MRR Software

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.

That’s right, on the heels of Syrinx 1.0.1 comes NameChanger 2.2.  This is a solid usability update for NameChanger.  I started by updating the UI, I’ve dropped both the “Original Text:” and “New Text:” labels that lived just under the toolbar since NameChanger debuted.  They’ve been supplanted by default text within the appropriate text fields.  This gives a nice tweak to the UI and really streamlines it.  I have also changed some of the animations when dealing with Append/Prepend as well as how those fields behave during resize.

After that I integrated Quick Look.  Pressing space bar will preview the selected file just as it does in the Finder.  Unfortunately Quick Look is still a Private Framework, so I debated wether to include it, but in the end I went “Whatever is best for the app”.  This framework gets loaded dynamically at runtime, and if it is not found for any reason(such as Apple moving it), NameChanger will continue to function normally albeit without the Quick Look ability.  So all in all I think it was a reasonable and safe move.

Lastly I added inline name changing.  For too long has NameChanger existed without the ability to individually change file names.  That wrong has now been righted.  Double clicking or pressing return on a row will now allow the user to change the filename in place.

This update is available through the built-in Sparkle updater and has been submitted to the usual suspects: MacUpdate, VersionTracker and Apple Downloads.

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.

Finally got the website up.  NameChanger and Curb have been moved over, the MacUpdate and VersionTracker link updates have been submitted.  Soon Syrinx will be out there as well.

I still have to close out the old site and throw up some redirects to the place, but I’ll wait for MU and VT to finish moving the links.  I’m also fairly new to the website/domain management, so I’ll be playing with Webalyzer and learning my way about as I go.

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.

I’ve been hard at work today, building a website worthy of my having finally acquired mrrsoftware.com.  It started by thinking about different tools I could use to build the site.  As a coder, it’s always tempting to learn a couple new languages, grab an editor and just write it all by hand.  Luckily I came to my senses and realized I just don’t have that kinda time right now.

I have been using iWeb, which is fantastic at what it does.  But unfortunately that fantasticness comes at the price of not being able to tweak things to be just the way you want.  Don’t get me wrong, I think I’ve designed a very nice website so far, but there are things I would like to do that iWeb just won’t allow.

Combining these first two paragraphs brings me to the conclusion that perhaps I can design and build in iWeb, and then tweak that code by hand.  I realize all the detriments this leads to, but I think I can pull it off, at least until I’m ready to dig deeper into the web.

While I was poking around web site builders, I very briefly tried out RapidWeaver.  RapidWeaver has some amazing themes built in.  There were at least five that I would love build a website with.  But once you get past the themes, you’re right back to paragraph number one, and learning a couple languages to build the contents of those themes.  If I ever get to a place where I can dedicate the time to building a website by hand, I think I’ll be stopping by RapidWeaver.

Also during my construction phase, I thought a lot about an icon that could represent MRR Software.  I wanted something simple, but meaningful. Since I do all my own graphic design(I do all my own stunts as well), I came up with a simple plan.  I took the picture of my dog Callie that has adorned my .Mac website for so long, and made a simple silhouette.  Then I outlined it to help give some depth and then on a last minute whim I added her red bandana which she is rarely without.  I think the red bandana really stuck the final chord that said “Yes, this is what I wanted.”  The end result is pictured on the right.

“End result” may be wishful thinking on my part as I’m likely as not to tinker and tweak it as ideas come to me, but for now, the raw nature of a three-color silhouette, the almost unfinished quality, well that’s MRR Software is right now.  It’s an unfinished idea of what I’d like to do.  But it’s a start, and that’s usually the hardest part.

I’ve finally acquired mrrsoftware.com, and am working on getting it up and running.  It was not my intention to jump into web domain ownership, but after over a year of watching, my domain finally became free from the previous holding company.  I will eventually be moving over what is currently present at my .mac (or MobileMe, now) account to here.

On a side note I wanted to say that I’ve purposely chosen one of the default WordPress themes because I have always liked it, since the first time I saw it.  Perhaps in the future I will choose something new, but for now I still really like this theme.

In the meantime I am also continuing work on Syrinx, so it will be a busy few weeks ahead, but hopefully the end result will be so much more than I could have achieved on .mac alone.