Here’s how it works:

Mail Designer 1.3 now supports Campaign Monitor placeholders for your recipient’s name, email address and more, allowing you to customize your message for each and every reader. If you design for multiple clients, you can choose each sub-account while uploading your template from Mail Designer.

Mail Designer 1.3 is a free update for existing users. Mail Designer is available from the equinux Online Store for just $69.99: equinux.com/maildesigner.

Preparing your video

Most users will only watch roughly 60 seconds of content so keep it to the point. Then upload your video to the web – we recommend using YouTube or Vimeo, as they will ensure that your video looks great on mobile devices, as well as on Macs and PCs.

Adding videos to your newsletter

Most email apps do not support videos directly, so we’ll be using an embedded preview link instead. Mail Designer includes a video preview placeholder that makes it easy to create a play button preview image in your email:

1) Drag in a video image placeholder

2) Double-click the image placeholder (you should see a yellow border) and drag a still shot from your video onto the placeholder

3) Add a link so clicking the video will take the reader to your video on YouTube, Vimeo, or a page on your website

Metrics

By embedding your video on Vimeo or YouTube, you also get extensive statistics, such as number of plays, how long people watched your video and more. Measure the success of your video campaign and adjust your next video accordingly.

That’s it

And that’s how easy it is to use videos in email newsletter campaigns with Mail Designer. Take a free trial version of Mail Designer for a spin and let us know if your have any thoughts or questions!

Enjoyed your Thanksgiving turkey? Then let the shopping season begin! Until November 26th we’re getting into the seasonal spirit with our annual Black Friday Sale! And this isn’t just you run-of-the-mill sale: all our Black Friday offers are an incredible 50% off.

This one-of-a-kind deal includes our productivity tools Mail Designer for just $34.99 or Stationery Business Edition for $24.99. And we’ve got amazing deals for mobile workers as well: get VPN Tracker Personal for just $64.50.

There’s something for everything in our big 50% off special, so head on over!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We all send more emails than ever before to colleagues, team members, business partners and new contacts. Our new Team & Business Communication templates are designed to help you write all of those messages and pack them in a stylish design.

We went through some of the most common scenarios our users have and designed templates and text to inspire more effective communication. You’ll find templates for:

• News: Inform your business partners, share updates, followup after a phone call

• Meetings:  Plan meetings, assign tasks, share the agenda

• Team: Motivate your team, colleagues, teams and less formal contacts

So check out our 43 new templates for Apple Mail today and start sending effective and elegant business emails.

Discover more

Widescreen films and TV shows look absolutely stunning on the 16:9 display, making the iPhone 5 the perfect pocketable TV companion for when you’re out and about.

Have fun with tizi and tizi+ on your iPhone 5!

Note to Mac App Store customers: as always we have to rely on Apple to review updates to our Mac App Store apps and this is currently taking a bit longer than usual. We hope that the App Store review team will be able to approve our Mac App Store updates shortly. If you have any questions, please contact our support team and we’ll find a solution.

Here are the details on our Mountain Lion updates:

• iSale – we released 5.8.7 to tackle a couple of  issues with Mountain Lion and now it’s all systems go! We have also submitted the update to Apple and it should hopefully be available for our Mac App Store customers soon.
• CoverScout & SongGenie – our MusicLovers apps are both running smoother than ever on OS X 10.8. We’ve fixed an issue with existing cover thumbnails not appearing, so it’s all systems go in the music world!
• Mail Designer – today we released Mail Designer 1.2.3. This new update will ensure that all our newsletter creators and mail superstars now work correctly with changes in Apple Mail. A few things have been moved around in 10.8 and as Mail Designer and Stationery Pack both work so closely with Apple Mail, this update is important to ensure they’re all on the same page.
• Stationery Pack – the same goes for Stationery Pack. Stationery Pack browser 2.9.4 keeps everything working smoothly to ensure that all your templates are ready to go from either the Stationery Pack app itself or from within Mail.
• The Tube – also gets a little shine and polish and is ready for Mountain Lion.
• VPN Tracker – works with Mountain Lion, however we are still investigating a DNS issue with Apple.

We pushed updates for nearly all our Mac apps over the last week (shoutout to our amazing developers for all their work) and we hope you’re enjoying your favorite equinux apps with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion!

Today we released our super-fancy, super-simple tizi Aerial Adaper! As portable as tizi is, lots of the tizi community enjoy using it just at home for convenience. tizi@Home mode makes this especially fun as it means you can link tizi up to your Wi-Fi so you can watch TV on your iPad or iPod that doesn’t have 3G and still surf the web while the adverts are on!

However with this little addition you can connect your tizi to an external digital TV (DVB-T) antenna or rooftop aerial. Lots of homes now have these installed and we expect this will help out our customers that live in areas with less than desirable signal strength.

Especially handy if you’re in an area with poor reception or a house with especially thick walls or have a holiday home in the middle of nowhere.

Head over to tizi.tv to pick up one for yourself.

However, without being too overdramatic, thanks to tizi it’s not going to be a problem this year! Hoorah! All our lucky tizi users can just grab their iPad (or iPhone) and their tizi, sit in the sunshine and watch the game. Problem. Definitely. Solved.

Here at equinux our team is from all over Europe – let’s hope we can stay friends throughout the tournament!

It’s been just over a month since the hugely publicised UK Digital Switchover was completed in London.  The UK’s garbage dumps brimmed with old TV sets and Twitter was bombarded by Londoners’ pictures of the Crystal Palace tower’s light show that took place to celebrate it.

Check out Andrew Grantham’s snap of the 18th April in London on the left.

With our great tizi product range, we here at equinux were keeping a keen eye on all the happenings around that time to see what people were making of it.

So what’s it all about?

We got a lot of questions from customers asking us what they needed to be aware of.
Basically, almost the entire country has now completed the digital transition, thus analogue TV signals have been switched off in most areas of the UK. This is interesting, because the major broadcasters; such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4; who dominated the analogue signals, are now simply broadcasting over digital like every other Freeview channel.

It also means digital TV reception will improve in these areas and higher quality programmes being broadcast but also requires some action to gain the optimal viewing experience: You’ll need to retune to make sure you have all the correct digital TV frequencies.

Luckily with tizi it’s simple. Users merely tap on “Search for Channels” in settings and they’re done. tizi showing again exactly how convenient it can be. Just throw it in your bag with everything else and you’ve got mobile TV wherever you go!

Bottom line is: if your area recently switched, simply run a new channel search. Then tizi can make use of all the great new signal strengths that are finally flying around the UK and you can have a quick flick through the channels whenever you like. So why not hook yourself up with a tizi now!

This update fixes a crash that could occur when sending your design to MailChimp, solves one or two formatting problems and has a few other improvements.

Open Mail Designer to get your free update, or head over to our website to download a free trial today.