Steve Lamerton's blog

I am disappointed to say that Toucan will not use the Volume Snapshot Service in a future version. The idea behind VSS is that it allows you to copy files which are in use, for example an Outlook .pst file whilst Outlook is open. As there were a number of requests for this feature, and indeed I too thought it would be useful I have had it on the todo list for a while, and indeed I intended to have it added for version 2.1.3 which is now in pre-release here.

As of the middle of last week Toucan now uses the Sourceforge Mercurial code repository rather than SVN.

The main reason for using a distributed system such as Mercurial is that it allows me to commit stuff even without an internet connection and then push these changes to the server later.

Just to let you know Toucan hit 2 milestones last week! The first was the release of Toucan 2.0.4 one week ago (January 15), the tenth release of Toucan. Also on Saturday (January 17) Toucan hit 500,000 downloads.

Thanks to everyone for their support in making this happen!

Well I have just posted a patch to the wxWidgets Trac system, as far as I know the first time that PortableApps.com has submitted a patch to an upstream project, and long may it continue! If you are interested the patch is here and it implements the setting of directory timestamps on Windows. Nothing fancy, but hopefully a solid start for PortableApps.com helping other projects.

This is just a post of my recent musings with regards to when to publish a release of a program:

So I have been thinking recently about how to deal with Toucan development in the future, specifically with regards to when to release new versions. Currently there is quite a long time between releases, which is fine if you aren’t affected by any bugs and are just looking forward to new features, but is a nuisance if you are affected by a bug.

As I mentioned in my last blog post I am working on a new progress box for Toucan, so after getting Pre-release 2 out of the door earlier I have done some work on it.

The progress box is probably the part of Toucan I like the least as it currently just outputs text which can be hard to look through when you have copied a lot of files. So for the redesign one of the major priorities is to made it easier to use and to find errors.

Yes, I know it is more than six months since I last posted, but I thought I would (once again) try to keep you all more informed with what is going on with Toucan, so here it goes

So clearly 2.0 has been released since my last post, along with 2.0.1. 2.0.2 Pre-release 1 is now in testing in the beta forum, you can grab it here. This should fix the majority of the bugs in the 2..0 platform.

With 2.0 Alpha 1 now out I thought I would give out a rough timeline of future developments, in chronological order

Today/tomorrow: Spanish translation poll
In the next week: Assuming the poll comes up with an answer the next week should see the release of 1.2.2, which should be the last release in the 1.x series.
Two-three weeks: Alpha 2 released, this may come earlier, depending on when I get free time!

That's right, there is only one more major feature to be added before the first release of Toucan 2. Every major function listed as a target for the first alpha has now been added, except for previewing sync. However I have spent a lot of time working out how to best achieve this. Because of this I think it is fairly safe to say you can expect Alpha 1 in the next couple of weeks. Please check the rest of the blog for features that will be included in Alpha 1.

Well, 7 months after the first launch we hit the big 200,000 today Thanks to all for downloading it, and I hope to have some more news on 2.0 very shortly, progress is being made!