Did you forget DriveGauge?
NO!
However, there’s a bit of a story behind why it’s so… well, behind.
DriveGauge is the first application I wrote for Infinite Nexus and as such it goes back a long way (relatively speaking.) I started working on it in 2002 on 10.2 using Project Builder. Over the course of the next couple years I continued building it using these same tools while expanding it (with features such as custom table cells [not available on 10.2], Growl support when Growl came out, and general growth.)
Panther came out and I made sure DG was updated to work well on this new OS as well. Overall it had reached a point I was happy with. New ideas came about such as Compare Folders and dotMac Menu. I built these using Apple’s (then) new Xcode 1.x and never looked back.
By the time Tiger was announced alongside Xcode 2 and it’s expanded tools I was deep in the newer projects and DriveGauge still worked fine. So work continued on the primary commercial apps and spare time became even less.
Which brings us to today…
As I noted in a previous entry, I’ve moved to a new primary laptop and set up new SVN repositories for each project along with other resources.
Evan sent me this link to a thread about Growl and DG not playing well anymore (full disclosure: I knew this was coming) and I checked it out. Once I replied I hopped over to the repositories to check out a copy of DriveGauge 3.2’s full code.
This is where that history lesson comes in…
Although the Growl fix itself would be straightforward, the rest of what goes along with it is not. Check out the list of what it will take to actually take care of this -
1. Upgrade and tweak the Project Builder project to be Xcode native (including the 5 separate targets)
2. Replace the custom table cells with cells from Panther
3. Upgrade SDK support to use 10.3 instead of 10.2 [and any issues along the way]
4. Upgrade Growl support and refactor all Growl code to use the 0.7+ format
5. Strip abandoned features (iUpdates for example)
6. Replace custom “Check for Updates” with Sparkle support
And this is for a .2.x release! (not to mention Universal support should come along as well..)
I’m not complaining, in fact, I look forward to making DG great once again, but time just hasn’t opened up for this can of worms yet. Not to mention I want to actually rewrite the entire app, not just provide patched fixes to the old version. The new DG 4.0 will knock drive usage visualization out of the water!
This entry was posted
on Sunday, June 4th, 2006 at 11:44 am and is filed under Apps, DriveGauge.
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