Happy New Year to all of my readers!
Pretty much right after I posted my “off the grid” message, I picked up unprecedented levels of traffic. 43Folders and lifehacker had picked up on my little fix for iCal, and from there, word spread. As far as a quick look through the access log can tell, there were over a thousand downloads of the actual executable, and quite a few more hits to my articles. And, as a result, many comments and e-mails.
Since I truly was off the grid (no Internet for 10 days! World Record!), those comments and mails piled up - my apologies for the late replies.
And let me tell you: I’m appreciating even more what the people on truly high-volume websites do. Even with the relatively moderate traffic I got, answering those e-mails kept me quite busy - I don’t know how often I typed “Happy New Year!” so far…
There were a couple of recurring questions, so let me answer them in public:
Q: Will you add feature <X>? A: Most likely. I’m keeping a list of all of your suggestions, plus my own ideas. The top contenders for the next two releases are listed at the bottom of the article. If you’ve got any other suggestions, I’m happy to hear them.
Q: When’s the next release? A: iCalFix is on a monthly schedule right now. Every month, around the 15th, there will be a new version.
Q:Why SIMBL? Isn’t it evil? A: SIMBL is most certainly not evil. It is a bit touchy about OSX upgrades - but that comes with the turf - It allows you to hook into arbitrary Applications, and that’s bound to be version-sensitive. I would have avoided it if possible, but there’s no iCal plugin API, so it’s one of the few choices I had. File a bug with Apple - maybe, if there are enough complaints, there will be a plugin API.
Q: Will you open-source iCalFix? A: Not yet. It’s not polished, and there are a lot of features I’d like to add. Once it’s matured, I’ll think about this again.
Q:Will you tell us how you did it? A: Most certainly. There will be an article about this within the week.
Here’s the top feature list for now:
Likely for 0.2 (January 15th)
- plist entry for advance warning time - not everybody wants 24 hour advance warnings
- plist entry for alarm sound. Amazingly, some people don’t like Basso!
- Different warning time for all-day events. (Right now, those always sound at midnight)
post 0.2
Those are all still pending investigation. I don’t know if I can do them, but they have been requested frequently enough that I’ll try to.
- Preferences instead of plist entry for advance warning etc.
- Alarms on Birthdays from Address Book
- Re-use settings from last alarm - for bulk entry
- Allow changing snooze time interval
- Allow portrait instead of landscape printing
- A complete installer w/ SIMBL etc.