09 Jun 2009

Maxto goes commercial, makes me sad

One of my favourite little desktop apps that I discovered a few months ago is MaxTo. It allows you to divide your Windows desktop into regions and then maximize applications to those regions, allowing perfect and practically effortless tiling. However, I don’t recommend that you download it. Not from the official website, anyway.

As of June 2nd, MaxTo stopped being a free application licensed under a Creative-Commons 3 license and went commercial. There is nothing wrong with this. However, I am miffed that I only discovered this after MaxTo had installed an update to my free version and turned it into a 30-day trial. What the hell? Here’s the dialog box I clicked on to install the new version:

I’m not impressed. I clicked on the ‘Yes’ button hoping to see a new, improved version of the app that I loved, not a sudden notice of impending termination of functionality. Instead of giving me something new, the creators decided to take it all away. That makes me sad.

However, there is a happy ending to this tale! The old version of MaxTo may have been removed from the official site, but my downloads folder is very big. I have downloads in there from waaay back. After a bit of digging, I found the old installer for the free version. Hooray! I promptly uninstalled the new, commercial version and re-installed the older one. Balance was once again restored to the Desktop. There’s even a handy checkbox in the options that turns off the update-checking.

Best of all though, because the old version is licensed under CC, I’m free to re-distribute it here for anyone that wants it. Yay!

Thanks for reading! If you like my writing, you may be interested in my book: Healthy Webhook Consumption with Rails

David at 23:55