Farewell

It hasn’t been easy to write this, but we have decided to discontinue the Compass.app & Fire.app projects.

TLDR;

• You can still get the source code under GPL as always, and we have put the latest binary on GitHub for free. Download link: Compass.app & Fire.app.
• Open source projects can make money and help others.
• If you are willing to maintain these projects, please let us know compassapp@kkbox.com / @compass_app

Back in 2011, we created Compass.app for our designer friends who would like to try Sass/Compass but hate command line interface. Compass.app worked well for them, and we released the source code on GitHub in GPLv2 (because we love open source). People can pay $10 (free as in beer! 🍺) to buy the official built version if they don’t want to build it themselves. We also decide to donate 30% of sales to UMDF, because Compass is charityware, and Compass.app is fundamentally a cross-platform GUI of Compass.

One year later, we added more features to improve our HTML prototyping process. We released Fire.app so people won’t confuse with Compass. 10% of Fire.app sales went to UMDF as well. Altogether we have contributed USD$20K+ to UMDF to date. Since Compass.app and Fire.app are open source projects, this journey has been unbelievable (and incredible) to us.

But since Compass.app and Fire.app were originally written in Java to be cross-platform, it feels outdated and hard to support all operating systems in these days. We have decided to discontinue the development. You can still get the source code under GPL as always, and download Compass.app & Fire.app binaries on GitHub for free.

While we will no longer provide the official built versions, the community will still be around and the software has always been open source! If you are interested in taking up as maintainer, please let us know compassapp@kkbox.com / @compass_app.

Thanks to everyone who gave Compass.app & Fire.app a shot.