Hey Folks!,

It’s been a while since we last spoke — over a month, in fact. I’m happy the say that the extraordinary gap of time was not time wasted, but in fact, time well invested.

I’ve been working on the next release of Flow, version 1.0.3. While it does have some new features, they’re not what took so long — this release took so long because architecturally, it’s a lot more stable, fast, efficient, cleaner, and more maintainable than any previous release of Flow. Good stuff.

I did mention a few new features, though. Namely, Flow 1.0.3 adds support for Amazon S3, and adds a navigation banner (back/forward/reload/address field) to Flow’s LivePreviewing in the editor.

This new version of Flow is available as a nightly release. Make sure you check out the release notes to find out known issues, what’s changed, and what’s been fixed. After roughly a week or so of testing (I need your help!), I expect 1.0.3 to be available as the official release.

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It’s also worth mentioning that as far as support is concerned, we’re experimentally trying out Get Satisfaction; Extendmac’s support page has been updated to reflect this.

I previously mentioned wanting to move in a more open direction in terms of support, allowing you guys to give your opinions on suggested features, and easily let us know that they you’re experiencing the same issue that was previously reported, for example. I’ve stated a discussion on Get Satisfaction itself to keep track of what you folks think about all this. I encourage you to let me know!

Hey Folks!,

This is just a quick post, mid-WWDC, to let you all know that Flow brought home an Apple Design Award (albeit Runner-Up) for Best Mac OS X Leopard Student Product tonight.

It really means a lot to me have such recognition from both Apple and my developer-peers for all the work that’s gone into Flow.

That being said, I’m excited to acknowledge that I’m now on summer holiday from school, and consequently, you can expect big things from Flow this summer.

All my best,
Brian Amerige.

There are two parts to today’s announcements.

Part Un: Flow 1.0.2 Now Available

This new release of Flow fixes a myriad of issues, increases stability, and clarifies a few user interface paradigms. For more details, feel free to read the release notes.

Coincidentally, it was roughly 1 month ago that 1.0.1 was released. As a few have pointed out to me, nearly a month between bug-fix releases is rather abnormal — this is mostly due to the massiveness of these updates.

Would you prefer it if Extendmac released smaller updates in a more frequent fashion?

I’m really interested to know the general opinion on this, so I strongly encourage you to let me know via the comments.

Part Deux: Feedback Ideas

Since April 4th of this year, I’ve been wondering about the best way to handle customer feedback. At the moment, our support system is as follows:

1. You e-mail us.
2. If it’s support, it’s answered within 2 or 3 days, sometimes sooner.
3. If it’s a bug report, it’s queued to be fixed, or marked as a duplicate if it’s already been filed. When it’s fixed, we’ll let you know, and point you toward the nightly release to confirm that we’ve fixed your issue.
4. If it’s a feature request, we’ll follow up with dialogue if it’s something that necessitates it.

This is a nice system, no doubt, but I think it can be better. I don’t like that:

1. Support is a closed-system. Because there is no mechanism for browsing past cases on the customer’s part, you guys can’t find instant-answers to issues that, chances are, someone else has already run into, and chances are, we’ve already answered.
2. Some people hesitate to report bugs and/or features because they simply assume that someone else has already reported it. Right now, there’s no way for you guys to know what has already been reported.

Cumulatively, I think the problem with support today is that the collective body of information about/for Flow doesn’t grow as you invest time into giving feedback, and Extendmac invests time into addressing it. I’ve got a few ideas rolling around about how to fix this. Most notably, I think we need a system that:

1. Allows users to submit feedback, specifying an explicit preference as to whether or not the case is to remain private or public. From experience, I think that most cases are generic enough (e.g. “Doing this causes Flow to crash.”) to be safely public.
2. Provides an intuitive and simple way to effectively discover whether or not your feedback (bug/feature/support) has already been addressed. If it has, the system should allow you to let us know, in a single click, that “I have this issue too,” which effectively gives us a *far* better idea of what to address first.

In any event, this is most certainly not going to be a system that’s implemented quickly, but it’s something I’d like to see a dialogue start about. As I’ve mentioned previously, Extendmac is a rather transparent company (we’ve got nothing to hide), and this type of dialogue really counts.

Hey Folks,

What an incredible last four days these have been! The exciting news of Flow’s release has been received positively by more blogs and news outlets than I could possibly list here. While the focus of this post isn’t to talk about the launch, I just wanted to briefly thank everybody who has supported Flow (and myself) through this whole process, once again. As I’ve said in an unhealthy number of e-mails, it means a lot to me.

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That being said, I want to talk a bit about the future, and mention the first bit of infrastructure Extendmac will be employing to help us get there.

While I’m incredibly proud of Flow 1.0, obviously there are bugs that must be (and will be) addressed, as well as features you’ve all made clear you want implemented. As I’ve made a point of saying in other corners of the internet, this is just the beginning of the true development cycle, not the end.

Unlike many other applications on OS X, testing fixes for an FTP app is significantly more difficult, as there are quite literally thousands of server-setups we’ve got to support. Obviously, at Extendmac, we don’t have thousands of servers to test on, so when I think I’ve addressed an issue, the best way to make sure it’s fixed, is to have the reporter test to make sure.

So instead of e-mailing internal revisions of Flow to bug-reporters, I’m going to do something a whole lot cooler. Introducing Flow Nightlies.

Nightlies are pre-release builds of Flow intended to ensure, first hand, that your bug has been addressed.

When you submit a bug report, and we think we’ve fixed it, you’ll receive a notification via e-mail requesting you verify the fix. Whether or not you do so is entirely up to you, but I get the feeling that many users will appreciate the ability to get their fix without waiting for a public, official, dot-release.

If you’ve got comments, thoughts, or suggestions, as usual, I’d love to hear them.

I’m incredibly(!) proud to announce the immediate availability of Flow, Extendmac’s new FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and .Mac client exclusively designed for Mac OS X Leopard. After a 15-day fully featured trial, you can purchase Flow for just $29.

What makes Flow different from any other FTP client on OS X?

I’m glad you asked! Flow is different because of how it feels to use. It’s hard to quantify, but immediately obvious when you begin using it. Despite being an incredibly powerful application, Flow is always light on its feet. It’s fast, it’s gorgeous, and it makes sense.

But there’s more to Flow than being delightful to use. Flow is also very smart: Flow can QuickLook just about any file on your server, can automatically copy the URL to the file you just uploaded to your clipboard, and can edit your files too, complete with tabs, syntax coloring, code sense, and live-previewing.

Words only mean so much, though. Download Flow, and fall in love with the FTP client that makes you smile.

What about support? What about the future?

Included with each license is unlimited support to help you out when you need it. Even our beta testers have been surprised at how quickly and accurately we respond — I’m sure you will be too.

As for Flow’s future, you can bet on it being big. As I’ve mentioned previously, Flow 1.0 is truly just the beginning, and I can’t wait to get started on the exciting ideas that are in place to be implemented in future Flow 1.x releases.

Thank You

To those of you who’ve been watching since the beginning: thank you. The endurance of your enthusiasm and support is what keeps me going every single day. I couldn’t have done it without you!

To Flow’s Beta Testers: thank you. You guys, all 1700 of you, have been awesome. You’ve been invaluable. You’ve been perfect. I couldn’t have asked for a better group. Together, you helped shape the development of a hand-crafted piece of software I care about an awful lot. Your participation, activism, and enthusiasm have made it clear that Flow means an awful lot to you, too.

To my family, friends, and everyone in a 10 mile radius to my house and/or TwitterFeed: thank you. I can only imagine what it has been like to put up with me these past few months. Needless to say, it hasn’t been easy, but I appreciate it. I couldn’t have done it without you, either.

Flow’s development has been a long, long journey, but I couldn’t have asked for a better beginning to an exhilarating adventure.

Passionately, Excited, And Truly Yours,
Brian Amerige.

(P.S. - Thoughts? Comments? It’d make my day if you’d let me know by posting a comment!)

It is with euphoric excitement that I announce that Flow will be launching next Friday, April 4th, 2008!

Tell your friends, family, and colleagues — the first Leopard-Only FTP client will be made available on Friday afternoon, for both download and purchase.

Good times ahead!,
Brian Amerige.

Sorry! This isn’t a Flow-news related post

That being said, it is a somewhat exciting announcement — well, if you’re the type of person to get excited about sexy Cocoa wrapper classes that eliminate the necessity of writing ugly carbon code. We sure are!

Briefly put, today we’re open-sourcing a class we use internally at Extendmac. EMKeychain makes working with OS X’s keychain a whole lot cleaner, shorter, and easier. So if you’re a developer who uses keychain, check it out, it might just make your day.

It certainly made ours!

Edit: Made a few updates to EMKeychain, now at v0.12.

As you can see, a few changes have occurred with our website.

A few days ago, I made a small landing page for extendmac.com — Because Extendmac plans to work on more than just Flow in the future, it made more sense for our home page to do more than just redirect to Flow. It should give notice to company branding, not just product branding. Following that change, I updated the Extendmac Blog design to reflect that. While everything I have written here so far has been related to Flow, in the future, this will not be the case. As such, it makes sense that the blog follow a similar design to the landing page, and not just that of one product. It’s still rough around the edges, but if you observe anything out of whack (or would like to share your opinion), leave a comment and I’ll try my best to tackle it.

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That aside, I thought it’d be nice to speak about how the expanded beta is going:

We’ve got roughly 2,000 active beta testers right now, and while that’s a fairly huge number of testers (especially for such a small company like us), I think it’s working out really well so far. We don’t believe in unit-testing as much as we do in real user-testing, and having such a huge pool of real people is the best way to make sure Flow is as mature as it can be for the 1.0 release.

Progress is steadily coming along, especially behind the scenes. Right now I’m rewriting the open-source SFTP implementation of ConnectionKit, Flow’s connection engine. To summarize, it’s being written with a much more solid, robust, and concurrent-friendly core. Once I finish up with this change, Flow’s SFTP support should be just as robust as FTP, and the others. Current Beta users can expect this updated-SFTP support in the upcoming Beta 4.

As of Beta 3, Flow optionally collects statistical information about your machine to help us better judge the market we’re working with. Of course, all the logged information is entirely anonymous, with no user-specific information being retained. Personally, I think the most important part of these statistics is the OS Version (Leopard or Tiger), because that will help us determine when we can drop Tiger support, and delve into the amazing new technologies in Leopard.

Any feedback, is, of course, welcome.

Thanks for being patient,
Brian Amerige.

Greetings all!

Today, Extendmac, LLC. shipped the first beta of Flow to MacHeist/MacUpdate participants. As stated in the e-mail, Flow has matured tremendously over the past two months, and we hope the new testers’ activity will have an equal, if not more significant effect.

If you’re a MacHeist/MacUpdate promotion participant, you should have received an e-mail from Extendmac with instructions to download Flow. If you haven’t received your e-mail, or have another concern, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Hey All!

It’s been rather quiet on the public front from Extendmac lately, but rest easy — that means it’s been everything but quiet behind the scenes!

For more than one reason, we decided to overhaul the Flow Preview page¹. We think this new layout makes better sense for the content, and also allows you to get a fuller scope of the application. Additionally, now that we don’t have to load up all that javascript to power the media-switcher, the page is also considerably smaller in size, allowing for acceptable load times. If you’ve got comments on this stuff, feel free to share — we are always listening.

While we’re at it, we may as well give an update on the private beta. Simply put, it’s going really really well. We’re getting tons of great feedback, comprehensive bug reports (which are, of course, promptly fixed), and insightful feature requests. We couldn’t be happier with the group we’ve selected.

In the past month or so we’ve received many questions from those of you who participated in the MacHeist/MacUpdate promotion. To repeat: after the private-beta is complete, Flow will be distributed to those participants. You will receive early access before the public beta once we feel we’re ready.

That’s about all we can share for now — as usual, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

¹ : Yes, those screenshots of Flow are from Mac OS X Leopard. We will be Leopard ready on day one!