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The wyDay blog is where you find all the latest news and tips about our existing products and new products to come.
wyDay blog
wyUpdate & wyBuild 2.0 are now out. This new version has several improvements, most notable is the speed increases in both wyBuild and wyUpdate.
Now you can build update patches and release them to your users faster than before.
Version Management
Managing past and future versions of your software is simple. Just drag the files into wyBuild. Adding registry modifications is just a simple and intuitive. You won't even need to visit the help documents or the forum (but they're there just in case you get stuck).
New in wyBuild 2.0 is an improved tab bar for version management. Not bullshit market-speak improved either. Really improved.
What happens when your version tabs exceed the width of the tab bar? Popular browsers like Internet Explorer & Google Chrome squish down the text to unreadable widths:
The w and Sou are some of my favorite sites. Clearly IE's and Google Chrome's tab management approaches are flawed. We took the Firefox approach and kept the tabs at readable widths so can actually tell the difference between 1.0.3 and 1.0.4 (or as IE would show it 1.0... and 1.0...).
Plus, in wyBuild you can just hover your mouse over the version tabs and scroll your mouse to see all of the versions.
We're thinking about releasing the C# source code to this. Tell me your thoughts in the comments.
Include Multiple Languages with wyUpdate
wyUpdate now comes with full multi-lingual support. You can add, edit, or select any of the many languages in wyBuild and include them with wyUpdate. The correct language is then used when wyUpdate automatically detects the language of Windows and applies that language.
wyUpdate on Google Code
The wyUpdate source code is now hosted over at Google Code. You can now checkout the source code using subversion:
svn checkout http://wyupdate.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ wyupdate-read-only
Or, if you prefer the zip of the source, just head over to our wyUpdate page.
Update Patches
wyBuild 2.0 solves a few major problems with patch creation. The biggest fix is that wyBuild now properly support patching files with Unicode filenames. This fix will be especially noticeable for our non-English speaking users.
The patches created by wyBuild are much smaller than just zipping files. And much much smaller than releasing a new installer for every update to your program.
An example to illustrate my point is Nero Burning ROM. Nero Burning ROM is CD/DVD writing software that has been popular for many years, and Nero is updated frequently. One big problem, though, is their lack of a good update creation and distribution method. Instead of using a program like wyUpdate, they release full installers as their updates. That's over 300 megabytes for very small changes to Nero.
The graph below shows how enormous just the bare minimum installation of Nero Burning ROM program is. Notice the tiny size of the update when created with wyBuild (just over a megabyte!):
Free licenses for Open Source Programs
We're now offering free licenses to people developing open source programs. See the details of the offer. This offer also applies to educational institutions.
$20 until July 20th
Celebrating the 2.0 release, wyBuild costs only $20 until July 20th. Buy it now.
Subscribe to our blog's RSS Feed or follow Wyatt (CEO of wyDay) on Mastodon (@wyatt@hachyderm.io) to keep up-to-date with our latest posts.
Nice update I just wished for two things... One, that it wasn't only for open source software but for freeware too. And two, that you would make some more components like the tab bar and that photoshop alike sidebar and release them like the others :P
Keep up the good work.
Ok, I'll work on polishing up the tab bar for an open source release.
Nazgulled, why don't you release the source of your programs? That way you'll qualify for the free license?
Why should I if I don't want to? You also don't realease wyBuild as open-source, in fact, it's a comercial product (although you are giving free licenses now to some people), so you should, somewhat, understand why I don't release the source of my programs if I don't want to.
I just don't understand why you give licenses to open-source and not free stuff. Both are free and they make no money off it, in fact, I think open-source software probably makes something (depending on the product and people behind it) than freeware software. But you must have your reasons...
The software I'm developing where I wanted to use wyBuild is going to be open-source someday I already though of that long time go. But it's not going to be for the time being, I only release my source code when I'm happy with my code and the software is developed to a point where I'm happy to share it's code, that's not the case at the moment.
Either way, it's my choice as it is yours to give away licenses to whatever you want, I just don't want understand why do you discriminate both models like that.
But you must have your reasons.
About the tab bar, I was actually more keen to use the other control lol but it's fine. Actually, if both of them were released right now, I would have any use for any of them but they look so nice (I really must congratulate you on them) that If I wanted to use them someday, I could... But it's your choice. :) And I really don't care if they are open-source or not (you seem to release almost everything as open-source that's why I suggest to release them "as the others") I just wished they were free to use, that's all.
But you do what you gotta do, these are just suggestions :P
The reason we decided to do this is that many free (non open source) apps follow the fremium model. That is, they offer a free version alongside a for-pay version.
Obviously this isn't the case for you. But this is the case for many companies. Hence our restriction to open source only software.
Your worries are misplaced. People will judge your work on it's usefulness, not on whether the code is clean or not.
For instance, take our wyUpdate source. There are quite a few places that are just plain ugly. The process checking algorithm was written 4 years ago and is ugly as hell. But it works. And when bugs are found we fix the bugs and slowly cleanup the ugly work.
I don't think I'll be able to convince you, but the worst that can happen is that people are completely indifferent to your software. Much worse, in fact, than if they think your code is ugly.
If they care enough about your application to actually download your source code and criticize it, then that means they actually care about your work. It's a good thing.
My point is stop caring about perfection, you'll never reach it. Software development is a process. All mature programmers know this.
If you don't believe me, take it from a guy who worked on MS Excel for a number of years and now runs his own software company: Joel On Software. He makes many of the same points I'm making here.
I still don't get that fremium model you are talking about, what difference does it make if a company also has a paid product? As long as it has an open-source one you might give them a license right?
My point is, your giving licenses away to open-source projects, projects that don't (normally) make money of it and so you're helping, in a way, those people, by giving them a license since they don't make any money of their products. Why not do the same for just free projects? I still don't get it...
If someone is making money of some product, even if I was, I would gladly pay for something (if it wasn't too much) to help me develop a better product. wyBuild doesn't seem that expensive, but I'll never pay for something to help me with a product that I don't make a single cent out of it. People tend to don't understand this point of view, but it's what I think.
About the code, it's not about the people and the users of my product, I couldn't care less if they think the code is ugly or not, it works, it does what it's supposed to do and I'm doing it for free and releasing it to the public, if they like what the software do, they should be grateful. It's not about perfection either, I'm the one who cares about the code and I simply don't want to release it like this and it's not about bugs or pretty code, all my code is pretty from the moment I start typing lol (I just can't help myself and leave messy code) it's about other things that don't really matter, but I'm not going to release the code at this moment.
Perhaps in the future we'll consider giving licenses to companies with free products.
I'm not a "company" lol, I'm just a person that likes to code some utilities for myself and release them to the public for free, they might be useful for someone else :)
But thanks for considering it at least.
Keep up the good work, best regards.