I wanted to let folks know that, at the publisher's request, ToDoList Portable is temporarily unavailable. The author has indicated a dislike of the PAF package as some users have apparently been turning to him for support despite downloading it from us, seeing our splash screen, and having our help file next to the launcher. He is also upset by the dataloss issue that occurred with a handful of users who saved their data within the App directory and lost it on upgrade. The base app saves to its own directory by default and the PAF package did not take that into account. I wasn't aware of this when we began speaking as I didn't write the original package, I simply helped keep it updated. I pushed a revision to ToDoList Portable this morning that takes into account users saving to App and preserves their data on upgrades.
As we have around 500k downloads of ToDoList Portable (it's more popular than the base app itself), I'd wager there are maybe 100k active users of the app. Leaving them stranded isn't really an option. Technically, we could simply continue to package it over the author's objections, as it is open source under an Eclipse license and the name is not trademarked, but I'd prefer not to. We have a couple options that are more appealing.
1) We can write a custom installer to convert existing users' installs to a standard ToDoList zip install and have a custom message show as they upgrade that the app is no longer in PAF format, will not be upgraded by the platform, will be incompatible with the platform's app data backup function, and will no longer be supported by PortableApps.com. We can then point the existing users to AbstractSpoon for any future updates to be applied by the user. Most users will be unable to use the app's built-in update checker as it requires admin rights. For users wanting a supported task app from us, we'd point them to Task Coach, whose developers ship a PAF package directly. We could even investigate writing a converter to help users transition from ToDoList to Task Coach.
2) The other option is to do a mild fork of the app, renaming and rebranding it lightly to avoid the issues the original author is worried about (our work reflecting on his). This mild update would rebrand it as TDLister Portable and would only add about 10 minutes to packaging time. It would have a new icon and remove the links pointing to the original author's support pages and email. The author's original copyrights will remain, of course, and we'd be distributing the source under the Eclipse license as required. I'd like to maintain a link to the original author's donation page, but am unsure if he'd even want us to do that. The app would continue to function exactly as it does today and all users will be automatically upgraded with all data intact. We did something simlar when CoolPlayer Portable became CoolPlayer+ Portable and we added some functionality and fixed some security issues. We kept the name similarity since CoolPlayer was abandoned.
I have TDLister just about prepped and can push it out to our users tomorrow if I decide to go that route. But I'd like to get some thoughts from the community before I make the final decision. Though not required, I've let the publisher know that we may be making the TDLister fork to continue supporting our users.
UPDATE (Mar 16, 2014) - After additional interactions with the author, we have decided to remove ToDoList completely. Though he has released his code under the Eclipse license, it's become clear he doesn't want anyone to utilize the rights given under the license. Based on this and additional behavior like Facebook spamming, this seemed the best option. This whole incident is especially odd considering that it was the author who requested we add ToDoList originally. Existing users who wish to continue using the app can run the ToDoList Portable to ToDoList zip converter to switch to non-PAF TodoList.
(awesome, temporarily incapable of speech.)
Visit the Community page
Join our forums