The development of Springy 2.0 has started
Dragan, posted Mar 1st 2010 at 2:40PM
The recent period, since the unfortunate event described here, was very frenzy for me, both on professional and private front. But that time wasn’t spend for nothing. I set-up the necessary infrastructure for the new Springy development; the whole Development folder (where I keep all my projects, sources, documentation and other development related stuff), while being regularly backed-up to in-house backup storage using Time Machine, will also be backed-up on a daily basis to TWO remote servers/cloud services. Also, every local Git repository will also have its copy on TWO remote Git repository servers, which will be updated (commit performed) also on a daily basis. All this may seem a bit paranoid, but I certainly don’t want to loose any important data again and in that regard I don’t mind some extra precautions. I assume I’ve learnt my lesson good.
Moreover, even the initial development of Springy 2.0 has started. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, this will be a good opportunity to some refactoring and redesigning of many things for which I haven’t had time before, as I was constantly tempted to add new features. I started from the ground-up, implementing faster and more robust automatic archive type and format recognition. Concrete results of this will be available very soon, in a form of Spotlight Importer plug-in which will enable you to index and search for files inside archives and disk images. This importer will provide significant improvements over existing ones on the market (including Apple’s Spotlight support for ZIP, TAR and CPIO archives in Snow Leopard), as it will support much wider range of archive types and formats (DMG and ISO images included), as well as all different archive specifics, such are for example Zip64 extensions, file encryption, multi-segmented archives, etc.
Soon after the Spotlight Importer plug-in, in parallel with continued development of Springy, I plan to release a QuickLook plug-in for quick preview of contents of wide range of archive and disk images types. There are a couple of these QL plug-ins in the market, but I think this one will be a bit special in the way it shows and browses archive contents and I hope many people will like it better over the existing ones.
With all these activities I hope to assure all current and future Springy users that I’m pretty serious about its development and intention to deliver version 2.0 somewhere in the spring – summer period next year. I’ll keep you all updated about my progress both here (with less frequent, but more descriptive and elaborative posts) and on Twitter account springyapp (more frequent, but short announcements lacking further details).
Dragan
Lovely news. That means I can now purchase a license… I was worried for a sec there :-)
I know this might sound a little harsh, but isn’t it a little bit cheeky to still have up the payment for springy as-is now.
Shouldn’t there be a warning of some sort pointing out that the app isn’t going to be supported for over a year before adding it to basket at least?
Obviously I think it’s lovely and wonderful that you’re still going to carry on with it though.
Its fine to have the payment system up. The current version works great, and continues to work great.
And for those demanding a refund for their purchase: even if its implied that you’ll get updates for free, you’re still technically buying a license for that single version. So if a program is never updated, you still have a working version of a piece of software.
Developers need to pay their bills, and the hours it takes to write software, for even the better funded pet projects, would come to $5 a hour. I’m happy to support Dragan, even if Springy is never updated again.
...and looking forward to version 2.0 as well! :-)
