It’s been a busy few days since releasing Syrinx. Unfortunately I had to push out a 1.0.1 within the first day, but it was a necessary fix and to let it linger would have meant having people miss out on tweets. At the same time I fixed the sizing of the date/time field in the user’s most recent tweet and gave more room to current location(especially after seeing the GPS coords put in by some iPhone apps).
A brief perusal of the web shows that a lot of folks tried out Syrinx, and a lot of them liked it. Many saw potential and others dismissed it as not Twitterific enough. I am ok with that last one, because I did not enjoy using Twitterific and I would guess that anyone who really enjoys Twitterific will not like Syrinx. Syrinx is, by design, very different. Syrinx is a first class OS X app, it has a dock icon, a full fledged window, and it behaves much like you would expect an OS X app to.
The path ahead is clear, as I have a lot of enhancements I want to make and users have provided no shortage of feature requests. The top runners so far are:
- Growl integration
- Hide the most recent tweet
- Make the window resize smaller
This last point is interesting because until I received the feedback from many of you, I was unaware there was a sizing issue, the window simply resize to as small as it can be while still showing all the necessary information. So reducing the UI footprint will be an interesting challenge, and I will certainly take a stab at it.
As far as Growl goes, I myself have never used it. The one time I thought I’d give it a try their website was down for an extended period of time and I never bothered to go back. However, I think it would be a useful thing to build in as so many have requested it. And who knows, maybe I’ll like it.
At last! Syrinx 1.0 is out. You can currently find it on my website: http://www.mrrsoftware.com/MRRSoftware/Syrinx.html I have also submitted it to MacUpdate, VersionTracker and Apple Downloads.
Aside from adding brief credits to the About Box, this is essentially 1.0b4.
I’m hoping for lots of downloads, feedback and hits to the new site.
That latest beta of Syrinx (v1.0b4) has been good and stable over the last day. I think this will be the one to make it out as a full 1.0. I am away this weekend to do some maintenance on the Saab, so I think Monday or Tuesday when I get back will be a good time to push it out.
I’m excited to see how the website works under a little more strenuous load. As an added bonus, for the first time I’ll have file-level tracking, so I’ll be able to get a much better estimation of how many times Syrinx is downloaded. Previously, being hosted off .Mac(Mobile Me), I could only tell how many page hits I received, but I never knew how many of those hits turned into downloads. No longer will I have to estimate from MacUpdate and VersionTracker results as I have with NameChanger.
I think overall Syrinx will be well received. Is it as feature rich as I would like? Of course not, but at some point you have to release. ”Release early and often” has become difficult for this 1.0, but I hope once I get it out, the dot releases will flow earlier and more often.
I would also like to update NameChanger in the coming weeks, to further generate some traffic to the site, and maybe those folks will stop by and see the new site and notice Syrinx. One downside, perhaps one of the only ones, of Sparkle updates is that folks no longer have to come by the website, so they/I/we miss out on the opportunity to share new products. Even so, the ability to get updates, especially for bug fixes, into user’s hands quickly and easily far outweighs any other concerns. After all, the usability of a single app needs to take priority over the possibility of pimping out your other applications and your website.
My website development has been put on hold as I work through bugs popping up in the latest Syrinx betas. I pushed out 1.0b1 on Monday. Today I have cranked out both b2 and b3, as two separate deadlock bugs appeared. The first was my fault as I had failed to properly initialize an array. The second was the fact that creating an NSAttributedString with HTML goes out to the run loop. While there it is entirely possible for Syrinx to accept more events, and then try to reacquire a lock that is already being held on that thread that was waiting for the string. While I thought I had cleaned all of that up during my refactor, I had overlooked one cause. I moved a line of code, added an if check and there we have b3. 1.0b3 is also the first release to be hosted on the new web server here at mrrsoftware.com.
Now I just need to finish up the website, which is very close to done. By then hopefully I can get Syrinx out as a full 1.0 and let the masses have at it. I already have a surprisingly long list of future features, plus lots of feedback from betas I have given out.