Noodlings

Hazel 2.1 has just been released. One of the main focuses of this release was Leopard compatibility but what does this really mean?

In this case, it means that, for the most part, Hazel will work on Leopard as it did on Tiger. As other devs have pointed out ^{1, 2, 3}, we do not get the final version of Leopard any sooner than you do. Actually, unless we go into a store and pay for a copy on launch day, we will probably get it later.

The implications of this are that there could be changes that have occurred since the last prerelease and the final version that could break things and we won’t know until launch day. It’s a gamble but I’d rather have something usable in your hands the minute you upgrade to Leopard. This version addresses the known Leopard issues to date and should be ready to help organize your Stacks come August 26th.

As for the longer term roadmap with Hazel on Leopard: Hazel is not providing any special Leopard-only functionality currently. When will Hazel start using exclusive Leopard features or go fully Leopard-only? It’s hard to say. Leopard does provide some functionality that Hazel can take advantage of. But until I feel comfortable that a good number of my users have upgraded, I’ll try and support both Tiger and Leopard.

As a user, you do have the ability to influence this. When checking for updates, you have the option of sending anonymous data about your system. One of the things sent is your OS version (you can see all the data sent if you click on the “More Info…” button). Using this data, I can get a sense of Leopard adoption. If you want to be properly represented, then check the “Include anonymous profile” box in the update settings. I keep the data to myself and won’t do any bad things with it. Your participation will help guide Hazel’s future development so, if you’re not doing it already, please consider casting your vote in this manner.

So, in the end, I just want to clarify that there’s a bit of a juggling game here. I’ve tried to make sure that everything works as smoothly on Leopard as it does on Tiger. If it turns out that something changed in the final release or if I just flat out missed something, I’ll fix it. Leopard compatibility is not so much a state as it is a commitment.

As Apple is hurtling towards a Leopard release, we developers are scrambling to make sure our apps work. With the clock ticking down, I am making Hazel 2.1 beta available for testing. It should be Leopard compatible so if you have access to Leopard, I’d love it if you could download it and let me know how well it works.

I’ve also added a couple new features and a bunch of fixes so even if you are using Tiger, this release should have something of interest. For instance, you can now properly format the “Authors” Spotlight field so you don’t get the annoying parentheses and quotes (chalk that up to me stupidly using NSArray’s -description method). In any case, Hazel should be useful for replicating the iTunes folder structure of artist/album/song now.

I’m looking to go final with this next week so no time like the present to try and break things.

Enjoy: Hazel Beta page

Update (Oct. 16, 2007): It’s official. Leopard is shipping on October 26th, available for pre-order now.

Noodlesoft is sponsoring the latest episode of ScreenCastsOnline. Don McAllister does a great job of guiding you through Hazel’s features. Nothing gets the point across like seeing it in action.

You can check it all out here.

Oh, and there’s a discount code in there, if you need any more enticement to watch it.

Hazel 2 has been out for a few days and I’ve had a chance to sit back and reflect a bit. Of course, things are a bit different this time than when I was releasing 1.0. For one, I have users now. That meant that I had to split my time to do support in addition to development. But that also meant that I had more people giving me feedback and a larger pool of beta testers. Yes, it’s time consuming to process all that but it made for a better product in the end.

There were a couple decisions that weren’t applicable when doing a 1.0 that I had to deal with this time:

1.2 vs 2.0

When planning the next release, I went back and forth on whether it was 1.2 or 2.0. What’s in a version number anyways? Well, making it 1.2 would have made some things easier. It’s generally understood that point releases are free so there would have been less confusion on that point if it were 1.2. On the other hand, there were major chunks that were rewritten. The artwork was redone. I ended up labeling it 2.0 as it does indicate that it has significant improvements and that the product is more mature, which is the case here.

Why a free upgrade?

Several factors played a part in this. There were issues in 1.x that 2.0 addresses and they were the type of thing I wanted every user to have access to. Plus, I do feel grateful to all of you who took a chance with not just a new application. If I could, I’d meet with every one of you and shake your hand but I get the feeling that it would be unfeasible. In any case, I think you’d appreciate the free upgrade more. You don’t know where my hands have been.

• • • 

Overall, the pre-release went pretty smoothly. The one thing that was less than ideal was the timing and length of the prerelease period.

Because of issues with 1.x’s use of launchd, I had to write my own task runner/scheduler. Since some users were being affected by this, I released the alpha earlier so that they could have access to the new fixed version. Also, since it was a critical part of the system, I needed it to be tested for as long as possible. So, in retrospect, the alpha came out a bit earlier with fewer features ready than I would have liked but I felt it was necessary given the circumstances.

As for the length of the prerelease, it did run a bit longer than I wanted. A few factors came into play here including a good bit of contract work I was doing during the Spring and logistics concerning the business (including converting Noodlesoft to an LLC).

What surprised me this time around was the amount of attention my beta received. I had multiple articles in the press at each step of the way which was great. A big thanks to all of you who kept up with the pre-releases and sent in feedback and bug reports. I feel that 2.0 is pretty solid out of the gate as a result.

• • • 

In the end, I’m quite happy with how 2.0 turned out. There were some rough edges that I was finally able to polish and I feel like I’ve filled out the feature set while keeping it all cohesive.

What’s in store for the future? I’m still working that out but most likely, 2.1 will be focused on getting Hazel working properly on Leopard (without breaking it on Tiger, of course). I think the next major improvement won’t be in the product itself, but on the Noodlesoft site. People have been clamoring for some sort of repository of Hazel rules so I need to hunker down and figure out how that should work. As always, your feedback helps to shape the future direction of things so keep it coming.

After what ended up being a longer pre-release period than I anticipated, Hazel 2.0 final is out. Lots of new, neat stuff. Nifty, too. If you haven’t been keeping up with the betas then check it out. I feel it’s much closer to my vision of the product when I started down this path last year.

It’s a free upgrade for you registered 1.0 users because I love you all. Yes, there, I said it.

When the smoke clears, I’ll do another post-mortem but in the meantime, download it.

Hazel 2 is going to be released soon and our marketing manager thought that we should start a marketing campaign. When this happens, we usually sit down and look into how he escaped from his cell, but this time, we decided to give him a chance.

We here at Noodlesoft like to keep up with the latest currents and trends. With that in mind, we present our first unofficial web badge. We feel that it captures the spirit of today’s vibrant web youth culture.

Feel free to adorn your web page with the badge. Consider this our trial balloon into the wonderful world of online marketing.

K. Bai!

Typing this up between sessions so please excuse the sloppy writing.

Stacks

When Steve started talking about cleaning the Desktop, my heart stopped for a split second. I thought I was going to be Sherlocked (I was also sitting with the Karelia guys at the time). As it turns out, Stacks is just doing what I’ve been suggesting for a while on my tips and tricks page: download everything to a separate downloads folder. Hazel stores the file’s date added and ships with a sample rule to color newly added files; Finder (or maybe the filesystem, I need to check) now keeps track of the date added as well and uses it to keep your most recently added files at the top of the stack. Nonetheless, those Stacks don’t clean themselves so, I think the main adjustment I need to make is to change the marketing message from “Clean Your Desktop” to “Clean Your Stacks”.

Miscellaneous KeyNote comments

I feel like I’m missing the point of the transparent menubar. You can’t drag windows up underneath the menubar. Are the top 20 or so pixels of your wallpaper that important? What do you need to see under there? While I appreciate the tricks they pulled to maintain legibility, it’s still not as clear as an opaque menubar. So yes, add me to the list of grumpy transparent menubar haters.

Did anyone find it odd that when showing the pie charts of Safari’s current market share and their target marketshare, that they had Safari eat up Firefox’s slice of the pie while IE’s market share remained unchanged? Not sure if one should read too much into it as it probably was inadvertent, but it does give the impression that Apple is gunning for Firefox.

Parties

A big thanks for Chuck Soper and Buzz Anderson for organizing their respective parties. The edge has to go to Buzz though since he arranged for a taco truck to be parked outside. Nothing like eating a taco with meat scraped off the face of a cow to start the evening off right.

I’ll probably drop by the OmniFocus get-together later today but won’t be able to make any of the other extracurricular events because of dinner plans.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I went to my first WWDC last year. I had recently quit my fulltime job. Hazel 1.0 was in beta at that time. Since my app was to be released on Tiger, all this Leopard talk seemed somewhat irrelevant. I was a newcomer and an unknown.

It’s not quite a year later but WWDC is here again. Hazel 2.0 is now in alpha. It is still targeted for Tiger so Leopard-specific features are still just in the concept phase for me. I’m now not a total unknown. Additionally, since the last WWDC, sales have increased by ∞% so things are going great!

I’m on the road already and am trying to squeeze out another release before the conference (most likely later today). I’ll be in SF on Sunday in time for the Mac ISV dinner. If you spot me, feel free to give me copious amounts of money; it’s what they call “networking.” How do you spot me? Well, take Rodney Dangerfield in a tutu and cross him with Zombie Joseph Stalin and you’d get something that not only is hard to visualize, but also doesn’t resemble me in the least. See you there!

GTD/productivity guru Ethan Schoonover at Kinkless has put up the last installment of his “Kinkless Desktop” series of screencasts. Of course, this particular one interests me as it focuses on Hazel, showing how he integrates it into his workflow to keep his folders organized. He even makes the rules he uses available for download. Check it out here and make sure to check out the rest of the series.

Today I got to demo Hazel for the first time at the MetroMac users group meeting. I didn’t do massive prep for it. I just had a general outline of what I wanted to show and talk about. I’m the type of person that can’t deal with too much prep in these types of situations; it makes me nervous. I ran through the demo earlier in the day a few times and it ran fine. I felt pretty loose going into this.

For the demo, I did the typical vacuum cleaner salesman pitch. I had a bunch of files dumped onto the Desktop. I went over the rules I had set up (basically, just a variation on the sample rules Hazel ships with). I activated them all then ran them expecting that Hazel would clean it all up.

Nothing.

Ran them again.

Nothing.

I checked the logs and everything looked fine. The MetroMac guys ran some interference for me (thanks guys) while I did a little flailing and head-scratching. Ultimately, I just moved on with the rest of the demo but I never really recovered. The impact of the rest of demo was blunted by the fact that there was a mess of files all over the Desktop.

Afterwards, I sat on the sidelines and took the time to diagnose the problem. I looked at the Desktop directory in Terminal. Lo and behold. The files were gone. I looked at my Desktop. I looked at the Desktop folder in a Finder window. The files were still there. It finally dawned on me. Finder failed to refresh. Worse than that. It would refuse to refresh after I navigated to other folders and came back. I ended up force-relaunching Finder and was finally greeted by what the audience should have seen: a clean Desktop. In a nutshell, Hazel worked; Finder didn’t.

It was weird in that the subsequent rules I created worked fine on any new files I downloaded. Thinking about it now, it might be related to the fact that I set the clock forward to demonstrate a time-based rule. I did it during my test runs and I guess Finder got very confused afterwards. I don’t remember but it’s possible the setting-the-clock aspect of the demo was added later and therefore not “regression-tested,” so to speak.

In the end, it’s not such a big deal. It was maybe less than 30 people. Nonetheless, it’s not fun sitting up there clicking that button that refuses to do anything. I’m sure there’s a lesson here but at this point I don’t care. What is this? South Park?

Unfortunately, I don’t have lackeys to yell at like Steve but this thing is behind me and I have a bottle of scotch in front of me so here’s to looking forward!