Let's shoot the good news right away: largely thanks to the LifeHacker review of JuiceDefender (a never redundant thank you is in order for Kevin),  rent for March is more than covered!
Of course, it's too early to tell if this is going to be sustainable in the long (or medium) term - but I guess that's mostly up to me now.

More good news: Latedroid has been selected (probably per il rotto della cuffia) for the DSPfTAMD (by the way, why does AndroidAndMe only review the big shots?) - meaning Google should send me a Nexus One to aid my development efforts.
Not only this is great because it's free - it's the only way I could ever get a N1 in Italy. But I've been forced to temporarily move out in the middle of nowhere to patiently wait for the phone - never have stuff sent to Venice, it'll just get lost.

The downside is that I've been suffering from a bad case of email overload that greatly reduced the amount of time that I can spend on coding. Which is too bad, as there are so many things to do! Moreover the quality of my support inevitably suffered; I still manage to respond to every email, but sometimes it takes a couple of days. No good.

For these two excellent reasons, I decided to semi-branch the development of JuiceDefender (and later the other apps) and to institute a "private beta" test group - this will hopefully allow me to focus more on a fast release/feedback cycle and take some load off my suffering inbox.

So if you're interested in helping the development effort join the brand new JuiceDefender Google Group:

Subscribe to JuiceDefender

Email:

Visit this group

Now let me profusely thank the many people who are or have been in contact with me via email or in the various comments threads - reporting bugs, suggesting solutions and new features, or just discussing this or that. You guys have been immensely helpful, but more importantly it's a real pleasure to have these interesting conversations with you - let's keep it on on the group! (And, I'm sure you'll be happy to get to know each other)