Testing 0.3.5

posted by Martin Cohen in Development | August 11th, 2009 |

After one and half year of silently developing Intype we finally got to the testing phase. A lot of stuff done, rewritten, polished and rewritten again. A lot of trials and errors. A lot of time at the drawing board. A lot of energy spoiled by going the wrong way.

Our original release date has been moved forward several times. Mostly because we went back to the beginning, which we are not much proud of. The wait is long and it is not helping us, nor you. We learned our lesson, and believe we’ll make it through and make it right.

To the point: We finally managed to send the testing release to a bunch of guys, who I named “shadow community” and ate a lot of criticism for that, which I deserved. Guys being our testers are our friends who were involved in the development for a very long time. We found it easier to “manage” a smaller group of first-liners that would catch most of the critical bugs, than to involve whole community after this long wait.

With the guys we’re trying to test incrementally; by target parts. There are three phases of the testing planned:

  1. Editing and UI
  2. Bundles
  3. Project

The list starts with Editing and UI which has been completely rewritten and therefore requires the most of our attention. Once the testing is done, we’re ready to involve everybody to find more sophisticated bugs.

Current state is that Intype is unstable and not feature complete. It’s being finalized and polished during the testing and bug fixing.

At the moment we’re working on the bundle management. The first version of bundle editing workflow came to be very dangerous to use. The general issue was “when to apply changes”. We decided to save changes automatically without asking user for approval, which turned out to be a very bad decision, even with option to revert changes. Now we have nice Windows-like workflow with an Apply X changes button which does the job. Fortunately changing it was much easier than we thought, so we hopefully get to the “Bundles” testing phase next week.

As for the project management, I will describe it in detail in the next post to follow.

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  • 1 oxman | 11.08.2009 at 3:22 pm

    Could I be in shadow community please ?
    I wait this “alpha release” since lots lots of time.
    My email : nhvj39vh3qx5cut@jetable.org (Cloaked with a security)

    Thanks :)

  • 2 Junrey B. | 11.08.2009 at 4:02 pm

    Yay! First to comment. I’m really excited with this release! Keep it up guys! Congrats.

  • 3 Jeroen Mulder | 11.08.2009 at 4:05 pm

    Happy to hear things are progressing! Enjoying the current ‘unstable’ release a lot and use it daily at work. Truly looking forward to the next release. Keep it up guys. :-)

  • 4 nvartolomei | 11.08.2009 at 4:49 pm

    Aeee baby! Intype team rokz, we know!

  • 5 Anonymous coward | 11.08.2009 at 4:49 pm

    Hey!

    OK. This is all very nice, but a question in which everyone is interested is when a new build will be (will be somtime in future, right?) available to the public?

    thanks,
    Peter

  • 6 Anonymous coward | 11.08.2009 at 4:54 pm

    unbeleivable…is there any final release date yet?

  • 7 Sam | 11.08.2009 at 8:45 pm

    Can’t wait for phase one to be available to everyone!

  • 8 Ivan Čentéš | 12.08.2009 at 12:08 am

    Sorry guys (especially Junrey B. :) for the moderation halt, but I was AFK longer than I expected :)

  • 9 Anonymous coward | 12.08.2009 at 1:05 am

    I still use Intype 0.3.1.734 unstable everyday. Hopefully in 1.5 years there’s been some good progress :)

  • 10 Junrey B. | 12.08.2009 at 4:53 am

    You know guys, your product is really great because even with all the troubles and disappointments that we get, we still root for it. We still keep coming back.

  • 11 Slightly anonymous coward | 12.08.2009 at 5:59 am

    Can’t wait.

  • 12 oxman | 12.08.2009 at 9:09 am

    Indeed sorry Junrey B., I AM THE FIRST ;)

    Then, you haven’t answer my request ;)

  • 13 Deadelus | 12.08.2009 at 9:32 am

    Wohoo!! Which means we’re allmost having cake!

    Very nice to hear, as i’m also a regular user of the current ‘unstable’ release :-)

  • 14 Mick | 12.08.2009 at 9:32 am

    Thanks for the update Martin, it’s really appreciated. I use the current build daily and can’t wait to try out the new version

  • 15 Martin Cohen | 12.08.2009 at 9:55 am

    #5: We’re not telling dates, see our FAQ.

  • 16 Coward | 12.08.2009 at 10:31 am

    Hope you made it public sooner :)

  • 17 Anonymous coward | 12.08.2009 at 10:37 am

    Cool, now there is hope, that a new release will come this year. Not lots of hope, but a little. ;-)

  • 18 Martin Cohen | 12.08.2009 at 10:49 am

    Thank you guys for the support. It really helps us getting through all the development troubles and time chase stress.

  • 19 David Collantes | 12.08.2009 at 12:44 pm

    Is there a Guinness World record on how long in development a single application has been? You should consider applying it for (seriously, no offense intended).

    Good luck and all the best on the continuous, ever going development!

  • 20 Julio Protzek | 12.08.2009 at 1:19 pm

    Thanks for the feedback. Twitter + some posts really become a better way to comunicate with the community.
    I’ts good to know that project will be polished in this version. I hate have to use windows explorer to manage projects.
    I am very happy to hear about the testing phase. Hope to get it in my hands ASAP.
    Also hope that the next iteration to be much shorter than the last :)
    Cheers

  • 21 Samuel | 12.08.2009 at 2:58 pm

    @David Collantes Not sure if it’s a Guinness World record but Duke Nukem Forever has been “in development” since 1997.

    Is there any way to donate to this project? or allowing pre-orders? I am sure there are many people out there like me who love this editor and would be willing to push development along.

    Great job so far, keep up the good work!

  • 22 Brendon Kozlowski | 12.08.2009 at 4:52 pm

    I’m just looking forward to getting my hands on the new bundles and hacking about with it - assuming it’s ready for hacking, that is. Also re-testing square and those column(?) selections (ctrl+click).

    …key commands, search and replace, etc… I’m certain I’ll have further feedback and have been anxiously awaiting to give back my ideas. :D However, I do not want to say anything until it’s released, I’m sure none of us want feature creep.

    I am curious, however - since different areas of the core have been done and redone so many times, is the UTF support still as good as it was in the most recent unstable build? Intype is the only text editor that I have that fully (properly) supports UTF types.

    Thank you for the feedback, Martin. Transparent development is very important when either building a community, or you have a community built just from sheer marketing/word-of-mouth. Also, thanks to Ivan for constantly checking the comment moderation system daily. ;)

  • 23 Martin Cohen | 12.08.2009 at 5:21 pm

    Brendon: UTF has not been touched yet. Though it looks like we’re going to do something about UTF-8 with BOM, as it is not recommended (thanks to Ingwar for pointing to it).

    There are planned features to upgrade encoding to also support other single and multi-byte charmaps, but that will be part of one single release sometime during the beta.

  • 24 Martin Cohen | 12.08.2009 at 5:23 pm

    Samuel: We’re planning to start with pre-orders during the beta.

  • 25 nvartolomei | 12.08.2009 at 5:50 pm

    And what about joining in shadow community?I will be happy to participate in development of intype, really.

  • 26 Luis Lavena | 13.08.2009 at 12:42 am

    Any chance for official One-Click Ruby Installer developers be part of the shadow community?

    Been using Intype and working on projects like sqlite3-ruby, mongrel, mysql-gem and even the RubyInstaller repositories:

    http://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller

    Will really love to provide my feedback as a committed Intype user.

    Thank you.

  • 27 aFaD | 13.08.2009 at 2:10 am

    Great news,

    Good luck and all the best on the development!

  • 28 Murchik | 13.08.2009 at 2:42 am

    gimme, gimme, gimme!

  • 29 Shaun Walker | 13.08.2009 at 3:38 am

    This is great news, its nice to hear from the team to know that something is still pushing through.

    I can’t wait to get a hold of the new build when its available.

  • 30 Anonymous coward | 13.08.2009 at 5:16 am

    I love inType and I like the way “Anonymous Coward” sounds :D

  • 31 Felix | 13.08.2009 at 1:02 pm

    Join the shadow conspiracy instead! Together we’ll break into Martin’s house and see if there’s really new Intype code on his computer.

  • 32 Anonymous coward | 14.08.2009 at 7:33 pm

    Now just wait one and half year for a public release.

  • 33 adamramadhan | 14.08.2009 at 8:15 pm

    pre release ? so when can we work together on translateing ?

  • 34 Nikolay Kolev | 14.08.2009 at 8:23 pm

    Honestly, it sounds like another year until you release 3.5.

  • 35 Anonymous | 15.08.2009 at 9:03 am

    Correction… 0.3.5 ALPHA

  • 36 Namek | 15.08.2009 at 9:20 am

    Show us your greatness and please give us your program ^^ Anyway, it’s very useful and I hope next version will be better. Why don’t you just release Intype with current possible bugs (like KDE 4.0 :D)?

  • 37 mvm | 15.08.2009 at 6:49 pm

    For all people complaining about slow Intype development, there is resent blog post from Allan Odgaard about Textmate 2 and its slow (?) development.

    http://blog.macromates.com/2009/working-on-it/

  • 38 Joe - No | 16.08.2009 at 8:11 am

    > For all people complaining about slow Intype development, there is resent blog > post from Allan Odgaard about Textmate 2 and its slow (?) development.
    @mvn:
    do you see the logical fallacy here? It’s Textmate 2 => there’s a *stable* version 1.x since ages that works, that the users can purchase, and most importantly: it was delivered on time (as well as updates for it) :).

  • 39 Anonymous coward | 16.08.2009 at 10:42 am

    Textmate is mature app!! its been stable for long time now intype hasn’t come out from alpha yet : ) no complains from me I switch to mac while back to use text mate, but still addicted to see how intype comes along.

    Best

  • 40 Ingwar | 16.08.2009 at 11:49 am

    I’m reading about TextMate on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textmate) and I see that it also came out with only some basic functionality. It took literally years to get TextMate into current shape. So yeah, developing software apparently takes time.

  • 41 mvm | 16.08.2009 at 1:51 pm

    If one try to make something new, this can take much more time than you want. That is the similarity between textmate 2 and intype. Intype currently isn’t commercial project, and maybe never becomes commercial (they don’t want get money from intype - requests for donations, preorder etc were ignored), so there’s no need to have any stable versions. Team makes money from other activites, so they can experiment with intype freely, in spare time. Their only mistake was give any promises to community concerning release dates and features. They now are correcting it, refusing to give release dates. The next logical step would be refuse to publish any plans and roadmaps. So users will have no reasons to complain.

  • 42 Derek Hammer | 18.08.2009 at 4:47 am

    I want to thank Martin and team for continuing this project. I love InType and use it as much as possible. I’ve been around the block with text editors and none are as clean / full of potential as Intype is.

    However, as a software developer, I believe in the release early, release often philosophy. Several companies, including Google, embrace this philosophy.

    This is merely a development philosophy difference. Other successful companies, noticeably Apple, believe in the big bang, big launch theory of development. Apple isn’t hurting from it (but neither is Google in their philosophy).

  • 43 awake | 18.08.2009 at 8:50 pm

    I hope the next release will be portable like the previous ones…

  • 44 Namek | 26.08.2009 at 1:55 am

    When next information will be shown up?

  • 45 Per Nissilä | 27.08.2009 at 3:11 pm

    I just tried Intype for the first time and i love it!
    Previously i’ve been using E-Texteditor but its kinda slow hate using Cygwin.

    If Intype gets automatic indentation i will start using it and abandon E!

    Thanks for a great editor!

  • 46 MechanicalJunkie - ANOD Pixels | 30.08.2009 at 7:46 am

    Hey guys InType is awesome my respects…but one suggestion If you can implement……that menu that pops up when you hit space that thing that helps you….you know that writs in it…I don’t know properties to float or text something like that…would be grate…..MUCH LUCK with it

  • 47 JexChan | 02.09.2009 at 6:13 pm

    Greate tools, i love it

    jexchan@gmail.com

  • 48 Ziem | 07.09.2009 at 10:39 am

    Intype is awesome! Can’t wait for new version.

  • 49 Karel | 08.09.2009 at 12:00 pm

    Guys, it takes you too long. All the cool features that you wanted to implement in the beginning are getting already old. And we still haven’t seen the beta release.

    I hoped that Intype could change the way many people write the code, but I was wrong. After years of development, you haven’t been even able to make the editor useful (it lacks very basic features)…

    Man up and finish the project, guys!

  • 50 masptj | 14.09.2009 at 2:53 pm

    Excelente editor, simples e direto, consigo desenvolver um site inteiro apenas usando o Intype como editor, nada de Dreamweaver, Komodo ou qualquer outra coisa correlata além do que ajuda no aprendizado.

  • 51 Anonymous coward | 17.10.2009 at 6:20 pm

    You guys need to prove an easy way to report bugs. It looks like a great product, but it’s still a bit buggy and I’m sure many of us would be happy to contribute bug reports

    (Here’s mine: editor stops responding if you paste in a 10,000 character line)

 

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