After 6 years of developing, maintaining and improving ecto, I felt it was time to move on. From now on, the new owner of ecto will be illumineX, inc. Instead of one guy working on your favorite blog client part-time, you’ll now have a team of developers working on ecto full time. Before I decided to sell ecto, I had a long correspondence with Gary Longsine, the CEO of illumineX. I wanted to make sure it will continue to be in good hands. I found Gary to be a great guy and he convinced me that his team has many new ideas that will keep ecto growing in functionality and power. In fact, they have already developed a blog client for iPhone based on ecto’s code base. I helped out with a few tricky XML-RPC and Atom issues and I was very impressed with how quick the illumineX team picks up things and how fast they work.

I will remain involved with ecto as a consultant and it’s very likely I will develop custom plugins (I already wrote an iTunes plugin). I will always be a fervent user of ecto, so obviously I’d like to see it continue the excellent job it’s been doing. You will also still find me in the support forum.

It does feel odd to let go of something that has been my flagship product and my precious for so long. I put many hours in it and I take much pride in having created ecto. But it remains in capable hands and I now have the opportunity to spend my free time on new things.

If you have any questions about the transfer of ecto to illumineX, feel free to post them in the comments section below.