do we ask questions to more technical users? (and how do I distribute the script I wrote since it’s written in Ruby ?)

Sounds a bit like a simplified GNOME Do. Maybe you would like to play around with Do for ideas…

Jono: The beta links still don’t seem to work. Congratulations on this interesting move!

Waaah! I bought Enso a year ago and I’d buy it again. It’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in years, and I wouldn’t consider doing without it. Everyone who sees it says “Wow, what’s that?” and they leave my desk with their jaw dropped.

I’ve been hoping it would make you guys phenomenally rich and phenomenally successful. Now that will take another route. Congratulations, best wishes, and keep my Enso coming!

Perhaps a foreshadow?Braydon, hang on a couple of days and we’ll talk about that.
Don’t tease me, Jono…

Between this and your little postcard, I’m gitty with anticipation. If you do open up, I’d be more than happy to help port to GNOME.

Disregard that quotes in that previous comment — it was supposed to be embedded quotes. It looks like there’s a little bug in your live preview…

<quote> appears to show a quote element, but in my last comment, the quote element got stripped.

Nice to have cool stuff like this free.

I went to the download page, but I couldn’t seam to find the sources anywhere?

nolan: come on down to ensowiki.com and the rest of us rubyists will hook you up.

Thomas: no source release has been made.

Joost: Thanks for pointing that out; I restored the links to the individual beta products, but the one to install all beta products at once was still broken. That is now fixed.

To clarify, this was a free-as-in-beer release, not a free-as-in-freedom release. We’re not opening the source code at this time, but we’re not ruling out doing so in the future.

We would like to do a Linux version, but we don’t yet know when such a thing will be ready.

Also, please stay tuned for a full-length blog post from Aza explaining what’s going on with Humanized and Mozilla.

Just wanted to add my thanks to that of everyone else. This is really appreciated.

Great product, great decision.. thank you! Please do consider the free-as-in-freedom move, and the wealth of beneficial possibilities to the product that could ensue as a result of mass source contribution..
Again, good job!

Many many thanks for this!

I love Enso, and now i’m able to use it fully.

And congrats on the Mozilla collaboration.

For dictionary services, there’s also Google’s define:whatever command, which is quick and handy and ad-free, or if you don’t mind the ads Merriam-Webster Online is decent.

Me thinks the Humanized folks have been following Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Blog and/or watched Chris’s Presentation

Good lookin.

It is exciting see ‘inovation’ like this. I have to put ‘inovation’ in quotes, because in reality this revisting what has existed for many years. vi, EMACS have provided simlar (but simpler) functionaility. And of course the very essence of UNIX (and Linux was you grow out of using the GUIs) was command line, simple coule of keystokes, get a result and carry on. But very nice to see the evolution of these basic concepts. Like wise in the statement of software becoming free. Fact is, software started out free, the OS and applications were ‘thrown’ in as part of the hardware (mainframe). But boy did thoss support services cost.
Well as they say nothing new under the sun

Weird. I was reading folklore.org, then started wikipediaing the original Mac crew, and somehow ended up here.

Enso looks like a very good example of “!!! why didn’t I think of that ???”

Cheers,
Phil

I’d gladly trade six months of tech support (which I haven’t needed, nor do I expect to need it) for a Mac version. :) Maybe I’m using Quicksilver wrong, but I find Enso far friendlier, faster, and cleaner for everyday acceleration.

You guys are doing fantastic things and I can’t wait to see what comes next!

Well I am very glad to see that enso is free now. Bit I really liked the built in dictionary that enso used to have. Perhaps the enso team could make it so that you could download enso with the dictionary seperately? I just find that I cant find the definition/thesaurusition quickly/easily enough for it to be worth looking up. Plus I like not having to have internet connection to look up words.

I love so much the things that you are.

I used a demo of your program a few months ago and as a poor college student, was very sad when the trial ended (I nearly cut off a limb to distract myself from the pain of my newly-found virtual limb -named enso).

Today you have reattached said limb, and it is a beautiful thing.

Thank you.

I would gladly exchange my 6 months of technical support for adiscount on Enso 2.0 - unless that is free too!

Thanks very much guys! How do you intend to make money though?

Hey, thanks a lot! I’ve been using the trial version of Enos for a while now. On a lark, I thought I’d check out the site to read up on the blog postings, and now it’s free. That is absolutely fantastic! Keep up the good work.

I want to use Enso but I don’t use Windows!

Brilliant! ;)

I’ve been a furiously keen user of Enso for the past year, but I’ve now switched to using Ubuntu. I yearn for Enso on Linux. Yes, there are similar utilities, but they don’t have the grace and sheer usability that Enso has (mind you, I started using it in sticky mode after about six months).

Free is great, but I am tremendously disappointed that there will no longer be an offline dictionary available. One of the key reasons I chose Enso, was that I often use my laptop offline and I wanted a dictionary and thesaurus tool that would continue to work even, gasp, without Internet. Perhaps you could allow for the possibility of an offline dictionary and thesaurus? For instance, for those of us who own a licensed copy of the Oxford American product, maybe Enso Free could continue to access those data?

I am wholehearted agreeing with Brent Krueger! I love Enso Words for its application with the Oxford dictionary, because the dictionary itself is VERY useful, concise, and to the point. Answers website is just too much, and sometimes it takes time to load, not to mention the BIGGEST DISADVANTAGE which is loading on a separate window.

One of the main attractive features of Enso is enabling users to continue their work without distractions, this new “bigger” Answers.com really takes a wrong turn.

I am very disappointed.

PLEASE, by all means, I sincerely hope you guys will bring the Oxford dictionary back!! Or at least, give us users an option when downloading. I do not mind how big the file size, Oxford’s usefulness is ALL I need.

Please consider my comment.

Thank you for the wonderful products.

I use your products every day, throughout the day. And, what I use the most is the define to see words and synonyms. I am mobile and am in coffee shops and offices, and on the road, so the online option is of no help to me. Yes I have wireless and desktop internet at home, but I will stay with my paid version for as long as I can. I like the internet but the built dictionary is nearly instantaneous. On my palm pilot I have an excellent dictionary and synonym and do on my desk at home as well. Finally, like the comments above, I vote to keep Oxford built in, or to have two options. I want the built in!

If you are going to make this product free, then refund our money. I thought it was worth the price, and still do. I have both of your products which I paid for.

I think that opening up a website like answers.com creates an unnatural transition when viewing the definition or thesaurus. I really liked the small dialog that came up, it made it feel more coherent to the system.

Also, I would go on to suggest that having a window open up for spellcheck creates another unnatural transition that could be replaced by context windows small enough to show upon text that needs to be fixed.