Hey everyone,
I’m working on being more transparent, even when I don’t have anything new for users to download.
There are 2 main things I wanted to let people know about.
First, I’m not going to have an update ready as soon as I was hoping. I got back into things and found that, for reasons that no one on the internet can identify, Apple’s XCode IDE and command line tools now refuse to sign my builds of File Buddy 11 Alpha. The same configuration on a different project works fine, but it won’t even finish building the app, much less open it. Unfortunately, the solution seems to be rebuilding the project from scratch so that whatever broken configuration exists isn’t part of the project anymore.
This is what I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. Things are obviously going a lot faster than the original development because there’s a lot of copy/paste to the new project. It’s not a straight copy/paste because that’s not how Apple’s projects work (specifically the UI files don’t work that way) and I’m taking the opportunity to change out some libraries. Certain Swift libraries I was using are now unmaintained and haven’t seen updates in years, so I’m removing them and using alternatives. This has actually helped clean up some things in the code, so it’s been a nice improvement. Also, as I’ve been copying, I’ve found some things that weren’t implemented correctly and I’ve been fixing those. For example, the last alpha didn’t show the same informtion as File Buddy 10 when viewing a volume in the Info Window. Now, it correctly shows the capacity, file count, block size, etc.
I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to have build with fairly similar functionality as the last alpha in another couple weeks, but you never know. I’ll do my best to keep things updated.
Second, I’ve started a small amount of collaboration with some other teams that build popular macOS apps - specifically the guys at FindAnyFile. Among other things, we are working together to establish a file format that can be used by multiple apps to communciate lists of files between them. For example, you could use FindAnyFile’s search to generate a list of files and then give that list to File Buddy to open in a List window for manipulating them. The work is fairly early days, but it should be a nice integration for people who use other tools. There are other possible collaborations on the table as well, but those are theorectical at this point.
Another minor item, I noticed that Chrome didn’t like the download links on my website because I didn’t have them as HTTPS links. Those have been updated, so the download links should work for people on Chrome now.
– David