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!

Hello all,

As you can see, we’ve made the new Flow website live — offering a very close look at Flow itself, among a few other things. And yes, I’m aware we need to do some fixes for Firefox, which happens to render a few pages (namely features and preview) a bit oddly. As usual we’ll continue optimizing the site as time goes on.

While I’m busy with Flow development myself (which, as any beta tester could tell you, is going quite well), this design is thanks to the hard work of Adam Betts. Of course, you can also see Flow’s icon is prominently displayed throughout the site, which was designed by Sebastiaan de With. On that note, Sebastiaan has written a great blog entry on the process of working with me on the Flow icon. You can read it here. Over the past months I’ve come to know both Adam and Sebastiaan as not only great designers, but great people too. Cheers to you two!

The roadmap for the next space of time is fairly simple. Extendmac will continue knocking out bugs and implementing features in the private beta. Once Extendmac and the testers feel we’re ready to move public, we will move into a period of free-range public testing. This will be delivered first to those lucky enough to have participated in the fantastic MacHeist/MacUpdate bundle. Following this period of public testing, we’ll tie loose ends, and move to the 1.0 sale release. Of course, even then we’ll continue innovating, collaborating, and of course, communicating.

As usual, you can contact me using the information provided on the Support page. If you’ve got something to say, I encourage you to do so, or leave a comment on this blog.

Edit: It seems Glenn Wolsey has posted an interview with me regarding Flow and Extendmac. If you care to read it, you can find it here.

Cheers,
Brian Amerige.