I’ve been doing a fair amount of contracting recently, including this crazy project, so development of Elegant Chaos products has had to take a bit of a back seat.

Happily though, I’m now in the position to spend some time on it again, and now that Ambientweet has made it to 1.0, the next update on the agenda is Neu 1.2.

This update of Neu is going to be quite substantial, not least because Apple are about to change the rules on how an application in the App store is allowed to interact with the Finder and the file system. This is going to require me to change the user interface a bit. There is a slight danger that it’s going to get a bit more clumsy, and I may have to permanently enable some settings that have until now been optional, such as whether you get asked for the file name / location when making a new item.

I’m hoping to have a beta version ready for release in a few days, and I’m especially keen to get some feedback on this version.

If you’d like to test it, please either check the beta software page, or get in touch.

If you have purchased an App Store version of Neu (and have updated to version 1.1.1), you should now be able to download betas from this website and test them. Although they have come from this site and not the App store, they ought to recognise that you have had a paid version of Neu on your computer from the App store, and won’t annoy you with reminders.

As always, if you have any problems with this, or anything else to do with Neu, please get in touch and I’ll try to help. Likewise if you have any feedback or feature suggestions for version 1.2 or beyond.

One of the most common problems I find when switching between testing on the simulator and testing on the device is the fact that the device’s file system is case-sensitive, whereas the simulator uses the user’s default file system which generally isn’t.

This can throw up mysterious bugs where things appear to work fine on the simulator, and then fail unexpectedly on the device because one or more files are actually being referred to by the wrong names (or rather, the right names, in the wrong case).

It occurs to me that the simulator could instead create and mount a private DMG disk image to use as the simulated device’s disk. It would then be able to format this image using a case-sensitive file system, which might provide a more realistic simulation of an actual device’s behaviour.

For what it’s worth, I’ve filed an enhancement request.

Hurrah!

After a beta period even longer than Apple’s iOS 5 (well, maybe), I’m pleased to announce that Ambientweet 1.0 has been released, and can be downloaded from the Mac App store.

As this version still has relatively modest functionality, and as I’m mostly interested in getting some user feedback, I’ve decided that it will initially be available for free.

Eventually I plan to start charging, but of course if you grab it from the store now, you will be able to get any future updates to this version for free too.

I’ve released another two betas of Ambientweet in the last couple of days, and hopefully it’s now getting close to being ready for submission to the Mac App store.

The current plan is still to release it as a free app to begin with, as the main thing I’m interested in at this stage is getting a bit of feedback.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to do much to Ambientweet, but it’s still trundling along in the background. It’s a fairly experimental project, and as such it definitely suffers a bit from the “there’s one more thing” syndrome.

In other words, every time I think it’s time to release it, I have another idea (or spot another bug).

Having said that, hopefully you’ll find that the latest version is fairly close to being ready for submission to the store.

As always, any feedback appreciated…