PayPal has informed us that on Friday 3rd of October between 6:00AM and 7:00AM GMT (approx.) they will be conducting maintenance and that, therefore, it will not be possible for us to take payments through PayPal at that time.

During this period you will still be able to pay via our other card processor, WorldPay, who will not be affected by the PayPal maintenance.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.0 of iPartition.

This release supports formatting of NTFS partitions.

It also comes with numerous other bug fixes. For full release notes, see the iPartition news page. You’ll need an ATOM enabled browser such as Safari to read that page.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” in the iPartition menu and do the same for iDefrag Lite.

Alternatively, you can download it directly from our site. If you choose this method, you’ll need your username (the e-mail address you registered with us) and password. If you cannot remember/find your password, select the “Reset Password” button on the log-in page.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

We were recently contacted by a customer who lost data after using iPartition on a Drobo unit. Having reviewed the information on the Drobo website, we believe iPartition is probably incompatible with Drobo.

The reason for the incompatibility is that it looks as if Drobo is using knowledge of the Mac and PC filesystems that it supports to optimise data storage on its disks. That, coupled with the fact that Drobo is able to lie about the amount of space available on the disk (“Thin Provisioning”), means that there is a significant risk of problems if you attempt to use repartitioning software on a Drobo unit.

We have contacted Data Robotics, Inc., the manufacturers of Drobo, and if possible we would very much like to work with them to resolve this issue.

In the meantime, we strongly advise customers not to use iPartition on Drobo units.

If you purchase iPartition and iDefrag at the same time, we’ll give you a 10% discount. Simply add both products to your shopping cart (by clicking the Buy Now buttons on their respective pages [1] [2], or by clicking on the 10% Off advert on our home page), and the discount will apply itself automatically.

It has come to our attention that someone has attempted to crack the protection on both iPartition 3 and iDefrag 1.6.6, and has distributed the results of their efforts. Unfortunately the crack is botched in such a way that the cracked copies could cause significant and potentially irreversible damage to users’ data. As a result, we strongly recommend that anyone considering using the cracked copies avoid doing so.

We will not help you if you destroy your data with a damaged and illegal copy of our software. We didn’t provide it to you and we didn’t break it.

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.6.6 of iDefrag.

Changes in this release:

• Improved appearance and behaviour of lock button.
• Applications are now digitally signed.
• Fixed a problem where iDefrag could hang when commencing the On-line algorithm.
• Increased the speed of the Compact algorithm for some scenarios.
• Fixed some minor user interface transgressions.
• The workaround for Leopard’s AHCI driver bug is now disabled when running from 10.5.3 or later.
• Fixed a problem where the algorithm or class-set drop-down boxes on the toolbar would be incorrectly disabled after defragmenting.
• Fixed an interaction problem with SMART monitoring utilities (such as the iStat applications and widgets); iDefrag will no longer report that SMART monitoring is not possible when running those applications.

To get this update, select “Check for Updates…” from the iDefrag menu or you can download it from our website.

We’ve also released a new version of CDMaker which comes with a new, downloadable, Leopard based template that should work on recent machines. Unfortunately, at 530MB, it’s a rather large download so you may prefer to use the installation media that came with your machine.

For any problems, see our support pages which include ways of contacting us.

If you are a user of a challenge-response e-mail system like SpamArrest, please note that we will not reply to e-mail challenges for the following reasons:

1. There is no way for us to distinguish between legitimate challenges and those caused by spammers attempting to deliver e-mail with addresses forged to look like they come from our domain.
2. There is no way to tell whether any given challenge is actually legitimate. Some spammers have been sending out e-mail that looks like e-mail challenges in order to get people to click links, whether to validate their e-mail addresses or to install malware on their systems.
3. Some of the supposedly legitimate challenge-response operations have previously used their challenges to harvest other peoples’ addresses for unsolicited commercial e-mail (aka spam). There is also a concern that they may be retaining data on past communications for various purposes.
4. Challenge-response places all of the burden for spam on legitimate senders of e-mail. Essentially you are fobbing your spam problem off on other users rather than taking responsibility for it yourself. The burden belongs on the spammers, not on legitimate users of e-mail, and so challenge-response is an inappropriate way to attempt to screen incoming mail.

We do provide DKIM signatures on all outbound mail, and we also publish a draconian SPF record. These steps should enable e-mail providers to screen out any e-mail with forged addresses corresponding to our domain. And since we do not send spam, there should be no reason to use challenge-response addresses with us.

As should be obvious from the large “Mac Developers Wanted” notice on the front of our site, we’re looking for a new employee, ideally a recent graduate (but we’ll consider more experienced people as well, though keep in mind the salary range on offer). More here.

Anyone who has been looking at our site over the past few days will have noticed that we’ve updated it. We intend to make a few more improvements yet, but the idea of the changes is that the site should be easier on the eye, easier to navigate and more importantly easy to use.

Our intention is to reduce our reliance on e-mail for things like announcements, new product releases and so on. Hopefully as the new site matures you’ll all agree that it’s a huge improvement over what we had before.

Oh, and a quick p.s. to all those people who had been complaining that they couldn’t specify their own password on our site. Now you can… just go to My Account and click Change Password.