Cosmic Life

EventBox Update (703)

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:37:44 +0100

The Return of the Services

We’re happy to return the following services with this build:

Digg
Identi.ca

Digg has gained a feature and lost one - we identified that the upcoming view in Digg was of limited utility, so it’s now gone. We have added the ability to perform searches in Digg using Digg’s search engine.

Application Move

You might have noticed that some applications ask you to move themselves to the Applications folder. I have seen three variations so far:

App runs from a bundle, asks to copy itself to Applications
App runs from a folder, asks to move itself but doesn’t relaunch
App runs from a folder, asks to move itself and relaunches

The first scenario doesn’t apply in our case as we ship in a zip file. The reason I think scenarios 2) and 3) are not ideal is because they break the “flow” - you’ve just started the application and you want to run it but instead you get interrupted with a relaunch or worse, the app just quits and doesn’t relaunch itself.

We’ve taken a different approach - we will ask you on startup but actually perform the move when you quit, so that you don’t get interrupted on startup and move on with using EventBox.

Bug Fixes

We have included a few bug fixes - we fixed the problem with dates in the future (Google Reader) and also a crasher bug.

I’d like to thank everyone who has been submitting bugs - your help is greatly appreciated. Special thanks to the following people who have gone the extra mile (in no particular order):

Andy Couch
Jeremy Pinnix
Adam Procter
Dirk Sierd de Vries
Simon Iannelli
Jon Nall
Colin Pekruhn

Content Limitation Details

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:46:00 +0100

I’d like to explain a few details about how content limitation works in EventBox.

Event Ownership

Each event can have multiple “owners” (folders / containers). It’s important to distinguish between ownership and aggregation. Just because you see an event in a folder / container, it doesn’t mean it’s owned by it. I’ll give a few examples to clarify the point.

If you use Google Reader, you know that content is organized in feeds. Each feed owns the feed posts that belong to it. What about any folders? Well, they don’t actually own any of the feed posts - the only reason any events are displayed is because the folders aggregate the contents of feeds.

Let’s support you use Twitter and have created a folder to keep all your searches. Each search owns the events it contains but the folder containing your searches doesn’t own a single event.

Content Limitation

It’s crucial to understand that when you right click on any container (except a few ones, see below) and adjust the content limit, you’re only adjusting the limits for any owned events. The consequence is that if you set the limit for a Google Reader / Twitter folder to 1 day and pressed “Limit Now”, nothing will happen. Why? Because the container doesn’t own any events, so there’s nothing to remove.

Exclusion

We also have the ability to exclude some containers from being limited. If you right-click on them, you will not see any options to adjust the limitation (Twitter’s Favorites and Google Reader’s Starred are prime examples).

Behavior

We’ve changed the behavior of the content limitation actions performed when you use the interface (i.e., by right-clicking). Everything above is still valid and is how things work under the hood. We’ve made the following adjustments:

When you set the content limitation for a folder, we will automatically assume that you also want to set the same content limit for all folders below.
When you manually limit (“Limit Now”) a folder, we also perform content limitation for the folders below.

Main App Progress

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:29:19 +0100

As explained in one of my previous posts, I’m currently working on getting a build out that can be tested (“main app” vs “services”). I’ve got a long list of tasks that need to be completed before we can release some sort of build to the public. Some notable work in the past few days:

The Heads-Up Display has now been ported and works as normal.
I’ve introduced a more granular control mechanism to adjust exactly which folders appear in the HUD - you can now control it on a per folder basis (via right-click). See screenshot below.
The preferences section of the application has now been ported and modified so that when you add / remove services, preference panes get added / removed.
A time-based content limitation mechanism is being introduced (as opposed to the current limit-based). Content limitation is performed only on startup as to not disrupt any ongoing reading activity but you can trigger it manually if you wish. See screenshot below.

Screenshot.

Quick Status Improvements

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:20:44 +0100

There has been been a problem with the quick status view (the text area which you use to tweet, etc) - it does not make it clear what exactly you’re doing and where you are posting to. At the moment, it can cause confusion in the following case:

Posting a tweet / FB status update in a mixed container (e.g., Unread)

Another potential issue is that when you have selected a tweet and post an update, EventBox treats this is a reply to that particular tweet. In 99% of the cases, that’s what you want but in the remaining 1%, it will not only do the wrong thing but the user will have no indication of it.

With multiple accounts, there’s even a higher chance of confusion when you tweet from a mixed container - which account is being used to send the tweet? So we have taken steps to remedy the problem and we’ve come up with the following solution (screencast, screenshot). The new area gives you additional information about:

What type of service you’re sending the information to (using a small icon)
The account name which is used to send the information
Any additional information (e.g. whether you’re sending just a tweet or replying to a particular person)

Google Reader Update [2]

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:51:51 +0100

Google Reader has almost been ported. The features that work:

General feed syncing (i.e., whatever is in the currently available public build)
Friends’ shared posts (new feature)
Starred folder (new feature)
Shared folder (new feature)

Bonus Screenshot

It’s fast. I’ve benchmarked it against a few other Google Reader clients and we’re by far the most efficient. A delta update where you have a small number of new unread feeds takes only 40-80KB while other implementations use upwards of 1MB. The savings are going to be even bigger if you subscribe to more feeds.

There’s another issue associated with Google Reader - the Starred folder. After I asked you, how you use starred items, two patterns emerged:

Starred used as a way to read articles at a later point and then un-starring the posts in question. The starred folder grows / shrinks.
Starred used as a way to bookmark posts. The starred folder only ever grows.

If we want to keep the starred folder in full synchronization, the second usage scenario poses two problems:

Memory usage will only ever increase due to the starred folder
Huge amounts of data would have to be transferred on each refresh

That’s the reason why I’ve included a setting to control the behavior of the starred folder - you can either set it to fully sync the starred folder or not. For people who have a relatively low amount of starred items, full sync will pose no performance / network bandwidth problems. For everyone else, the default (off) should work for you well.

Testing

I’ve outlined rough timeframes at the bottom of a previous post but I’ve changed my mind on a particular aspect. The timeframes are still accurate with regards to the public release but I also plan to release a working build of the new generation EventBox as soon as I can. Here’s the catch:

It will only feature a couple of services (Twitter, OneRiot, Reddit, Google Reader)
Some features will be missing
Updates will be released very often
It will have bugs

You will be able to run the build alongside the current release without any data interference. I’d really appreciate it if some brave people would be test it out. I’ll be releasing more information regarding the details in the future.

Google Reader Update

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:19:36 +0100

Following up on my previous post, today was a quite a productive day. As mentioned, I’m porting Google Reader at the moment. I made a screencast to show you some of the improvements.

Speed

Here are the raw numbers:

Full sync, improved build: 4s
Full sync, current build: 13s

That’s a saving of 9s, a whopping 70% improvement in sync time.

Favicons

Notice how all favicons load properly (except a few ones but those feeds have no favicons) and none of the favicons are FeedBurner’s.

Friends

I also managed to get your friends’ shared feeds into EventBox.

EventBox Progress Update

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 16:03:44 +0100

It’s time for another progress update. It has been very busy over the last few weeks.

As I have explained previously, I’m currently rewriting the core of EventBox which forces an almost full rewrite of any parts affected (which is almost everything). The rewrite goes along the lines of:

Fix the core
Rewrite all services / plugins to use the new core
Rewrite the interface bits to use the new core

Fixing the core is not an easy task but it’s doable with a little bit of thought. I’ve already rewritten it and from a usage point of view (i.e., how the core is used internally by the other bits of the application), it’s brilliant and a huge improvement over what we had. Do users actually care about the internals? Not directly but here’s the twist: a badly engineered core / foundation will last up to a point and when the “breaking” point is reached, it will be impossible to add new features / improvements. That’s the reason why I’m carefully doing the work now and taking all the time I need because it will pay off in the future.

One of the upsides of doing the rewrite is that it allowed me to fix some longstanding architectural problems which prevented us from implementing features / fixing bugs in some plugins. One such example is that now, our user interface architecture can have multiple representations of a single event. You might ask what does this mean in real terms? One usage would be the representation of RSS / Atom posts. For example, we could display them as a list (screencast) when you look at them in their plugin and as paper cutout when being displayed in a mixed container (e.g., Unread, Flagged, smart containers, etc). We’re currently not taking advantage of this but we will. Another example of a new capability available due to the core rewrite is the new notification center.

With the core now fixed, I’m left with rewriting the plugins and the interface bits so they all start working again. The following plugins have been fully ported to the new architecture:

Twitter
OneRiot
Reddit
Feeds

I’m currently working on porting Google Reader. The following plugins still need to be ported:

Google Reader
Identi.ca
Digg
Facebook
Flickr

You might want to know how long it takes to port a plugin. It depends. It can take a single day (e.g., Feeds) or a week (e.g., Twitter). Bear in mind that I’m not just “porting” it straight, I’m taking the time to fix any problems and improve the plugins as I go along.

For example, here are some of the improvements that I’ve made during the rewrite (Twitter):

Events are now logically consistent. For example, if you have the same event in a profile peek and in the main timeline, you will not have to mark both as read and they’re logically the same event.
When you send tweets, we no longer refresh to get the new tweet but instead use a more efficient method to retrieve it. So you can send 10 tweets in a row without EventBox making any refreshes / additional requests.
Twitter favorites are finally implemented correctly so you will see all of them and not only a subset.

I’ve also fixed the problem with feeds’ favicons - it currently displays the Feedburner favicon for some of them.

As I’m rewriting the Google Reader plugin, I’ve discovered many problems which I need to fix. Firstly, it’s going to use a more efficient way of performing synchronization. I also want to implement support for the Favorites / Shared folders.

A lot of work still needs doing. The rest of the plugins need to be rewritten / ported and it will take at least another 2 weeks (optimistically) and 5 weeks (worst case). After that’s done, the main part of the application which controls the interface needs to be adjusted to all the changes. I’ve no estimate for that but it’s at least a few weeks of work. Optimistically, we’re looking at an early October launch, realistically, maybe end of October / mid-November.

Due to some internal changes, I’m currently the only person performing all the work that I’ve described above and the estimates assume that I continue to work at the current rate - seven days a week with an unhealthy amount of working hours. I’ve been able to keep it up for a while now but it’s getting increasingly harder to do so. I just want you to know that I’m doing my best to bring you the new features as fast as possible but I might be forced to slow down in the future if my health deteriorates due to my working schedule.

EventBox's Notification Center

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:33:14 +0100

As part of the EventBox rewrite, we took the chance to introduce a centralized notification center. It will give you more granular control over what notifications get sent. For example, you will be able to say that you only want to be notified about mentions and DMs (for Twitter). Check out the screencast for a demo.

EventBox - Multiple Accounts Update

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:52:25 +0100

I’d like to say a few words about how work has been going recently.

Multiple Accounts

As you may know, I’ve been solidly working on getting multiple accounts into EventBox (it should have been there from day one but we made a mistake, retrospectively). Supporting multiple accounts in EventBox requires a lot of work due to the internal structural changes. I just got the new architecture sort-of running and here are the results as a screencast.

It’s not very apparent that almost everything else doesn’t work at the moment. Think of it like this - you’ve been building your house for a very long time but suddenly you realize that your foundations are not going to last you any more. So you take them all out and start replacing every single bit. That’s what I’m currently doing.

More Than That

The build which will contain multiple accounts isn’t just about multiple accounts. It’s actually much more than that - it’s a complete rewrite of our foundations. We will have a much faster core and it’s going to be a lot easier to extend it in the future. I’ll be documenting all the positive and negative side-effects of this in the following weeks. Regarding time frames, I can’t really say anything - it’s at the very least a few weeks off. Thanks for your patience, I’ll be doing my best to keep you up to date with what’s happening behind the scenes.

EventBox Update - OneRiot

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:00:40 +0100

We’re very happy to release another update to EventBox (while working on multiple accounts) and it brings a new service, OneRiot! OneRiot indexes the social web in realtime and now you will be able to use their search right within EventBox. All you have to do is setup several searches and then keep an eye on them - check out the screenshot.

We’ve also fixed some minor bugs like the conflict between automatic URL expansion and internal photo viewing (Mobypicture URLs would get expanded and not recognized as a consequence). The Facebook status limit has been increased to 255 characters (limitation imposed by the API) and we’ve also fixed a bug where liking in Facebook would return an unexpected error.

The update has been pushed to both stable and bleeding edge, so just click on “Check for Updates…” from the EventBox menu in the menubar.

EventBox - Towards 1.0

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:10:00 +0100

I would like to take a few minutes to talk about our future plans and what that means for our users.

So Far

Just a quick recap of what has happened so far. We launched our public beta on the 7th November 2008 and we developed EventBox for a few months before that in stealth mode. I have to say, this has been a life changing experience, for me personally.

Towards 1.0

We’ve been nearing the final release of 1.0 and we plan to get out of beta sometime around this summer (you know how software schedules are, right?). Here’s what 1.0 is all about - getting the basics in place. It’s not about having every bell and whistle. There will be small annoyances and minor bugs but the main aim is to not have any major issues. Yes, we are working on multiple accounts.

1.x

Maybe some of you are wondering what happens after we release 1.0? Well, lots. We will take a deeper look at the problems we’re trying to solve, take a step back and then provide tools to solve them. To give a simple example, we would like to synchronize the data about what you’ve read / seen across multiple devices (whether that would be multiple Macs / iPhones / etc).

Multiple Accounts

I’ve been actively working on getting multiple accounts in EventBox over the last couple of days. It involves quite a bit of work because I’m re-engineering the core of EventBox from the ground up. I’m planning to release a few minor updates in the meantime but I’ll be concentrating on getting multiple accounts in place. Since it’s essentially a rewrite of the whole internal bit of EventBox, we will see the following additional benefits (on top of multiple accounts):

Reduced memory usage with large data sets
De facto removal of container limits
Much much faster operation
Ability to have hundreds of smart folders without any performance penalties
Different sorting options

EventBox Update (581) Quick Notes

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:36:00 +0100

We’ve pushed a small update to bleeding edge which contains the following changes:

TwitPic / Mobypicture / yfrog picture links are now opened using the internal photo viewer. You can turn the option off if you prefer to use your web browser (it’s under the URLs tab in General).
We’ve now support Su.pr
We’ve fixed a major crasher bug which caused about 50% of the crashes in the recent weeks.

EventBox Update (580)

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:14:33 +0100

We’re releasing another update to bleeding edge. The two major changes are:

Picture uploading using TwitPic / yfrog / Mobypicture. You have to enable it in the preferences and provide a username / password (your Twitter username and password works with all of those providers). To upload pictures, just drag & drop them on the main events view. There’s also a menu item you can use to bring up a dialog to select the files if you don’t feel like dragging and dropping them.
You can now “like” Facebook status updates. Should work for all new status updates fetched after you’ve updated.

Picture uploading hasn’t been tested much so please report any bugs you find with it.

Regarding the new service coming, we’re waiting for the green light from the service provider. Once they’ve said we’re good to go, we will release another update.

EventBox Update (576+577+578+579)

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:55:00 +0100

Here we are again with another update! Let’s get down to business and see what’s new:

Facebook Comments - you can now view and comments on status updates, straight from EventBox! We think that’s going to save you a lot of time and make you more productive (or less if you like commenting a lot!). WARNING: when you apply the update, all your current Facebook statuses will get deleted and then refetched, so please, don’t panic. We have to do this in order to enable comments.
You can edit Twitter searches - just double-click on them and you can adjust them. Screencast.
Easily create duplicates of smart folders (right-click on them). Usually, you want to adjust a rule slightly and now you can just duplicate the smart folder and easily apply a small change, instead of re-creating the whole rule from scratch. Screencast.
Support for Internet Time (from the appearance prefs pane). Screencast.
We’ve revamped how errors are represented - they’re now stacked and are more visually pleasing. Also, you’re seeing all the errors at the same time, not just the last one. Screencast.
We’ve fixed some minor memory leaks and a crasher triggered when you profile peeked / clicked on a hashtag.

We were planning to release an additional service today but due to a bug on the other side (the API), we’re delaying the addition of the service to Monday.

We’re also almost done with another very popular service that will bring a type of service we don’t currently have. We’re also working on two major features that will bring us closer to our final 1.0 release.

We would like to take the time to thank all of our users for sticking with us. In return, we’ve got some surprises lined up for next few months.

EventBox Update (575)

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:10:20 +0100

Alright, we’ve pushed 575 to Bleeding Edge. You probably want to know what’s new.

We’re officially supporting Identi.ca now. Na drew some really nice icons for it too! Enjoy.

TweaK

We’re supporting a new URL shortening service. You might ask why yet another one? This one has the interesting property that the shortened links are domains!

Memory Usage

We totally revamped the memory model of the interface subsystem - it is now faster and uses a lot less memory. On top, we’ve found and fixed a memory leak that was leaking quite a bit of memory. Fortunately, from now on you should not see memory usage balloon over longer periods of usage.

Progress Update

Mon, 25 May 2009 19:09:43 +0100

We’ve been actively working on some interesting stuff recently and I would like share a few bits of information about what’s going on behind the scenes.

Identi.ca

We’re pleased to be able to offer support for Identi.ca starting from the next update. You can go and checkout the screencast if you have some spare time.

Sidenote: I’ve just recently switched to using Screenflick for screencasting and I’ve been pretty happy with the results.

Tumblr

We’ve been working on support for Tumblr and it’s been going pretty good. Expect more news and previews in the upcoming weeks.

Realtime Social Search

We’ve also been talking to a provider of realtime search across different social networks, so if it all works out you’re going to be able to watch the social space in realtime for specific keywords.

Performance

As previously discussed, we’ve been working on a complete overhaul of the visual subsystem. I’m happy to announce that we’ve converted all the necessary bits and it’s working beautifully. I’ve never seen EventBox be so snappy and use almost no memory.

Syncing

Work has also been done on providing integrated syncing for EventBox. We don’t have anything to demo yet but we will get there.

Road Ahead

We’ve got tons of stuff planned for the upcoming months, it’s going to be an exciting summer. In terms of short term release times, we’re planning on:

Releasing the performance fix and Identi.ca as pre-release in the next few days. After some brave souls have given it a test, we will push it to Bleeding Edge for a wider audience.
After that’s done, we’re left with one performance problem which we would like to eliminate (it’s causing beach balling if you have a large number of events).
Then we’re back on track to start releasing some cool new features that you’ve been waiting for.

I hope that gives you an insight of what to expect in the near future.

Performance Update

Fri, 22 May 2009 15:25:35 +0100

I’ve been working around the clock for the last few days to get our performance problems fixed, starting with the high memory usage. I’m extremely happy at the results so far and want to share some demos with you (for background information regarding the performance problems, see my previous post).

I’ve recorded two screencasts - one showing the current performance (~20MB, H.264) and one showing the improvements (~20MB, H.264). If you don’t have the time to take a look at them, here are the results:

The current version peaks at 305MB for about 900 tweets
The improved version stays constant at 41MB throughout the test

So the question is, when are going to ship this? Well, as soon as we can! We’ve got some surprises for the next update as well, so I’m quite excited about it. Apologies to everyone who had to endure high memory usage numbers and thanks for your patience.

Having fixed the 2 performance problems, there’s one left - which we will address in the update after next.

EventBox Update (574)

Mon, 18 May 2009 21:24:20 +0100

The newest build in Bleeding Edge contains 13 bug fixes - it’s recommended that you update to improve the stability of EventBox. You can also take a look at the release notes.

EventBox Update (573)

Sat, 16 May 2009 20:58:47 +0100

We’ve just pushed build 573 of EventBox (only to Bleeding Edge, to give it some testing first). The major change is that we’ve returned the Digg service! If you haven’t seen the Digg plugin in action, check out the screencast.

My next task is to completely rewrite the data model and fix the underlying performance problems over the next week or so. After that’s done (and all the current bugs have been fixed), we will start adding some new and exciting features. Stay tuned.

EventBox Update (571)

Thu, 07 May 2009 15:40:41 +0100

We’ve just pushed build 571 to all users. We’ve been informed that Apple made a change in the latest beta of 10.5.7 which affects the networking stack and thus might result in crashes. We’ve updated both bleeding edge and stable.

The MacHeist edition is unaffected because it uses the old networking.

How To Update

You can either get the update automatically or manually. Get it automatically:

Launch EventBox
Go to EventBox —> Check for Updates… in the menubar

To update manually, you can download the binary directly.