| Background |
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Sig Software was one of the early businesses selling Macintosh software using the shareware distribution method. It was solely built and run by me (Gideon Greenspan), starting in my late teens. My first Macintosh program, NameCleaner, was released in 1994 and distributed via FTP at the Info-Mac HyperArchive. These were the days of System 7, Stairways Software, DragThing and Ambrosia games.
NameCleaner was originally designed to just make file names tidier, but it turned out that many people had a critical related problem: renaming files in order to allow them to be moved between Macs and PCs. So based on user requests, NameCleaner developed strongly in this direction, and ended up selling really well in some surprisingly big places. I went on to develop a bunch of other products, mostly for Mac, some of which sold thousands of copies (Classic Menu, Drop Drawers, Email Effects, Email Merge), and some of which did not (Cross Platform, TableText). The programs that sold best tended to scratch an itch of mine that many other people shared. Sig Software never grew beyond me, but I made a good living from it for about 10 years, while studying for a BA (Computer Science and Management), MA (Philosophy) and PhD (Computer Science) in the UK and Israel. I also had some great times travelling with the business, when the Internet was all about novelty and modems. Sig Software began winding down gradually from 2007 as other projects, especially Copyscape and Web Sudoku, took over my time and became larger opportunities. It took further hits in 2011 when Mac OS X 10.7 was released without PowerPC emulation on Intel Macs, in 2016 when Kagi went bankrupt, and in 2019 when Mac OS X 10.15 dropped support for the 32-bit Carbon APIs, on which all the Mac programs depend. Today, May 31st, 2020, I am officially retiring Sig Software and providing free license codes for all of the programs on this website. My thanks go out to all the people who bought and used them over the years, especially those who provided incredible feedback to help me improve them. Finally, I dedicate this (now somewhat archaeological) site to my father who recently passed away. As a child I wrote software to help run his business, beginning in SuperBASIC on a Sinclair QL. He was my first and probably most demanding customer. Gideon |
| Products |
Sig Software's products are widely recognized for providing functionality, value, reliability and ease of use. They have won several awards, including:
Our programs have also been mentioned in various mainstream media, including:
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