The iNexus

I’ve finished up most of the coding work on a nice little update (3.4.1) for Compare Folders. As the title of this post implies, it’s all about copying.

I’ve rewritten how copying items works and successfully copied over 23,000 items (4 GB of data) and Compare Folders churned through this without blinking (instead of crashing like before.) This rewrite also addresses other minor issues with copying.

Right now I’m in the midst of updating the documentation to ship with this update. It’s been out of date for far too long [it was last updated for the 2.6 release, sheesh], and will finally be updated with all the current features.

Over the past several months I’ve worked with DeliciousSafari on Bookmarks Pro 2.0 for iPhone OS 3.0+ to add built-in search, an embedded browser, and a handy contacts’ URL list. This update has been submitted to Apple and is queued up for review currently. Personally I can’t imagine my iPhone without it; Bookmarks Pro has been an invaluable part of keeping interesting and important links in sync between all of my machines, devices, and the cloud.

Compare Folders 3.3 is wrapping up testing and will be released in the next week or so. This release focused on addressing some major crashes, performance, and polish as I’ve previously discussed.

Now that those projects are wrapped up DriveGauge 4 is going to be my primary programming focus. I’ve got some ambitious (but certainly attainable) plans to upgrade its engine and work on the polish I expect in the finished product. I have people reminding me (quite frequently) that they are eagerly awaiting DG, even in beta form, so it’s never forgotten.

To coincide with DG 4’s release I’ve been working on a new site and it too is coming along nicely; yesterday I finished a Python script that extracted all the content out of the current site to make it easier to review and add to the new system. There’s still that part of the process, as well as updating the content and some necessities (like store integration.) Overall I’m really looking forward to the results here, there’s a lot of potential in using a full fledged CSM like Drupal.

2009 is shaping up to be an excellent year for Infinite Nexus, keep checking in!

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

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!