ZenVilla Blog

The new year is upon us and with it, a special gift for XBit, a brand new bug! It seems the code that handles downloading new issues from the TidBITS FTP server had a slight oversight in it. The result, no new issues for you! That such a simple bug could so impair the functionality! Anyway, the application has been updated and downloading should work once again.

On the topic of XBit, I’ve been playing with a handful of ideas for the next major release. Nothing has been hammered out yet but it will probably be Panther only.

I’ve set up a separate site to deal with specific announcements related to my software development efforts. I don’t expect anybody to read my personal thoughts here so it makes sense to have a company related news page where people can see what’s new with the software they may have purchased. It’s running the latest release of WordPress (1.2.1 at the moment) and I’ve set it up to use the Kubrick theme from Michael Heilemann. If you haven’t seen Michael’s work check it out, very clean stuff.

I’m a bit late with this and in fact, I was surprised to find that I hadn’t noted this already but TidBITS #746 has a short write up on the first release of XBit. It’s very similar to the earlier mention on their ExtraBITS blog. The major difference being the number of people who will see it in TidBITS as opposed to ExtraBITS is probably quite significant.

Adam Engst of TidBITS has noted the release of XBit 1.0 in ExtraBITS, the TidBITS blog. His write up is relatively positive considering the somewhat limited functionality of the 1.0 release. The biggest note is probably the inability to search across multiple articles. I’m definitely aware of it and hope to address it in a future update.

I guess it figures. The minute I finish posting the final version of XBit 1.0 online I find a new bug. Update the Read Me file, update the website, rebuild with optimizations on and debugging info off, update the various software tracking sites and then kick back and relax right? You’ve earned it… right?

So it’s time to check email. Ahh, a new issue of TidBITS! Pop back into XBit, tell it to download the latest issue and that’s when I see it. There seems to be a problem parsing the second article. What could be causing this I wonder? Well I guess that relaxing part will have to come later. Version 1.0.1 needs my attention!

Update: Posted 1.0.1 online with the fix to the parser. According to my server logs only 1 or 2 people actually got the initial build and XBit will notify them if they need to update.

The final 1.0 release for XBit will be happening this week. It’s taken a heck of a lot longer then I had initially hoped for but I guess that’s how things work out when you have to schedule your programming time around a full-time job, the gym, Aikido classes and Japanese study. The first posted public beta was Dec 6th, 2003. Wow! And I thought the guys at Omni were taking their sweet time with their latest thing.

Next up, the website will need to be updated. No more info on the public beta. I will be extending the discounted price for a short while though. Just long enough for a press release to make the rounds and hopefully get us a little more exposure. I’m really looking forward to wrapping it all up and starting fresh. There are so many things that I’d love for XBit to do that I’ve had to cut from the 1.0 release. It should be fun to sit down and hammer out the features for the next release!