Diego's Rants » Software http://blog.massanti.com Confessions from a Geek Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:22:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 Download Thingy, it slowly starts to make sense. http://blog.massanti.com/2009/09/22/download-thingy-it-slowly-starts-to-make-sense/ http://blog.massanti.com/2009/09/22/download-thingy-it-slowly-starts-to-make-sense/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:08:42 +0000 Diego Massanti http://blog.massanti.com/?p=1014 I have been working for the past days in the foundation for a new Download Manager that I’m writing for the Mac platform, and this is just an “status quo” about how things are evolving.

What is done so far.

  • A certainly modern multi-threaded Cocoa Framework implementation around libCurl‘s C API, which allows me to get my hands on the whole power of Curl, but without leaving the beauty of Objective-C and the Cocoa API’s at any moment.
  • A pretty basic prorotype kind of UI which allows simple segmented download of files for the time being.

    Download Thingy, the prototype UI

    Download Thingy, the prototype UI

  • A custom (and open, XML, standards based) file format baptized (you guessed) “.thingy” which takes care of storing partial download segments, some basic (for now) binary and redundancy checking, and of course, the ability to reconstruct itself into the original file.

    A standard .thingy container.

    A standard .thingy container.

  • Main Launch Services integartion is partially done too.
  • Some basic implementation of automatic mirror discovering.

What needs to be done.

  • I have to write the foundation for a proper queue management system.
  • Network Usage / Bandwidth Limiting logics are in the “to do” list too.
  • A proper User Interface.
  • A public alpha version with basic usability that people can start to use and report so i can accelerate the development based on actual user’s requests.
  • A Safari / WebKit plugin.

So far, this is looking pretty nice and i think it will become a pretty interesting utility for the Mac community.

]]> http://blog.massanti.com/2009/09/22/download-thingy-it-slowly-starts-to-make-sense/feed/ 5 The digital certificate breakage http://blog.massanti.com/2009/09/05/the-digital-certificate-breakage/ http://blog.massanti.com/2009/09/05/the-digital-certificate-breakage/#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:42:29 +0000 Diego Massanti http://blog.massanti.com/?p=980 So um… some weeks ago I released a new version of MediaInfo Mac with several fixes on my own code, with also a newer build of the MediaInfo Lib by Jerome Martinez, and, finally, a newer version of Sparkle (the amazing framework that i use for the automated software updates).
To make a really long story very short, Sparkle changed an important behavior: Now each and every update that I release has to be signed with a digital certificate, which is nothing but good, because it gives an extra layer of security for the final users.
Bad news are that I totally missed that part in Sparkle’s release docs, so I released an update without the certificate, and from there on, users were stuck on that version without the possibility to update.
I still had the ability to show to the users a nice dialog informing them about my error and kindly asking to update manually, but even that, i still can see that a LOT of people is still using the broken version (0.7.7.58), which leads me to the following conclusion:
Most people will NOT upgrade their software unless the process is totally automatic and painless, not even users of MediaInfo which are usually over the “Average Joe”.

This can be seen on the usage statistics that i keep (which I did reset some hours ago btw, due to some preparations for the upcoming MediaInspector beta) where you can see that there are still a LOT of users stuck on 0.7.7.58.
So to sum things up:

  • If you are using Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, the latest version that you can use is 0.7.17.3, get it here.
  • If you are on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” or newer, just get the latest version here.

Cheers!.

Diego.

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