Synergy Advance Public Preview Release 0.1

So the public preview release is now out on the server. It is not quite as ambitious as I had hoped the first preview would be, but I think you'll find it to be quite useful.

I had a couple of Cocoa nightmares in the second half of this month and I had to sink about five days into each of them, which meant that I couldn't integrate all the stuff that I was originally planning to ship in the first preview release. I ended up shipping 4 out of the 12 preference panes that I had prepared, for example.

So I plan to follow this up with another release pretty soon. One of the casualties was the documentation; there is some on the site but not as much as I would like. I'll be working on that over the coming days.

Don't ask me what my Cocoa problems were. I don't feel like talking about Cocoa Bindings, NSOutlineViews, and Model-View-Controller right now!

This release is the core application. You mostly interact with it through the Global Menu (which you'll see is much more powerful than Synergy Classic's Global Menu). There are still a few menu items I haven't hooked up yet (blame Cocoa), but 95% of the functionality is in there. There is a bit more too which isn't exposed yet but it will be once I add the other preference panes.

For those of you have Synergy Classic already (I presume that's most of you if you are reading this) you'll find that Advance and Classic work quite well side by side. Advance has much better hot key support than Classic (although I still have to add the different behaviours for press-and-hold; currently I've only hooked up simple press actions) and a much better Global Menu.

You'll see that the Floater, Cover Art and Menu Bar Control modules didn't ship with the 0.1 preview. I want to add a major module to each preview release, one at a time, to allow for adequate testing.

Advance supports Growl so if you can't live without a Floater and don't want to run Classic then you can use Growl to provide notifications (see http://growl.info/ -- the official website).

Piracy was an on-and-off problem with Synergy Classic and I couldn't change the license code algorithm once it was cracked without breaking serial numbers for existing customers. Advance has a new licensing engine which involves product activation. Now, product activation is usually a dirty word, but the little feedback I've had on the system so far has been excellent. "Painless", in a word. I think that done well that's exactly how product activation should be. See the list of links below for more activation info.

The program is quite transparent about it (ie. it tells you what it's going to do) but other than that I don't think you'd even notice it. I still want to make a couple of minor tweaks for the next preview release to properly handle the case where you aren't connected to the net and want to activate (activation is a once-only process), but I didn't have time to get those tweaks in and still make the 2 May deadline... Hopefully won't cause anyone any problems.

Road map:

https://wincent.dev/a/products/synergy-advance/road-map/

Known issues:

https://wincent.dev/a/products/synergy-advance/known-issues/

Bug reporting tips:

https://wincent.dev/a/knowledge-base/archives/2004/11/how_to_file_a_g.php

Instructions for beta testers:

https://wincent.dev/a/knowledge-base/archives/2005/04/information_for.php

Activation information:

https://wincent.dev/a/support/activation/

Purchase:

https://wincent.dev/a/products/synergy-advance/purchase/

Donate:

https://wincent.dev/a/products/synergy-advance/donate/

0.1 just includes the core (the Global Menu) and not any extra modules (like the Floater, Cover Art, Menu bar buttons etc). So if you run the two side by side you would turn off the Classic global menu and use the Advance one. Soon you won't need to run both because I will be shipping the extra modules.

As for the IM thing. There is no conflict, although there is no point in having Synergy Advance's IM support turned on at the same time as you have the built-in one.

I guess you could set Synergy Advance to only update your user icon (something the built-in one cannot do) and tell it to leave the textual part alone; leaving the rest up the built-in version. Your call. In my case I just let Advance handle it all.

There are some rough edges still to be polished off before I release the next preview release (soon).