Slow progress of development of Springy 2.0
Dragan, posted Nov 21st 2010 at 3:00PM
It’s been quite a while since my last post about the progress of development of Springy 2.0. I was quiet for two main reasons: the first one is not so good; there wasn’t much going on with the development. The second one is much better; there were some activities which would change my professional path in the near future, and that also means more time and devotion to Springy.
The development didn’t move much beyond robust automatic archive recognition and developing the new model to represent archives. It actually stuck in 7-ZIP development. I implemented archive models (including methods for opening, extracting and adding files) for all archive types Springy currently supports; ZIP, TAR, PAX, CPIO (including all common compression methods, such are GZIP, BZIP2, LZMA, LZ, Unix Compress and all that with support for multiple stacked compressions), RAR, DMG, ISO, SIT/SITX… And then I started with 7-ZIP. It turned out to be much more challenging that I anticipated. You can read some of the reasons in this blog post. To make a long story short, the modifications I made to original p7zip code, in order to build a proper library and link against, are really tweaks to the code to make it work for my purposes. I released that code in Springy 1.6 (which brought read-only 7-ZIP support), but it is ugly, unstructured and really made just to get the work done. I included it in Springy 1.6 just because the request for 7-ZIP support was strong, but it’s hardly maintainable and I don’t want to use it any more. So I started playing with reconstructing 7-ZIP format on my own, making a code around it, and it certainly took quite some time.
While doing that, Steve Gehrman of CocoaTech, the author of Path Finder which many of you probably know, needed some help to speed up the development of upcoming Path Finder 6. So he asked me to help. This was a great opportunity for me to work with a proven Mac developer, so I decided to step in. I was busy working on Path Finder in my spare time, doing it as a second job (I still have full-time daily job, not related to Mac development). It’s been successful so far, both Steve and me are satisfied with our collaboration. Of course, all this left development of Springy in certain limbo. I haven’t worked on Springy ever since I started working on Path Finder (sometime in June). Path FInder and my struggle with 7-ZIP support resulted in no visible progress of Springy development.
But this will change soon. If everything works out the way I planned, I should completely switch to full-time Mac/iOS development from February next year. Most of it will be devoted to Path Finder, but a significant portion of time will go into Springy as well. This will hopefully greatly increase its development pace.
In the meantime, Springy seems to work just fine. The sale, while still not being big enough to be the main source of income, is quite steady on a monthly basis. And while the user base steadily increases, I really don’t receive bug or problem reports. The version 1.6.1 seems to be very polished. The only exception is mysterious “No document could be created” issue, more of which can you read here and here. It seems to be related to some strange corruption of user’s LaunchService database that I still couldn’t manage to reproduce. It was reported by 5 users so far. It was apparently user-domain and not system-domain related, which means Springy starts failing with the message “No document could be created” for one user in the system, but for other users it works just fine(?!?). Hopefully, deleting the problematic user, creating the new one with the same name and restoring all users data from the backup (you do make regular backups, do you?) resolves this problem. At the moment I don’t have any smarter suggestion on how to solve this rather strange issue.
On a positive side, Springy seems to becoming quite popular with ePub e-books publishers, as it enables quick and streamlined editing of files already embedded in a ePub file format (which is actually just a ZIP file with a particular directory structure). I suppose the reason for this popularity was this document, published on Adobe blogs site. So, one of the goal for Springy 2.0 will be more ePub file format awareness.
So stay tuned. While the progress is very slow, I hope the final result will be worth waiting.
Dragan
I check back here every so often hoping to see something about the new version. Good to see that you will hopefully be able to put more time into Springy. The Pathfinder work is pretty great too! Maybe if we are lucky enough, Springy will be integrated into Pathfinder in version 7?!
I’ll be anticipating Springy 2.0! The killer feature for me is having my extraction options in the contextual menu. It was something I took for granted with WinRar on Windows and just can’t deal without on the mac. Happy New Year!
Hi Brice,
Thanks for your kind words. Springy 2.0 will definitely see the light of a day, I just can’t promise when due to things you can read about in the post above.
As of integration with Path Finder, I’d gladly do so, but I’m not the only one to decide. If it happens, you all will be informed.
As of having extraction (and other options) in the context menu, I hope you know that it you run Mac OS 10.5.x (Leopard) or earlier, you need to install SpringyCM contextual menu plug-in (read the instructions here. If you run Mac OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard), you get those options in the context menu by using Services provided by the main Springy applications. For more about Services provided by Springy application and how to enable and use them, please read here and here.
Hi,
I check in every so often as well. Hopefully things are going as planned and you’ll be able to give Springy some quality time soon!
Best Wishes
Regarding the user related error: No document could be created. What I’m going to suggest as a troubleshooting method is what I’ve found as a way to solve really perplexing problems that I learned from Apple Support.
This sounds like it could be a plist problem. One way to isolate this is to move the user’s Library->Preferences to the desktop, logout, and log back in (Library->Preferences gets recreated and the contents get recreated as each related application is launched – but obviously with just the default preferences).
If the problem went away, the problem is in one of the plist files. If it didn’t, jump over the next paragraph.
To find the offending plist file, copy half the files from the original Preferences back into the new Preferences, logout, log back in, and retest. After several iterations of halving the remaining plist files, the offending plist file can be isolated.
If the problem persists, it may be a better solution to delete the user and recreate it, but do not restore ~/Library all at once. Instead, restore folders from ~/Library half at a time, log out, log back in, and retest. Keep halving the folders until the problem comes back, then isolate the folder in the set that was restored in the same manner as above to isolate the offending folder. Finally, pare that folder’s files down until the offending file is found.
Keep in mind that any change in the content of ~/Library using the above procedure must be followed by logging out and logging back in.
Yep, this could take a long time to troubleshoot, but if the problem is isolated in this manner, please take the time to report your findings to Apple Support and post it to appropriate blogs like this one.
Hi John,
Thank you very much for this detailed and insightful description about this weird problem and its solution. I’ll advice all people experiencing it to read your post carefully.
Any news about Springy? Do you plan to release in the Mac App Store?
Hello Marco,
Nothing new since the last blog post, except that I do have a bit more time for Springy, but it still goes rather slow. It will eventually make its way in the Mac App Store, but not before version 2.0 is released, as I have to change licensing system (to comply with MAS requirements) and some other things.
Hey Dragan,
If you’d like some assistance getting Springy moving towards v2.0, I’d be more than happy to work with you.
I have been contemplating my own Mac archive GUI for some time, but I’d rather help you create something polished that supports as many formats as possible, in the best manner possible.
Please let me know (either here, or via the email I used for this post) if this is of interest to you, as I’d love to see Springy grow into the premier archive manager for OS X.
What do you think of the suggestion of giving users a time-based free trial, rather than a restrictive 50mb/500 files restriction?
Comparable applications in Windows offer those. WinZip offers 30 days. WinRAR offers 40 days. All unrestricted.
Could we have an update on the progress please?
Thanks.
Hi Paul,
Not much happening, unfortunately. Mostly busy with Path Finder and the current schedule will allow me to start working on Springy (or its successor, I also have some other ideas about archiving tool) again around October – November this year.
Hey Dragan;
You mentioned my session at Adobe MAX as maybe bumping up the use of Springy in the ePUB world. I’m still an avid user of Springy and will again use it at my upcoming session this year on ePUB.
Any info, any hints, any news on any updates would be great to hear. And I’ll want to know when you have a new version.
Thanks for the wonderful tool.
—- Colin
Thanks for your nice words Colin. My plan is to get back to development of Springy at the beginning of next year.
...in english, because it is international blog.
Hello Dragan,
Is there any progress creating Springy 2? And when you came to visit Serbia?
Anyway, thanks for everything you done for SMUG:)
regards,
ringeraja
Just a quick note to say that I too would love to see some new features in Springy, particularly toward ePub authoring.
Springy is already a very nice tool for properly zipping ePub package – with maybe a preset (that would disable compression for mimetype and assure the file in the first in the archive, for example), that would be the obligatory tool for any ePub maker on Mac.
It could be a good direction for Springy, specialized features.
The limits to the trial would have to change, because as of now, you can unzip / zip most of the ePubs package without licensing. Only the most complex, video-heavy of the ePub need a licensed version.
Hi Dragan,
Could you please post another blog regarding the current status of the rebuild of Springy as this post is over a year old now.
Thanks.
Paul
Yes, me too.
I am evaluating an alternative to BetterZip, but I’m a little concerned about getting Springy if development has stopped. Also, I use 7zip quite a bit and it sounds like the implementation of this format is not up to your standard yet.
Thanks!
Just want to send some encouragement. As an eBook designer I use Springy many times a day, and cherish its simplicity and power. I’m thrilled to learn it will run in OSX 10.7. That was a big worry, as I’m not sure how I’d get my work done without Springy.
Thank you for a brilliant product, and although I’m perfectly happy with it as it is, I’ll look forward to 2.0.
Are there any news about Springy 2.0? I would love to buy the new version, especially since current Springy does not always behave as expected under OSX Lion.
Hi Dragan,
Me again.
Could you please let us know whether Springy is still being developed, and if it is, roughly how far away you think you are from it coming out.
It’s been over two years since this blog post…
Checking in again. This was my favorite archive utility for mac. It’s the closest thing to Winrar I’ve found. Any progress? My last hope is that all of Springy’s great features will be completely integrated into Pathfinder at some point.
Springy is pretty awesome, but 1.x is totally unstable on 10.8 : (
If development has stopped, could you at least consider open-sourcing it? Even if it was just the 1.6 branch so we could get some stability updates…
Is the 2.0 update dead?
@indolering No, he couldn’t open source the 1.6.x branch, as there is no source any more. It was stolen as per a previous blog. So it’s either 2.0 or nothing.
It looks very like 2.0 is dead in the water too, so yeah, I’d give up hope now. Still a bit annoyed he’s kept the ordering system up when there’s no hope of bug fixes.
Very good and interesting site with very good look and perfect information I like i
