Perth, Western Australia - 12 July 2004 - Stairways Software Pty Ltd is pleased to announce that it has acquired Keyboard Maestro from Michael Kamprath. Keyboard Maestro is a powerful macro program for Mac OS X that lets you design your own macros and activate them at any time, with support for selecting menus, opening files or applications, controlling iTunes, pasting text, running scripts, and controlling processes.
While Keyboard Maestro itself is a very professional program (and one that we here at Stairways have found indispensable for our day-to-day tasks), Michael originally approached developing Keyboard Maestro as a part-time hobby. Keyboard Maestro 2.0 has been in beta testing for over a year and Michael realized that for a variety of reasons he did not have the energy or time to dedicate to the program that Keyboard Maestro's users deserved. When we learned from Michael that he was considering abandoning the program, we offered to acquire it from him. After a short and very fruitful negotiation the agreement was signed on June 30 and Stairways Software acquired all rights to Keyboard Maestro.
We here at Stairways Software will bring the same level of professionalism to Keyboard Maestro that we have to our powerful award-winning Internet client, Interarchy, including such things as rapid registration, prompt support, and web access to license and email details.
Some things will stay the same, especially the solid power of Keyboard Maestro.
Other things will change. We plan to finish the 2.0 version in around three months. Version 2 will be a free upgrade to those who purchased Keyboard Maestro 1 after June 30. Those people who purchased version 1 prior to June 30 (from Michael) will be able to upgrade for a nominal free. Following Stairways normal informal policy of one paid major upgrade per year we should see much more rapid development of Keyboard Maestro, perhaps including such things as Automator or Dashboard integration in the future.
Michael promised that he would not give customer email addresses to any third party, and that obviously includes us, so in order to allow existing users to upgrade to Keyboard Maestro or to retrieve their serial number or information about future versions, Michael will shortly send existing customers an email with details of how to transfer their customer details to Stairways if they desire.
It will take a few weeks before we have completed the transition and can email customers. Anyone interested in keeping informed can join the Keyboard Maestro mailing list at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/keyboard_maestro
Keyboard Maestro was developed by Michael Kamprath and is now engineered by Stairways Software Pty Ltd and distributed by Kagi. Keyboard Maestro is licensed on a per workstation basis (individuals can choose to license it on a per user basis).
New customers can purchase Keyboard Maestro 1.x from <http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/purchase> for US$20 and customers who purchased version 1 after June 30 will be entitled to a free upgrade to version 2.0 when it is released.
A fully-functional trial version of Keyboard Maestro is available for downloaded from <http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/download>.
For sales enquires, customer service, technical support, or to contact project management, our current contact information is listed at <http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/contact>.
For more information about anything to do with Keyboard Maestro visit <http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/>.