Here’s some quick status on the rooApps:

rooSwitch

The 1.2 release was started many months ago and took way too long to finish. I have ideas and user submitted feature requests that could either be rolled into a 1.3, but it’s more likely the next major release will be a 2.0. However, I don’t expect to see this happen before Fall 2008. This would likely be a Leopard only release and an almost complete rewrite (the are some things in 1.x that need rewriting )

rooVid

I finally abondoned hope of ever realesing a rooVid non-lite version on the 1.0 label. During WWDC 2007 I sketched out rooVid 2.0. In my mind it was three things:

• A video convertor featuring profiles (just like lite 1.0 is today)
• A video uploader (to YouTube, your .mac account, your personal website, etc)
• A video organizer

The feature I was most excited about was the organizer. Then iLife ’08 with the new iMovie was announced and I decided to shelf rooVid 2 again. It seemed the organizer part and a lot of the upload and converting was taken care of by Apple in the new iMovie. Now, months after using iMovie ’08 I realize I still want a better organizer and a better convertor and a better everything. I enjoy creating movies in iMovie ’08 (I think I’m one of the only ones that likes the new interface) but the organizing and exporting leave room for rooVid.

rooVid 2 will definitely be a Leopard only app and I hope to have it available in late Spring 2008.

Misc

I know I’ve never been good at estimating when I’ll be able to finish an app or even point releases. I blame this poor scheduling on lack of time and poor time management of that limited time by me. Having a full time job, a family (Married with 2 small girls) and trying to do this work when possible can be hard, and very hard to do consistently without burning out. If all goes well things will be changing around the end of January/early February that will help me with this time issue and remove an excuse or two for me not getting things done. More news on that when it’s official.

Merry Christmas!

Thanks guys

I want to add a progress bar to rooVid’s dock icon. This one progress bar would be the aggregate of all the running tasks. How does one add a progress bar to their dock icon? I don’t know, but I’ve known for a couple months that I wanted to do it. My best lead was Chad Weider‘s CTBadge. The plan was to look at Chad’s sources and learn how to draw a progress bar. Well, today I found a solution that should be quite easy to implement (I’ve already created a proof of concept app in almost no time). The solution is Uli Kusterer‘s UKDockProgressIndicator. The funny, it’s a small world, thing here is that Uli Kusterer commented on my Sparkle post over a month ago. But that’s not how I stumbled into UKDockProgressIndicator. I stumbled into it via:

• Andy Matuschak posts about Sparkle Beta 2 and NNW picks it up
• In the comments of that post, Andy mentions Uli’s app called Shovel, and how it might be gaining support for Sparkle’d applications soon. However, Andy does not provide a link to shovel.
• Google “Shovel OS X”
• Find link to Uli’s site via Softpedia
• Poke around on Uli’s site a bit and bump into a blog entry about UKDockProgressIndicator

This wandering into solutions happens enough that it’s one the first things I do when I can’t figure out how to tackle a problem. To many, that’ll sound like procrastination, and, well, it is. But nonetheless, it’s effective. Can’t argue with the results.

update: As I was driving to work I felt I needed to update this entry with this addition. Here goes: As a religious man, I’d be stupid to think that all this “stumbling” was really just random luck. Yet, going into any detail on my religious beliefs is not the focus of this blog. So we’ll just leave it at this: Yes, some of it may just be random stumbling (if you look around enough, you’re bound to find an answer to something), however it’s important for me to acknowledge that (according to me) there is something greater going on and I need to remember that and give thanks. There, I feel a little better now.

enjoy.

rooVid’s appcast: http://roobasoft.com/rooVid/appcast.xml