any updates on synergy advance?

Sorry for the delay in replying, I changed my email address and forgot to update it in my forums account so I didn't receive notification of the new post...

I've got a new release 90% done containing many bug fixes and a fairly important new plug-in. Hope to get it out soon. If you're not on the announcements mailing list (or the beta list if you want to get a sneak peak when the beta comes out) you can add yourself.

Quote: Sorry to bug you again

No problem. Quote: but Synergy Advance has been in the stage of a new important release pending since the days of Tiger's release. We have not seen a real improvement in "completeness" sine the very first release. Just the step from 0.3 to 0.4 took AGES. Back then I, and I think a lot of other people already considered it dead. When 0.4 was released I had some hope that the software would gain some relevance again; partly due to the announcement back then, that important but difficult changes under the hood had finally been accomplished and that it now would be just a matter of getting the functionality implemented. But again, it fell horribly silent. I think the lack of activity in this forum might be read in a way that many people have finally given up. The striking thing is that so many other software projects have been released over the last month (OK, mostly developer toold that probably came into being during your work on other projects), while Synergy Advance was just stagnant.

Most of the "other project" stuff was written directly for Synergy Advance. So stuff like the buildtools, atosym, Wincent Strings Utility, and the WOTest framework (all publicly available no this website) and WOBase, WODebug, WOBezel and WOCommon (not publicly available but they form the majority of the Synergy Advance codebase) was all written, without exception as part of and to support Synergy Advance's development. I know that these little offshoots are not of much interest to non-developers, but they are a substantial part of the "iceberg" (the tip and then some) of Synergy Advance. I continue to release periodic maintenance updates to Synergy, but my development time is split about 10%/90% between Synergy/Synergy Advance.

The slow release schedule is a consequence of the fact that I'm working alone, and that my time must necessarily be divided between programming and other tasks (website maintenance, customer support, server administration, accounting etc). So yes, I know it appears slow from the outside, but progress is being made steadily. Quote: Telling people to subscribe to the announcements and beta lists isn't really helping. Subscribers just get a mail once a month reminding you that they're subscribed - very annoying!

If they annoy you, you can turn off the monthly password reminders in your mailing list preferences. I provide the mailing lists so that people can "set and forget" with the peace of mind that they'll find out about new releases without having to repeatedly come back to the forums to check, or clutter up there RSS feeds list with yet another website address. Quote: I think a lot of people - though of course I can only speak for myself - would like to get an honest answer to the question whether Synergy Advance is still a thing to count on.

Yes, it is still being worked on. I make fairly regular posts to my personal weblog about the programming work I'm doing at any given point in time, and much of it relates directly to Synergy Advance.

You can also see progress in the bugs and feature request database although admittedly browsing Bugzilla doesn't make for as interesting reading as the weblog.

Quote: One little rant though; You mention your blog, which is fine. The thing is, it is a bit cryptic, i.e. I couldn't find a link on the (wincent.dev) homepage. Maybe its just hidden and I didn't find it; you may want to put this in a more exposed position, then people like me would not nag about progress in this forum ;-)

Point taken. The only link (that I know of) to my personal weblog is from the "About Wincent Colaiuta" page (https://wincent.dev/a/about/wincent/), which is not exactly the most heavily visited page of this site (there were 11,000 hits to the weblog RSS feed last month, 8,500 to the weblog itself, but a lowly 309 hits to the "About Wincent Colaiuta" page). Actually, it's interesting to compare the popularity of the personal weblog with that of the official "product and site news weblog (https://wincent.dev/a/news/). The official news weblog received about 15,000 hits to the RSS feed and 10,000 to the weblog itself (not counting article pages, only counting hits to the weblog front page).

The thing is, I never really intended the personal weblog to be read by many people. I started it because I realized there was stuff that I felt like writing about but which didn't really belong on the product/site news page. I also realized that it was a better place to post progress notes than in the forums. I certainly don't post notes about absolutely everything that I'm doing -- that would be time consuming -- but I do make note of technical topics that I find interesting, or when I remember to to do so I point out bug/feature request items as they get completed.

So I started weblogging but I never made a big point of trying to get traffic to the page. And so I am a little surprised that it gets as many hits as it does, almost as many as the official product/site news. People have found out about it one way or another; the truth is I suspect that most people get there thanks to a Google search, probably for some Cocoa-related terminology, and many once they discover it add it to the RSS subscriptions.

But you're right. It probably wouldn't hurt to publicize its existence a little bit more. To that effect I've added some text to the top of the product/site news (https://wincent.dev/a/news/) that reads:

Quote: Welcome to the official Wincent product and site news weblog.

Originally Posted By: zerockso... anything new with synergy advance?

Yes, lots of progress is being made. These are the areas that I am working on right now:

Leopard readinessAudioscrobbler supportNew plug-ins; don't want to be too specific about exactly what they are because I don't want to comment on unreleased featuresCompatibility module allowing Synergy Advance to use Synergy button setsPlenty of other stuff

You can keep an eye on this stuff here:

https://wincent.dev/s/progress/

I hope so too. After several months of positively "seismic" changes to the codebase (massive upheaval) the code is finally back in a buildable state... Almost every file has been touched, every project, every target... thousands of lines of changes and major structural reorganization. A lot of this has been mind-numbing work, a necessary evil to enable future growth, but with no short-term reward (no build-and-run gratification).

But it finally runs again after hundreds of hours of the most boring type of development work there is. Still some issues to iron out, but my plan now is to keep it in a very-near-to-release state from here on; that is, I will be approximating the "continuous integration" model of development, where the software will always be in a releasable or almost-releasable state. At any point in time I should be able to decide, ok, I want to package up a release for tomorrow, and be able to do it.

More info on this development style here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration

As before, progress information is linked to from here:

https://wincent.dev/s/progress/

Well, Apple's finally gone public with the release date for Leopard (10 days from now). I am very busy right now trying to get all my apps ready for it (including Synergy and Synergy Advance). Over the last few months I have made sweeping changes to the code bases to switch over to Objective-C 2.0, and there are still some issues remaining to be solved, but I am hoping to have stuff in shippable form by the end of this month.