Public Beta is Out!

Xslimmer public beta has started! Please download your copy and tell us what you think and if you encounter any issues. We are really willing to hear your opinion about the application we have been developing for the last few months.

Private Beta Ends Tomorrow

These last few days have been a bit different. While the private beta was out, we have dedicated ourselves to write documentation (FAQ, Help), creating the Web site, ready marketing details, as well as improving little things in Xslimmer that have been suggested by the testers.

In addition, from the beta test we have gathered several new ideas to implement in future releases.

Tomorrow we shall build a new release of the application, getting ready for the open beta period. Hopefully, tomorrow night, Halloween, will be the start of this new and final stage towards the application launch.

Private Beta Is Out

We have delivered the first beta to a few selected people. We are very excited and willing to hear their comments. Hopefully nothing major will come out, so we should start the public beta period next weekend.

Ultimating Details

Yesterday we made our appcast available. That is the information that allows Xslimmer to know if there is a new version available. As a consequence, we realized that in some cases the "last updated" date within the preferences was a bit too long.

We also dedicated ourselves to finalize some aesthetical aspects of the application, like some windows transitions that happen very seldomly, but did not look too nice.

We are now finishing the creation of the dmg file, along with the Web and documentation setup in order to start the public beta very soon, hopefully, within this week. But before we do that, we are going to allow a selected group of beta testers to try it out first. These are people we know and trust, and we are sure that will provide interesting feedback in order to improve both the application and the documentation.

We are getting there!

Got that bug

Last night we had some bug that kept us awake for a long time. What happened was that the application was booming randomly after re-registering it (something that is not supposed to happen very often, if at all). Pedro signaled that was probably GUI related, he ended up being right.

In order to nail the bug, I was using Xcode's debugger. Unfortunately Xcode's debugger did not show up any information about processes being run. I made some changes to the code, and by temporarely eliminating some pieces I finally managed to get to the offending code statement. It was around 2am.

I read the statement a few times. I could not make out what was happening. I did some more testing. Finally, I looked at the local variables. Found something wierd. We had an string that had an invalid pointer. What was the reason? 2:30am and I was still tracing code. Made some more changes. Finally, around 3:10, I found it.

The bug was due to the fact that at some stage, in one of our classes, we were retaining twice the same variable. We actually ment to retain 2 different ones, so the one that was not retained ended up causing the invalid pointer. As we were using KVO methods to assign a value to that variable, so it would be shown in the GUI, the hold thing exploded.

Fixed, we are getting there.

End of Xslimmer's Development; Start of Beta (soon)

After several months of work, we have finally finished the Xslimmer app. We are now producing the documentation as well as the Web site for it.

Xslimmer is an application that will allow users of Mac OS X to recover disk space in a very simple way, without having to give up to anything. How is that possible? Well, this first major release will allow you to get rid of foreign architecture code in the installed universal binary apps. This allows the applications to continue working as they did, but taking less space. For future release we have many other ideas that we want to incorporate to Xslimmer.

By the end of this week, we will be releasing the first public beta version. If you are willing to try it, please go to http://www.xslimmer.com and download your copy. We are willing to hear from you at beta@xslimmer.com.

We are getting there!

This is how the initial version of Xslimmer used to look. We thought we were almost done. Every aspect of functionality we wanted to add for v1.0 was there. Then we met Louie Mantia. He redesigned the interface, and a month later, we are still working to get it right. We have changed the look significantly, hoping users will like it better. Soon you will be able to judge for yourself.