Those of you following our Facebook page already know it, but for the sake of completeness we're cross posting it here.

We've launched support for iOS calendar syncing on July 29th. It's available to our pro users and quite easy to setup. Check our Facebook post for details. It's still an early preview, but we're working on fixing all bugs that pop up and once you're and we're happy with it, we'll shift our focus to contacts syncing.

Today we've also relaunched http://fruux.com. After uncountable night shifts, we proudly present a completely new look, a significantly improved support center and a consistent design throughout all sub-sites.

Oh, and we're hiring - take a look at our "Work with us" page.

Wednesday night we took the time to record a short video to show you a little demo of our upcoming fruux iOS calendar syncing feature. It was already a bit late and we had just an iPhone... so sorry for the bad video quality. :-)

If you want to get realtime updates about our day-to-day work you should definitely follow our fruux Facebook page.

We had severe downtime during the last days and currently our service is also not available, while we are trying to bring the systems back online by implementing certain optimizations. As an immediate action we had to disable new sign-ups a few days ago. We‘d love to grow our user base further, but with our current infrastructure we can‘t even provide our current users with the reliability they deserve. Unfortunately it‘s no technical problem - we could easily add a few more servers to our cloud to handle this capacity problems, however there is no budget for additional servers, but more on that later.

Right now our systems are busy executing these tasks and we're trying to relax while monitoring the whole process which will hopefully allow us to bring the systems -at least in a limited fashion- back online really soon (as in one or two days not weeks). It's one of those typical Sundays, except it is not, because this Sunday will either be our game changer and the beginning of something great or the day where we saw the end of the road in retrospective (If these lines sound familiar, you probably read the excellent blog post by Todd Agullnick, Co-Founder of Xmarks Inc., with a very similar story to ours).

Time to think about how far we‘ve come with fruux.

We started as an entirely bootstrapped student project. Initially we never thought about fruux as a product. We just started developing fruux because we desperately needed such a piece of software ourselves. During this time fruux eventually spread amongst family, friends, fellow students and ultimately people we didn't even knew in person. We started getting tired setting up accounts manually so we finally implemented a self-signup into the application and since then our user base keeps growing at crazy rates which makes it hard for us to constantly scale our infrastructure to keep up with this growth. First and foremost it's hard for us because it's a non-technical issue. We've really learned squeezing every single bit of computing power out of our cloud and whenever we hit conferences and talk with people from the industry they are completely blown away when we tell them how little computing power we actually have, but the time has come where we have to scale up big time to keep up with the load and provide a reliable service. Unfortunately nothing in life is for free...

As many of you know, we are only able to work on fruux in our free-time since we graduated. Our full time jobs help us funding the infrastructure for fruux, but also prevent us from investing serious time into the further development, which is kind of a chicken-egg problem.

The first step towards a solution for this issue is to ensure that we have the resources to scale our infrastructure (i.e. deploy more servers) up to a level where we are able to provide a very reliable service. We calculated that this infrastructure will cost us about 700 EUR (approx. 950 USD) per month, but we are unable to fund this personally and we won‘t be able to fund it through donations or ads, so the only option we have is to generate revenue by actually start charging for our service.

Our idea is to provide paying users prioritized syncing as the first "pro" feature. This way our paying users will always enjoy a reliable fruux. Once we actually start selling subscriptions for "fruux pro" it will also become much easier for us to plan the future development of fruux, implement great major new features, jump ship from our current jobs to full time fruux work and ultimately even hire additional engineers in order to bring the project up to speed. Based on your feedback, we discovered that about 25 EUR (approx. 34 USD) per year should be a fair deal (like paying for one "fruux caffè latte" per month) for our service and this way we would need roughly 400 subscribers to cover the infrastructure costs including related taxes (this pricing is based on your feedback and on a cost per user approach to ensure scalability). If we are able to achieve this number of subscribers, we'll be able to provide you with the most reliable fruux ever and also have an excellent argument when acquiring investors which will allow us to transform fruux into our full time jobs (=devote much more time to the project then we are currently able to do), hire additional engineers and provide you with the kick-ass features you have been waiting for for quite a while now (hint: iDevices support, a webapplication, a developer API, you name it...).

We thought about starting this by setting up a binding sign-up form for "fruux pro" and once 400 of you signed-up we'll setup the new infrastructure and start charging your accounts. If we are unable to convince at least 400 of you, that a reliable fruux is worth paying for, we'll probably have to sit here and wait until the load continues pushing the cloud over capacity and ultimately move on and pull the plug as a last resort, because in it‘s current state the project is neither a pleasure for you (due to the capacity issues) nor for us (because the solution is technically very easy, but not fundable).

We'd love to hear your feedback!

UPDATE 2010-10-03:
We're trying to achieve a "hybrid solution". In order to bring the service back online as quickly (and as reliable) as possible we'll pony up the upfront costs to scale up (at least a bit) right now and then start working on the implementation of the billing infrastructure. Then we'll hopefully be able to convince enough of you to become subscribers so that we are able to stay online (=build a sustainable business) with the additional computing power (and scale up even more). If you feel like supporting us in the meantime, you are happily invited!

UPDATE 2010-10-04:
We're super stoked about your overall positive feedback and the dozens of emails you sent us so far!

The following questions came up multiple times:

1)
Q: Is your pricing final?
A: No. We just calculated what would work to cover costs and also allow us to scale, while estimating a percentage of users we might be able to convince to become actual customers.

2)
Q: Where is the sign-up link?
A: Our first priority is bringing the systems back online (work in progress). Starting tomorrow we'll dive into the ugly paperwork for PCI compliant credit card acceptance and also start implementing the billing system.

UPDATE 2010-10-05:
We're making good progress with the tech part of our challenge. If nothing unexpected happens, we should be back online in a few hours.

UPDATE 2010-10-06:
We're up and running again (@fruux_status).

UPDATE 2010-10-10:
Unfortunately there is a service disruption at Amazon Web Services (our datacenter) causing downtime for fruux. We're working closely with the respective engineering team at Amazon Web Services to resolve this situation. Check @fruux_status for updates.

UPDATE 2010-10-11 #1:
Thanks to the nice guys at Amazon Web Services (who are obviously working like us on Sundays) we are now able to access and migrate our data, so we should be back online really soon. Also we scaled up even more for reliability reasons. Due to the increased costs this however sets us even more under pressure to start generating revenues asap because we don't have the budget to keep the service running at this scale. Check @fruux_status for updates.

UPDATE 2010-10-11 #2:
Initially we were set for a quite Sunday in order to prepare for the paperwork stuff and billing implementation during the coming week, but obviously Murphy's Law struck once again...
Nevertheless we'll work hard during the week to overcome all remaining obstacles on our way to sustainability. We'll keep you posted on the implementation of the billing system, the planned pricing (we're reading all your comments) and the progress of the negotiations with our bank for the credit card merchant account etc.

UPDATE 2010-10-11 #3:
We are up and running again. Thanks a ton to the nice guys at Amazon Web Services for helping us fixing these issues - even yesterday (Sunday) evening! Now back to the billing implementation and getting the necessary contracts for credit card acceptance signed.

UPDATE 2010-10-15 #1:
After a week of negotiations and talks with credit card companies, banks, payment gateway operators, and outsourced billing providers we've come to the conclusion that credit card acceptance is a total mess and utterly expensive. We strongly believe that we shouldn't burn (to much) money just to make money, because then we'd have to charge a higher price for the additional processing costs and involved work. Thats why we've decided to implement with PayPal for the start. We hope to complete this implementation (we're about 50% done now) over the weekend and launch paid accounts for new subscribers starting next week. We'll stop offering a free version of fruux for new users for a while and instead concentrate solely on the paid version and additional features, but we'll relaunch fruux free soon, once we've delivered some major new features to our subscribers. Once we are confident with the payment process, we'll implement it for existing users and allow them to migrate their accounts.

UPDATE 2010-10-15#2:
We aren't entirely sure about the final pricing yet, but we decided on the product structure. The good news is, that we won't offer fruux free, fruux starter, fruux home basic, fruux home premium, fruux business, fruux enterprise and fruux ultimate. Instead we'll just have fruux pro and (soon) fruux free. Pricing will be around 20 € including VAT/sales tax.

UPDATE 2010-10-17:
The bad news is that we didn't manage to complete the implementation of the billing system over the weekend, but the good news is that we've made good progress and shouldn't be a whole lot behind our initial schedule. We'll probably need a few more days, but the implementation will be better (completely automatic account activation, deactivation and renewal based on data from the payment processor), too.

UPDATE 2010-10-22:
We've finally implemented the billing system during the night. At the time being it only applies to new users signing up with fruux. We'll evaluate the technical aspects for the next couple of days and also keep an eye on the signup metrics. Our current pricing model for this test is one week free trial and then 19 € per year. About one hour until sunrise, time for a short nap... :-)

Unfortunately it turned out that we completely suck at blogging. Probably one of the reasons is that every minute used for blogging is missing somewhere else. So for now we officially quit blogging, until we feel it makes sense to start again (probably once we have the necessary manpower to deliver stellar software AND blog posts). Of course we'll still send out occasional updates via:

• our Facebook Page
• and our Twitter account (but mainly via Facebook)

Additionally there is also our fruux_status Twitter account, where we announce maintenances, downtimes and other quality of service relevant stuff.

• open "Terminal.app" (it's in /Applications/Utilities)
• type: open "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Sync.menu"
• hit "Enter"

Or even easier (Thanks, Brandon):

• open iSync.app (it's in /Applications)
• open iSyncs' Preferences (COMMAND+, or via Menubar)
• enable "Show status in menubar"

The menubar icon

• rotates when any sync client on your system (including fruux) is syncing
• allows you to click "Synchronize Now" (syncs all sync clients on your system, including fruux)

Remove the menubar icon again?

• Just press and hold the Apple/Command key on your keyboard and drag the icon out of the menubar

Every now and then people ask us about the tools and apps we use at fruux. Here is a short list of our everyday apps. Additionally we asked some of the developers for special deals (only as long as stocks last) - check them out.

"Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more."

Website / Blog / GNU-GPL / Donate to Adium

Why: Killing Time, Annoying the Team ;-)

"Design beautiful, innovative and fast-loading web sites… with a beautiful, innovative and fast app. CSSEdit's intuitive approach to style sheets and powerful previewing features will make you deliver awesome standards-based sites in no time!"

Website / Blog / Shareware (29,95 EUR) / Buy

Why: quick & easy css development

"Cocoa Packet Analyzer is a native Mac OS X implementation of a network protocol analyzer and packet sniffer. It is able to do basic network capturing, filter packets, analyze and display pcap files. CPA uses libPCAP for reading packet trace files and for capturing network traffic (filter expressions from tcpdump may be used)."

Website / Blog / Donationware / Donate

Why: Debugging all those funny packets

"Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Mosso Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac."

Website / Blog / GPL-License / Donate

Why: Best open source FTP client!

"Do you use many social services? Annoyed that you have to run 6 different applications? Enter the new revolutionary social app, EventBox. All your services in one place, integrated."

Website / Twitter / Shareware (15,00 USD) / Buy (Coupon: FRUUX-20 / 20% off!)

 Why: Twitter monitoring

"ExpanDrive gives you perfectly transparent access to open, edit, and save files with your favorite programs, even when those files are on a server half a world away. Transparent means that you won’t even notice you’re operating on remote file server—it will act like it’s an USB drive you plugged directly into your own computer."

Website / Blog / Shareware (39,95 USD) / Buy

Why: Maintaining the cloud

"Similar to NEXTSTEP's Merge utility, FileMerge graphically compares and merges two different versions of a file, and is often used to track changes to source code."

Website / Apple License

Why: Comparing file versions

"fruux is a lightweight and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your Address Book, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks between different Macs. fruux supports sync conflict resolution which will help you when you changed a record on more than one machine"

Website / Blog / Support us

Why: Best Tool on Earth ;-)

"HTTP Client is a Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages."

Website / Blog / BSD-License

Why: Great for webservices debugging. Thanks Todd!

"MindNode Pro is an elegant and simple-to-use mindmapping application for the Macintosh. It was created with the user in mind and features a very simple and intuitive user interface that lets the user focus on expressing and developing ideas. Nearly no time is required to learn the interface."

Website / Blog / Shareware (14,95 USD) / Buy (Coupon: fruuxmindnodepro09 / 20% off!)

 Why: Markus' app rocks! (And our pixelpusher Martin designed the app icon)

"Looking for an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac? You've found it! The Eddy award-winning NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs."

Website / Free

Why: Blogosphere monitoring

"Quicksilver is a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data."

Website / Apache-License 2.0 / Source

Why: Every Mac without Quicksilver is broken

"Spotify is a Sweden-based proprietary music streaming program, which allows listening to specific music without delay via browsing artists, albums or created playlists."

Website / Blog / Freemium

Why: iTunes in the Cloud

"Syncrospector is a debugging tool that you can use to inspect clients, the truth database, and the call history of sync sessions."

Website / Apple License

Why: Debugging SyncServices

"TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike."

Website / Blog / Shareware (48,75 USD) / Buy (15% off for students)

 Why: Best text editor on the planet!

"Versions provides a pleasant way to work with Subversion on your Mac. Whether you’re a hardcore Subversion user or new to version control systems, Versions will help streamline your workflow. Versions 1.0 is out now, so say hello to the fresh new look of your repository and start saying less to that command-line interface."

Website / Shareware (39,00 EUR) / Buy

Why: Wonderful UI, pleasure to use SVN (hopefully soon with GIT support) :-)

"Xcode is Apple's premiere development environment for Mac OS X. At the heart of the Xcode tools package is the Xcode IDE, a graphical workbench that tightly integrates a professional text editor, a robust build system, a debugger, and the powerful GCC compiler capable of targeting Intel and PowerPC regardless of host platform."

Website / Apple License

Why: developing fruux! (hopefully soon with GIT support!)

Of course there are a lot more great everyday apps, depending on the actual use-case, but if you'd look over our shoulder there is a very good chance that one of the apps mentioned above is active. :-)

Bookmarks, Contacts, Tasks, Calendars and Events in sync with fruux, but still looking for a solution for your files? Box.net and Dropbox might be worth a look. If you are looking for an iDisk replacement, you might see their services as a welcome addition to fruux.

• Box.net recently announced their iPhone application.
• Dropbox: Store, Sync and Share your files online, launched some weeks ago

(fruux is not affiliated with Box.net or Dropbox)

You might have noticed our roadmap, so you know that we have high aims with fruux - but we need your help to make it happen. Especially we'd like to know which features you want to see in our next version! Please add your comments below! Feature requests like "Please add Safari bookmark syncing" might be implemented earlier, than "Please add a Windows client and FileSyncin

We recently added a french localization to our software, which was donated by our user linathael over at HardMac.com/MacBidouille.com, then screwed up with our french inability and luckily corrected with the help of several comments from other french fruux users (Thank you, Emmanuel, Pierre, Virginie, Jean)!

If you'd like to see fruux localized in your language and want to donate your free time, please let us know. We'll provide you with the localizable strings.

Today we released fruux v0.7.1, besides several iCal syncing related bugfixes this version includes a french localization, which was generously donated from linathael over at HardMac.com/MacBidouille.com (Thank you, linathael!). We are also working hard on our main site at fruux.com. It's still work in progress, but you'll find our changelog and also our roadmap there. Please always remember, that fruux is still in beta.

Backup your data:

• Addressbook: File -> Export -> Addressbook Archive
• iCal: File -> Backup iCal...

If you are affected by any bugs, please let us know (support @ fruux . com). We are pretty responsive and will do our best to get any bugs you might experience resolved as fast as possible.

Can't wait for the new version? Here are the update instructions:

• Start "System Preferences"
• Start "fruux"
• Click "Synchronize Now"
• If you don't already have v0.7.1 installed, the "New version availiable" message will appear
• After a few seconds you'll be asked if you want to replace the current version. Click "Replace"
• Wait a few seconds, until the new version is installed
• Click "Synchronize Now"
• If the System asks you for permission to use the fruux Keychain item, click "Allow"

We are happy that our fruux v0.7 rollout went quite smoothly. However we're still not entirely satisfied, because some of you are affected by bugs. There are currently three known issues with iCal syncing:

• if you heavily use recurring events, your sync might break (we're working on this one)
• Obviously some of our users from russia are affected by an encoding bug (we're working on this one)
• Some users have problems with duplication and repeating sync conflicts (so far all of them used other sync systems in addition to fruux, we're working on this one, too)

Only very few users are struck by those bugs, but still we are extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused! Please keep in mind that fruux is still in beta. We're working really hard fixing those bugs as fast as possible. If you are affected by bugs or need help, please get in touch with us: support (at) fruux . com

If you email directly to our support emailaddress, please include the file ~/Library/Application Support/Fruux/Sync.log). Some of our users already work with our addressbook syncing in productive enviroments.

If you need addressbook syncing e.g. in your office and there is no way you could wait for our bugfix release, please contact us. We might be able to offer you a customized version of fruux, which just syncs your addressbook. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any problems concerning fruux!

Thank you for your support.