The iNexus

As I mentioned in my last post, the 3.3 release of Compare Folders has been optimized for launching and memory usage during comparisons. There’s been additional performance gains since then but right I’d like to talk about some of the other improvements in store.

Without further adieu, here’s a couple highlights:

• fixed: an unfortunate crash that could occur when stopping an in-progress comparison
• added: the secondary difference for each difference type has its own color now, so you can have unique colors for every type of difference supported

Overall I think the release is shaping up quite nicely and I’m looking forward to getting it into testing next week and if all goes well start preparing for release the week following.

Compare Folders has dramatically increased how many items it supports in result sets over the last several releases and the next update, 3.3, will be continuing this trend in several ways.

The major changes to the comparison engine include:

• optimizations made to the size of each item in the results to make them as lean as possible (switching from object to scalar types for the geeks out there)
• optimizations made to how results are stored to make them as unique as possible (for geeks again: this would be form of database normalization)

Another huge win fixes a common source of pain for users - saving text results with large result sets would crash. I’ve rewritten how saving a text report works and it can write tens of thousands of results without a problem (and includes progress sheet to let you know its going.)

I’m in midst of the engine improvements right now but it’s looking really good so far and I wanted to take a minute to share.

Update: So far the normalization changes have netted a 10% reduction in memory usage for a comparison. More optimizations to come.

Update 2: I’ve been rewriting how all of CF’s components are put together which has netted a 25% reduction in the amount of memory needed at launch, and should be marginally faster as well. Even more optimizations to come

By now I hoped to have DriveGauge 4 ready for release, but I got a bit distracted by the shiny new device and programming environment from Apple. Recently my friends at DeliciousSafari released an update to their iPhone/iPod Touch delicious client, Bookmarks. I’m proud to say I worked with them on polishing the look and feel throughout the app for consistency with (mobile) OS X and added the ‘Shake to Refresh’ feature.

If you use bookmarks with any frequency I recommend checking out both their iPhone and Safari clients which make it a breeze to access your bookmarks anywhere.

Today I get to share some exciting news - DriveGauge 4 is now feature complete and has reached feature parity with prior versions (I wrapped up automatic updating for gauges this afternoon.) More simply put, it’s much closer to release and will enter beta testing this weekend.

Now I’m working on polishing the rough edges and making it a great experience all around. I’ll post up screenshots soon of the new UI. Stay tuned!

Today is the release of another really solid update for Compare Folders. This update removes .Mac/MobileMe support but also improves exclusions in the engine and polishes more of the UI. These are just a few highlights, there are many additional features and bug fixes throughout the entire app.

See the changes in in the full article

As always, you can find the disk image for download at: http://www.infinitenexus.com/cf/

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