Weekend Diversion

The nice thing about having several software projects going at the same time is that if you need a break from one, there is plenty of work to do on your others.

LicenseKeeper development has been progressing nicely the last couple of weeks. But, this weekend I needed a break.

With all the excitement of Bullfrog getting featured by Apple and the resulting increase in downloads and feedback, I thought I would take a couple of days and implement a few new features.

The #1 requested feature for Bullfrog: a pause button.

I have no idea why I didn’t think of this for any of the previous releases, but it’s now in there.

I also added an “official” screen capture key. No one asked for this, but the functionality was already in there. It just wasn’t production ready. So I shored it up and added it to the help screen along with the pause key.

The coolest feature though was adding automatic software updates. I had this on my list from way back, but I just never got to it. Bullfrog probably doesn’t really need this since it probably won’t get too many more updates, but it gave me a chance to do a test implementation of Andy Matuschak’s Sparkle software auto-update framework.

Sparkle is cool! Thanks to the incredibly simple and easy to follow instructions, I had Sparkle completely integrated with Bullfrog in a couple of hours — most of this time was spent testing and putting together a new AppCast with Feeder.

With such quick and easy success, you can be sure that Sparkle will make it into the upcoming LicenseKeeper 1.0 release.

I’ll place the new Bullfrog code in Daniel Jalkut’s ‘cold-storage locker’ and hold on to it for the next week to let the code settle and breath a bit. Then Bullfrog 1.2 will release on September 1 — I like round numbers.