wyDay blog

In August I said "in about two weeks I'll upload the second release candidate [RC2]". What I meant was "in about two turtle weeks I'll upload the second release candidate." Well, it's nearing the end of the second turtle week and I still haven't found the conversion from whale-years to human-years. Thus, I have to release InstantUpdate 1.0 RC2 soon or risk being labeled a liar.

This release has a few new notable features like multi-lingual support, true drag-and-drop from Windows Explorer, editing and removing appearance templates, and the ability to preview the client without needing to run it on a test machine. More importantly, and subtly, RC2 went through an aesthetic overhaul.

I've used my time to make the interface simple. How? By eliminating all steps that can be done more efficiently by a computer. Go ahead, you can snigger at that sentence.

But Wyatt, a schizophrenic fragment of myself asks, isn't that the entire point of creating computer programs?

Good question, me. It is the whole point, but more specifically computer programs must allow freedom of creation while simultaneously restricting the user's actions. Don't scream "Orwellian" just yet. Although restricting liberties for the "greater good" sounds like something an authoritative government would say, in the case of computer programs it actually works.

For instance, this upcoming release fixes the way files and folders are handled. All previous versions of InstantUpdate gave the user complete control of how the files and folders in the update were visually organized:

As you can see, the "limited" control is much nicer. In addition to sorting sorts by name, I further limited the user's control by automatically warning you if you try to rename something to an invalid filename (by Windows standard) and prompts you if you try to overwrite an existing file or folder. Previously I just left all files and folder handling up to the user. It was an unnecessary freedom that led to messiness even in my own projects.

I could lie and say simplifying a program is hard. It's not; it's hours of tedium punctuated minutes of excitement and inspiration.

While you wait the remaining turtle days, here are a few screenshots which don't do justice to my work:

No, not Jesus; the second release candidate of InstantUpdate. It has been delayed by a dead motherboard and the bureaucracy of getting a code signing certificate. However, the release will happen this Sunday whether I have the certificate or not.

This is another big release with so many bugfixes that you'll likely see eunuch cockroaches in the streets. Plus there are new features such as multilingual support, and of which no castration jokes come to mind.

Edit (Sunday, August 26th): It will take a bit longer. These releases are supposed to be of "final release" quality, and I don't want to upload my changes until I feel it meets that standard. This means a few more days of delay.

Over the last week I've gotten some useful feedback on InstantUpdate. There were some bug reports like lack of proxy support in the client, and some rare crashes in the designer. Though the most requested feature was multilingual support.

Supporting other languages was something I had thought about briefly two years ago when I started InstantUpdate, but it quickly left my mind amid the ocean of technical puzzles. The only other time I thought about it was last week, before putting up the release candidate, when I peaked at my server logs. I noticed that around half my visitors come from countries where English isn't the official language. But, being the monolingual American that I am, I didn't connect this fact with need for multilingual support. Stupid me.

On the internet your dog's a medical doctor

As is typical with anything released on the internet, not all the feedback was so useful. One site had a bag of comments all accusing me of dishonest motives. It was summed up succinctly by a user "doc" who stated "trojan.gen.ds these idiots must think we are stupid".

You're not stupid, just inexperienced. All that "trojan.gen.ds" means is that your lousy virus scanner misinterpreted the InstantUpdate installer to be a "generic DOS trojan." If you download InstantUpdate from my site you'll find this accusation to be patently false. If I were to include a virus with InstantUpdate it would be akin to a butcher knowingly poisoning his meat; it's just bad business.

So why the virus warnings then? Simple - I use a library called ExecDos in the installer. All ExecDos does is hides the console windows when I run NGEN (an optimization program) so that all the user sees when they're installing is the normal graphical interface. Because of ExecDos's main function (hiding windows) it's been used by inept virus writers to install malicious software without the user being any the wiser.

This being the case, it's no surprise that slipshod virus scanners make a blanket statement that everything using ExecDos is a virus. In keeping with the butcher metaphor, these lousy virus scanners are acting like a police force that realizes sharp objects can kill. In the police force's haste to ensure safety, they arrest everyone that owns a sharp object. The butcher is thrown in jail and the town quickly achieves a protein deficiency.

If you need further proof, SoftPedia verified that InstantUpdate is indeed "100% clean" of viruses, spyware, and all that other nasty muck.

Release candidate 2

In about two weeks I'll upload the second release candidate with bug-fixes, interface polishing, and the beginnings of multilingual support. Until then, keep the comments coming (yes, even the bad ones).