AppSnap TODO published

I finally gone ahead and published the long list of TODO items I have been maintaining for AppSnap. I will be keeping this up to date so it should be an accurate representation of what AppSnap will be doing in the future. This list will complement the issue tracker since it is much easier to maintain as a text blob than having to post and manage a long list of enhancements. Feel free to comment on the list. Any discussions emerging from your feedback will surely go towards improving AppSnap.

I have also changed the WordPress theme for this blog from Contempt to Neat, since it is, in fact, neater. The bullets look so much better now than before.

Not many updates as of yet in terms of features but the database is being constantly expanded and bugs being fixed as often as time permits.

Tweeting about AppSnap

I recently created a Twitter account to provide frequent updates on what is going on as far as programming and technology is concerned. I have discussed this a bit on my personal blog. The account is generic and I plan on using it for all my programming adventures but it will help get an insight on what is going on with AppSnap, in between blog posts and releases.

Feel free to communicate with me over Twitter if you are an active user there.

Move to WordPress.com

Now that AppSnap supports the self-update feature, I’ve been adding functionality at a furious pace. The change log captures all the details but does not provide for a way to notify end users on a real-time basis. Also, the tone on a change log is quite boring. A blog is definitely a more exciting and fun way to communicate so here’s the official AppSnap blog. I’ve already moved all the older news items here so you can see what all happened in the past. There are just a few posts since April 2007, but from now on, you can expect posts every time anything changes with AppSnap. I’ve also created categories such as Code Changes, Database Changes, etc. in case you have specific areas of interest.

Prepending text to the News tiddler on the AppSnap website for each new post was cumbersome, requiring me to re-upload the site to SourceForge. It was also neither indexable or searchable by any search engine. WordPress just makes life easier. Many thanks, again, to the WordPress team for their fantastic product.

Database updates

All this time, the AppSnap database was being managed as an .INI file in SVN. That worked fine for starting out but it is not scalable or community friendly whatsoever. After fiddling with some PHP and MySQL for a few days, I stumbled upon the fantastic Zoho Creator. After a couple hours on Zoho, I had a fully functional system ready to go. Kudos to Zoho for their excellent system.

The AppSnap database has now officially moved to Zoho. Clicking on the Applications tab now displays the database directly from Zoho. You can also add applications which will get reviewed and integrated once verified by the database maintainers.

Database updates are synced directly from Zoho but require a translation from Zoho’s JSON format to the AppSnap .INI format. This is currently being done using PHP. Eventually, AppSnap will be able to handle the JSON format directly.

Now that the database is more accessible, I look forward to even more application contributions that will make AppSnap more useful and user friendly.

Reviewed on Lifehacker again

AppSnap has been reviewed on Lifehacker once again. So as to provide more reliable access, I’ve moved the website to SourceForge.Net. Hopefully, it will be much more reliable and responsive than before. The downloads are already linked off Google Code so that should already be providing a good user experience. I’ll eventually mirror the downloads on SourceForge.

AppSnap has already been downloaded 15000 times since the Lifehacker review and climbing 200 downloads every hour. Due to the massive number of hits, I’ve started receiving several bug reports and suggestions. I’m addressing them as fast as possible. Thanks for taking the time to try out AppSnap and providing feedback that will surely help in improving future releases.

New Documentation Mechanism

AppSnap is now using TiddlyWiki as its documentation mechanism. This means that all information related to AppSnap will go into this wiki. From the left menu, you can get to all the latest and greatest information related to the project.

The best part of this migration is that since TiddlyWiki is a single HTML file, the same file can serve as the AppSnap website as well as the documentation that is bundled as part of the AppSnap package and source. The user experience with the documentation will be much better when compared to a bunch of text files. This file will also be checked into SVN and maintained like any other component of AppSnap. This greatly simplifies the documentation effort since I no longer need to keep a bunch of text files and a WordPress based website in sync. All changes made to this file will be immediately reflected on the web and easily integrated into the installer.

For a while, I was concerned about the size of TiddlyWiki which weighs in at ~250KB just for the empty file. However, considering it compresses down to ~60KB, it is still a reasonable download for a website. And once the download completes, the site will be very fast since everything will already be in memory.

Enjoy the new look and feel. I look forward to your feedback regarding this transition.