MRR Software

After what seems like an eternity, Syrinx 2.0 has emerged from beta and is available to all.  It’s been out for a little over 24 hours now and the response has been great.  Lots of good feedback is going through the Twitter timeline.

Many thanks are due to the many people who beta tested 2.0 and sent in bugs and feedback.  This major release could not have been successful without all your help and support.

For this release I did something new: a Press Release via prmac.com.  I’m interested to see what impact that has on the amount of exposure Syrinx receives.  So far it seems like it has spread quite well.  Now if I can catch a review or two in some well read Mac websites we’ll be on our way.

Looking forward I think the new timeline architecture is really going to give me a strong base moving forward.  I have lots of ideas I would like to implement and users have sent me even more ideas.  I’m excited to see where Syrinx grows from here.  When I first published Syrinx it was one of only a few native Twitter clients available for the Mac.  Now we’re inundated with clients, each more polished than the last.  So far I think Syrinx’s unique feature set, especially Pause and Bookmark are really keeping it a little separated from the rest of the clients.

I’m also looking forward to exploring the iPhone development platform, and  I’d like to spend some time working on NameChanger.  Also, I’m headed to WWDC this year, it’ll be my first time.

It’s a busy summer ahead, but I look forward to it and producing some more great software.

As many of the beta testers know, Wednesday night (~10:30pm EST), the Syrinx beta would no longer login to Twitter, or more accurately it could no longer call the verify_credentials method from Twitter.

While deploying other fixes, the API folks at Twitter discovered a loophole that some were using to circumvent the Rate Limit.  This involved modifying how the verify_credentials method could be called.  The Syrinx beta, among many other twitter programs were caught completely off guard by this.

Ordinarily the Twitter API team gives reasonable notification before changes occur, but this time they did not and things broke.  There seems to have been a lot of heartburn over this and the Twitter API team has sent out emails claiming that they will work harder in the future to notify developers at least 5 days before public API changes except for necessary security and performance issues.

Compounding the impact of this error, I was at my day job for 12 hours, so Syrinx was crippled for an extended period of time.

It’s all fixed now and hopefully with more transparency from Twitter in the future these types of outages can be avoided.  I’d like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding in this issue.

My original plan was to have a beta posted by now for Syrinx 2.0.  However, due to a death in the family I have been doing a lot of traveling and have not had the time to dedicate to a beta.  When I push out the beta I want to be able to stay on top of the bugs and feedback to make this release of Syrinx the best ever.

To make up for this delay, and to fill my downtime while traveling, I have added in some new features.  Yes, sometimes circumstances require you to unlock your feature lock and push ahead.  I think when everyone sees these extra features they won’t mind the delay, which was unfortunately unavoidable.  Sort of a software release version of lemons to lemonade.

At long last I’ve locked down the feature set of Syrinx 2.0.  From here I have a short list of known issues I need to work through, then it’s on to a beta.

As many of you know, this release was all about the need for speed.  The tweet timeline, friends list and new search timeline are now tables complete with custom cells.  This results in smooth scrolling and fast searching/conversation viewing even with thousands of tweets.  The memory footprint has also been significantly reduced.

Though the main goal was to upgrade the speed and usability of what was already available in Syrinx, I still wanted to add some much requested features to this release.  But eventually every developer has to let go and make a release, so I’ve locked the feature set and am prepping for beta.

Here’s a list of the features new to 2.0:

• Search – Now you can search all of twitter with auto-updating search windows.
• URL Shortening – Highlight a link in the status update area and use this option to shorten the URL using tinyurl.com
• Tweet Deleting – Ability to delete your own tweets
• Retweet – Automatically retweet the selected tweet
• Open Links – Open all the links in the selected tweet from a keyboard shortcut.  Plus the links are opened in the background.

There was a question posted to the last blog entry about 2.0 release schedule and alpha distribution.  The only alphas in use are by myself and Mike from Fruit Stand Software.  Mike helps validate my builds (Xcode delights in forgetting to include my resources) and to help find initial functionality bugs that I would not ordinarily encounter in my usage.  As far as a release schedule I haven’t nailed anything down, but I hope to get these alpha bugs cleared up in the next week.  I will be tweeting and blogging about the 2.0 release as it progresses.

Syrinx started out fairly simple, with only the most basic functionality to make it useful to me in day-to-day usage.  In fact that’s all it started out as was something I would use everyday.  Then I decided to share it.  Since the 1.0 release I have added some really great customization and functionality.  A lot of these enhancements came from user suggestions and others from my ever growing list of ideas.  With the last release I feel Syrinx has really pulled ahead of other Twitter apps in terms of functionality.

Unfortunately this great functionality is being dragged down by the slow moving time interface.  What seemed like a great idea at the time, using NSCollectionView, has really started limiting what can be done, and how well it works.  As many users have experienced once a large number of tweets is displayed in Syrinx, scrolling starts to slow down.  Searching becomes painful and the great new Show Conversations feature takes way too long.

With all this in mind I’ve put a temporary halt on the next feature release I was planning to dedicate some time to making Syrinx’s timeline faster and more efficient.  I’ve got some ideas that I’m testing out and though it may mean losing some of the slick animations that NSCollectionView provided, I don’t think they’ll be missed if there is a suitable speedup.

Syrinx 1.3 has been released!  Now with a Friends window that offers searching, following and unfollowing of friends.  Also, use the new Conversations feature to see a thread of replies right within Syrinx.

New features include:

• Friends – View all the people you follow in the new Friends window.
• Follow/Unfollow – Use the new Friends window to unfollow current friends and start following new ones.
• Conversations – View conversations right in Syrinx, easily follow a thread of replies.
• UI Enhancements – Lots of small visual tweaks.

• Fixed a crash if a user had no tweets.
• Show Current Status menu item text is now correct.
• Scroll to Newest tweet preference now works correctly.
• Duplicate messages after unpausing is fixed.
• Preferences window no longer hides when Syrinx is inactive.
• Improved system date format.
• Replies now specify the correct replied to tweet.

I’ve been working away on the latest version of Syrinx, and I’ve added some valuable content.  Humorously I’ve given this next version (1.3) the codename: “Conversations with Friends”.  That should give everyone an idea what’s coming up.  I’ve been running this version for the past few days and it seems pretty solid.  Unfortunately I am holding back the release as I’m on vacation this coming week and I don’t want to have a new release going out without me here to make sure all goes well for the users.

Along with the new version of Syrinx, I’ve been updating the website.  It will now have feature overviews to help people get the most out of what Syrinx is capable of.  This is especially important as I build up the feature set, new users will be able to spin up more quickly.  And I’m building an FAQ section to address the questions I’ve been receiving through email.

Lastly, it appears Twitter has been having issues with their APIs lately, from missing tweets to just not responding at all.  Hopefully they will continue to get these issues ironed out in a timely manner.

Well the beginning of the week came and went without a Syrinx release, but it’s finally here.  This release, as with 1.1, was built from user feedback.  1.2 really clears out a lot of user requests I received that I felt were important, as well as fixing the HTML entity parsing bug.

I’m happy first that I got this release out, and secondly that I can start building in some bigger features for the next release.  The next release will not be as immediate as 1.1 and 1.2, it will take longer but have larger features in it that really help further separate Syrinx from the competition.

I’m making steady progress on the next release of Syrinx.  Version 1.2 will be another collection of user requested enhancements.  Enhancements will include customizable font colors (for both tweets and your current status), a resizable text entry field, smarter autobookmarking when receiving tweets from yourself and more options for checking tweets and removing older read tweets.

The next version will also include a bug fix for an issue where certain HTML entities were not being properly converted to text(bug on left, fix on right):

After this release, I am excited to start adding in larger features to Syrinx, to further separate it from the current crowd of Mac Twitter clients.  These features will be more involved and as such the release schedule will slow down.  So for all those who get annoyed by frequent releases and rapidly climbing version numbers, relax, it’ll slow down soon, but I don’t want to hold on to these user requested features while I work on something new.

I hope those with a long-weekend take time to enjoy it, and you can look forward to a Syrinx release early next week if all goes well.

Yet another release from MRR Software.  As with most 1.1′s, this is the “things that should have been in the 1.0 release” release.    It’s a curious thing, though.  People will try an app, tell you what they don’t like and go back to using something else.  I wonder if they ever come back to try the app out again once things have been fixed or improved.  Once you lose a user, are they gone forever?  This would fly in the face of the ”release early and often” and “you should be embarrassed of your 1.0 release” theories.  After all, if every 1.0 waited until they thought everyone would be satisfied, 1.0′s would take much longer to release, and many might not make it there.  Perhaps the people that will be lifelong users of an app will be so regardless of initial feature set, but if they like the general idea you’re trying to express.

Enough philosophizing for now, here’s a quick rundown of what’s new:

• Reduced Footprint - The UI has been slimmed and tightened resulting in a significantly smaller minimum window size.
• Hide Current Status - Hide the current status and user information to reduce the necessary UI footprint even further
• Growl Integration - Receive your tweets through growl messages.  Click a growled tweet to bookmark it, reveal the message in Syrinx or simply dismiss it.
• Remove Read Tweets - Option to remove read tweets older than 12 hours, 1,2 or 3 days.  Tweets that are still bookmarked remain untouched for as long as needed.
• Faster Message Parsing - Parsing messages received from twitter has been significantly simplified.
• More Robust Error Handling - Rather than bothering the user each time twitter fails to return updates, Syrinx silently attempts the request again.  This has resulted in many fewer errors and warnings.

The smaller UI footprint was by far the most requested enhancement, so I made sure to get it in here.  Second most requested was the Growl integration, and next was the ability to hide your current tweet.  No one actually requested robust error handling, but there was a lot of complaining.  It turns out that telling users exactly what’s going on behind the scenes is not always a good idea, and this case it’s better to try some more heroic efforts in the background before notifying anyone.  Since implementing this, I have been error and warning free.  The ability to remove read tweets older than a specified age serves two purposes.  The more important being that Syrinx, apparently due to it’s use of NSCollectionView, slows down during scrolling and searching after many, many tweets have been added.  Removing older tweets works around this issue for those that choose to.  It also solves the problem of Replies and Direct Messages than can be weeks or even months old depending on how frequently you receive them.

I still have lots of enhancements and features to add, so stay tuned.