November 20, 2009 - Whatever else we may have announced here in the past, this news item trumps it:

Printfire Store Opens for Business

After a record four and a half years of public beta testing and more than 7,000 downloads, Morning Flight has pulled up to the gate and is ready for boarding.

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The Silver Edition is already on the shelf as our first commercial product. Included in the box with the program CD you'll find a 272-page spiral-bound user manual. Price: $285.00, as announced in April of 2005.

Joining it are the new $48.00 Passport and $185.00 Express Editions. A digital-only (minus offset) "Pixelblitz" version of the Silver Edition is in the works and will become available before year's end. Price, with printed manual, $185.00. Look for it in December at the Printfire Store.

August 31, 2009 - Christmas came early at Unitac when we received our copy of "Printing News" and found the recently introduced Passport and Express editions prominently featured in an article on estimating. Liz Fedorowicz, the author, had asked us for a publicity photo, but we had no idea it would make the front cover. Thank you, Liz.

November 17, 2008 - When you're used to surfing the web with high-speed broadband, it's easy to forget all the dial-up that's still out there. At 7.45 mb, the 215-page "Morning Flight Archives" may load in 30 seconds on a fast DSL line, but could take 20 minutes or more on dial-up. Nobody's going to wait 20 minutes.

This should help: The Archives and FAQ's have today been uploaded to a dedicated web site, www.morningfiles.com, where they can be viewed as on-line Web Help. Think you have a question that someone else might already have asked? Get an answer fast, even with dial-up.

November 10, 2008 - Version 2008.3, a major upgrade of all three Morning Flight Editions, was uploaded last Friday. All editions come with improvements, but the Silver and Gold include what everyone's been waiting for . . . the ability to quote and enter Booklets.
Click here for details.

This will be the final phase of beta testing for the Silver and Gold editions. The Silver has been in beta since April 22, 2005 and, except for the new Booklet Module, became stable enough for commercial release years ago. The Gold has been tested for twelve months almost to the day.

May 3, 2008 - "Morning Flight Archives . . . the early years" is now available for downloading as a free PDF file. Click here to view or download. No registration required. The Archives contain a wealth of frequently asked questions, tips and techniques, and more than 500 posts from members of the Morning Flight Forum, covering all three program editions. Enjoy the read!

November 5, 2007 - Beta versions of not one, but two new software products are announced on the Printfire Forum: Morning Flight Gold, a complete management system for small to medium size print shops, and the Morning Flight Engineer.

Morning Flight Gold builds on the Estimating functions of the Silver Edition with Order Entry, Job Tracking, and Invoicing. The Flight Engineer, a plug-in module for the Gold, adds Inventory Control.

May 2, 2007 - All Printfire programs are now code-signed. Beginning today, when you download and install digitally signed Morning Flight programs, you can be confident that the code really came from us and has not been altered.

Digital Signatures serve as virtual "shrinkwrap" for software. After we sign our code, if it is tampered with in any way, the digital signature will break and alert you that the code has been altered and is not trustworthy. To view the certificate and verify that your Morning Flight program is secure, right-click on MFlightF.exe (Free Edition) or DFlightS.exe (Silver Edition Demo) in the C:\Program Files\PrintFire\MorningFlight folder, then select Properties > Digital Signatures.

October 11, 2006 - When Morning Flight was introduced in 2005, we promised the program would someday be available with a do-it-yourself language translator. That day is now! If you're located in a country where English (or German) is a foreign language, download the new version 2006.6 of either the Free or the Silver Edition.

French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian will eventually follow German as a built-in feature of all Morning Flight programs, so you may not want to spend much time translating those.

December 30, 2005 - We're finishing the year with new versions of both the Free and the Silver Edition, featuring improved digital, paper, and ink modules. Click here for details. If you haven't upgraded in a while, now would be a good time to do so. Until the user manual becomes available, the Silver Edition will remain a free beta download.

Note: The press and ink file structures have been revised to accommodate the changes. The program will transfer your data to the new files automatically, then delete the old files. If you're running both the Free and the Silver Editions (and are running them from the same directory), you willl need to upgrade both. Or else one of them will close with an "Invalid File Structure" error.

August 1 , 2005 - Free Edition of Morning Flight is released for downloading. This edition includes everything you need to make pencil and paper quotes a thing of the past. A user manual and help system will be offered as free downloads from this web site as well.

May 2, 2005 - Tech Support and Community Forum are now active. Until the user manual and help system become available, the forum is the place to visit to get your questions answered, see what other users are saying, and share ideas and solutions. If you're running into problems or discover a bug, please report them on the forum. With your help, Morning Flight will continue to evolve into the most useful estimating system for printing on the planet!

April 28, 2005 - You now have access to Demos and Simulations. They're Flash movies, so you'll need the Flash Player. In the boxed CD version of the program, the movies can be viewed from the help system. Why are they excluded from the download? File size. Including them would have nearly doubled the time to download the install. All movies are designed for a screen resolution of 800 x 600 when run from the program, but are best viewed at 1024 x 768 in a browser.

April 22, 2005 - Morning Flight Silver is released for public beta testing. The most automated estimating system for printing is now available as a free download. When the help system and user manual have been completed, the Silver Edition will be offered as a packaged product for a projected price of $285.00 US.

What will always be free is the basic program. $285.00 for a state-of-the-art estimating system may not sound like very much when measured against the cost of a new printing press, but in some countries, it's still a small fortune. With the Free Edition just a click away on the internet, we're offering printers everywhere a way out of the time-wasting tedium of doing quotes with pencil and paper. It's why Morning Flight works with inches or millimeters, and USA or ISO paper formats . . . and why the program is bilingual today (English and German), with French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian to follow.

And we're not stopping there. Printers in Holland, Denmark, Sweden - any country where the six built-in languages would still be foreign, will eventually be able to rewrite Morning Flight programs with a do-it-yourself translator.