Early November Update
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.
–
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.
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November 10th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Anyone else see the Star of David hidden in ExtendMac’s logo right away?
November 10th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
@ PhoeniX42
Haha. It’s funny you mention that. Back when we had the logo designed, the EM team members all saw different things in it. If you squint your eyes, I’m fairly sure you can see a whole myriad of things
Personally, I see the symbolic representation of an atom.
November 17th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
[...] over again. So sue me. Ever since giving extendmac.com a visual identity of it’s own, I gave extendmac’s blog a refresh too. In doing so, I upgraded Wordpress, and found myself yearning to move back home once [...]
November 18th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
On the Connection Kit page there is a mention of Amazon S3 support. Since Flow is using it, will it be available in Flow also?
November 18th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
@Sime
Yes, ConnectionKit does support Amazon S3. We’ll definitely be implementing it in the future, but whether or not it ends up in the initial release (1.0) depends on time alone. Have no doubt, it’ll be there eventually!
December 18th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Looking forward to the public release of Flow. I got one suggestion though: you should change the folder icons in the app to the default Leopard icons. It would make your app look more Mac-ish!
December 18th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
@R
The folder icons have been Leopard style for quite a while now, though the screencasts don’t reflect it. (Come 1.0 time, we’ll be re-recording all of that media to give a more accurate portrayal on 10.5)
Thanks for the feedback
December 20th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Eegad! Beta 4 has expired! Please provide us with a new beta quickly please. I’m quite liking flow, particularly the built-in editor with preview. Could really start using the app until SFTP was fixed, but now I like it quite a bit. New Beta please.
December 20th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
@Shock J
I just sent out an e-mail to all beta testers explaining. Beta 5 is now available for download