Noodlings

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!

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!

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!

It’s been a bit of a wait for a lot of you but Hazel 2.0 alpha is ready to be downloaded and tested. Now, it is alpha so most, but not all of the features are there; be gentle. I have stopped using launchd in favor of a homebrew scheduler. As a result, those of you hitting the “Hazel stops working after logging out then back in” bug will be happy. Hazel also features new icons from Fernando Lins (featured here). A bunch of other stuff is in there so if you’re curious, check it out.

This is a semi-public pre-release, so you have to jump through a couple hoops to get at it. Details are on the beta forum but you must be registered on the forums to view it. I know it’s a bit tedious but I want to make sure all testers are tuned into the forums.

Oh, and for those of you wondering, 2.0 will be a free upgrade. I’ll have a Hazel 2.0 FAQ up at some point.

Just a little heads up. The Infinite Loop folks at Ars Technica were kind enough to interview yours truly. Check it out.

I’ll say up front that I’m skeptical of this whole Twitter thing. Instead of me being a grump about it though, I’m trying an experiment. I put up a profile for Hazel for those who can’t resist getting micro-updates on what’s going on with Hazel. If you want to see what’s going on with development or other related news doled out in little SMS-sized chunks, then check out user Noodle_Hazel .

Hazel’s not the only Mac software on the Twitter circuit. Recently acquired MarsEdit is already there. And if you want Twitter updates on your desktop, there’s Twitterrific.

So, we’ll see how it goes. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.