After a slew of updates, Eventbox has grown into a mature client for all the services it uses. The twitter client in particular is in my opinion the best one out there.

Even though he is swamped with work, Milen Dzhumerov took some time off to answer some questions for me.

So Milen, Cosmic Machine the software company. What can you tell us about what’s going on on the inside?

We’re just going to have our first birthday and we’re the times are quite exciting. Initially, we started out as three people and we’re now 5 people working on various bits. Unfortunately, there will be changes to our team in the coming months but we have some ideas how we can tackle the problem. Personally, I’ve found it quite an experience, definitely more challenging than I initially thought.

Since it’s introduction, EventBox has lost two services, but gained none functionally speaking. When will we see the likes of FriendFeed, and others make their way into EventBox? And will we ever see Digg back in EB?

Actually, we’ve lost Digg + Pownce but we gained Google Reader. We’ve hired a developer to just work on new services but it’s taking some time for him to get used to the architecture. We have one additional service currently in development but I cannot reveal which one it is (it involves photos). I’m very happy to confirm that Digg will be returning in the future.

EventBox is largely judged by its twitter client. What moves do you’ll have that are going to set this aspect of EB way ahead of the competition?

We’ve just released support for Smart and Custom Folders which should help quite a bit in organizing. We also have TwitPic in development and a few surprises as well.

Perhaps this ‘tweet reply chain’ feature is one of those surprises?

We’ve noticed that a large part of your support is delivered over Twitter. How is Twitter working for you? As a service, what can you say about how Twitter has helped EB?

I think that doing support using Twitter has both negatives and positives. For one thing, it’s very convenient for people. It’s also very easy to ask questions and get answers. Unfortunately, there are a few downsides. Firstly, there is the problem with character count. If the issue is non-trivial, it’s very hard to do support over Twitter. Secondly, if you have Twitter on all day and you do support, you can hardly get any work done (depending on how often replies come in). You don’t want to be distracted in the middle of doing important work. Finally, there is the problem of missing some bug reports in the big pile of messages.

We’ve resolved most of the problems by encouraging people to submit bug reports (if they’ve actually found a bug). We also check the account at regular intervals when it doesn’t interrupt our flow (so if you haven’t gotten a quick reply, that’s the reason).

Twitter itself seems to be one of our major sources of growth (the other one being Google Reader). You can easily tell that this is the case because of the feature ratio of Twitter vs all the other plugins.

Twitter and Facebook users can now post updates quickly using the Quick Send box

The App Store sure looks like a promising platform, and EB-Touch is already being worked upon. Without needing to commit to this time frame, when can we expect this app to land in our hands?

This is a really really tough question. We really have no idea when we will be able to release it. As I have explained, we’re going through some internal changes and it’s not quite clear yet how it’s going to work out. I’m sure we will have more information in a couple of months.

The iPhone 3.0 beta preview. How does that look for EventBox? You guys excited about the 1000+ APIs or was EventBox already going to be awesome?

As end-users, we’re quite excited about 3.0 but there are not that many features which would make a difference in EventBox Touch. The major feature which is currently missing and we might utilize are Push Notifications.

If there was one other API feature you would want Apple to allow for your iPhone app, what would it be?

Trial versions.

We believe that trial versions are essential to the satisfaction of users. Sure, it will decrease the total number of sales (just think how many of the apps you bought you actually use) but it will increase satisfaction exponentially. I guess it boils down to what’s more important to Apple: Customer satisfaction or profit?

We’re currently planning some major updates for the mid-summer period and we think that when we release them, users are going to be more than happy.

Milen now posts Eventbox updates, upcoming features, and cosmic chatter at his Tumblr Blog. You can also follow him @milend on twitter. You can of course download a 14 day trial of EventBox if you haven’t done so already.