wyDay blog

Both wyBuild and wyUpdate 2.2 are now out. They are both fully compatible with Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and now Windows 7.

• Download wyBuild, free 14-day trial
• Buy wyBuild, just $40

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.

• Download wyBuild, free 14-day trial
• Buy wyBuild, just $40

I've gotten a few e-mails about the wyUpdate source being corrupt. It wasn't. It just appeared that way if you used any decompressor other than 7-zip. This was because I used LZMA compression for the file. Only 7-zip understands that brand of compression.

At any rate, I've uploaded the newly zipped wyUpdate source code that should work with generic compression programs (WinZip, WinRAR, etc.).

I've also been testing wyBuild and wyUpdate with Windows 7 - it looks nice. I especially love the subtle touches to the taskbar buttons. The background adapts to the color of the wyBuild icon when the mouse hovers over it:

On these pre-release versions of Windows 7 both wyBuild and wyUpdate run perfectly.

Download wyBuild today.