Wyatt Says...

Today I changed the style of wyDay.com to be much brighter. I felt that if this site didn’t burn out your retinas while simultaneously giving you a cavity, then it just wasn’t good enough.

A notable addition to the site is the open source list. It lists the dedicated pages for VistaMenu, SplitButton, wyUpdate Client, and some of my older projects.

I’ve also uploaded version 1.0 final of wyBuild (a.k.a. InstantUpdate). I’ll have a blog post later on explaining all of the many changes. But, for now, just download wyBuild and begin exploring. It was designed to be easy to use right out of the box.

The time has come to ditch my utterly worthless webhost, GoDaddy, for an ostensibly better one. GoDaddy has shown their worthlessness fleetingly over the past year from denial of service attacks to their frequent database mismanagement, all in all adding up to several days of lost work. Their revolting ineptness peaked this last week. GoDaddy recently fiddled with the configuration of their FTP servers effectively denying me all access to the files on wyDay.com.

This latest gaff on GoDaddy’s part comes at a particularly bad time for me – I was in the process of releasing the InstantUpdate Release Candidate. This release will fix huge problems in both the designer and the client, while also having enough stability to be used in production environments. I’ve spent so much time on it that I was dying to put up some screenshots of it – it’s that nice to look at and use. Alas, GoDaddy has foiled my plans; three months of work in the making has been delayed by GoDaddy’s idiocy.

Once I change from this lousy webhost I’ll release the latest version of InstantUpdate. Until then, I’ll continue to pound away at my code.

Stay tuned for the continuing saga.

A new version of InstantUpdate was released earlier this week: Beta 4, Refresh 0. The version number may strike you as excessively verbose, but it’s just a way of keeping things reasonable in the following weeks. Let me explain. Every other Saturday, until the stable v1.0 Final, I’ll release a new version of InstantUpdate with bug fixes and feature additions. So, to keep from having 10 or more “betas”, you’ll instead see this one beta (Beta 4) with multiple “refreshes.” Semantics aside, this means more updates and faster response to bug reports and feature suggestions.

What is InstantUpdate’s future and will it remain free?

InstantUpdate is taking a split path: the updater client will be open source, while the designer will remain proprietary. As soon as InstantUpdate is stable (namely, when I call it v1.0 Final) I’ll release the source code of the updater client alongside the normal, compiled, installable version.

Why open source?

Updater software is a dime a dozen – in the sense that it’s so plentiful as to be valueless – but shoddy companies charge anywhere from $200-$700. Yes, that’s right, people are charging that much for glorified downloaders with glaring security problems. I’ll back up my claims of the security issues in a future blog post, but for now I’ll just say they make my buggy Beta 4 look as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. So, by opening up the InstantUpdate client source code I can both develop securer software while assuring the longevity of InstantUpdate, even if I happen to fall off a cliff Wile-E.-Coyote-style.

Who are you, what do you do, and what are your motives?

I’m Wyatt O’Day and I’ve personally written every sentence, designed every pixel, and programmed (almost) every line of code on wyDay.com, InstantUpdate, and CueSharp. There is no layer of management to maneuver around, and no Pointy-Haired Boss to report to. I’m my own boss, for better or worse. My motive is to eventually make a profit from this humble little website, though the exact means to this end isn’t clear. However, you can be comforted in the fact that my aim isn’t to screw over my users, which brings me to my final point:

The forum is up!

Over the last year I’ve gotten a bucket full of great suggestions and bug-fixes, most of which I’ve implemented. The only problem is that these comments have all been through e-mail; the world is missing out. I did have a forum up briefly, but the spam-to-comment ratio was about 60:1, forcing me to disable it until last week. To make a long story short, I found a better way to transparently manage the endless torrent of spam, and I’ve reinstated the forum.

Head on over and report some bugs or ask some questions; I’m here to serve you. Plus, the more input I get the faster InstantUpdate will hit v1.0 final, and the sooner the source code will be released.