It’s been a while since we’ve updated you on the goings on with Notify, so here’s a quick status update of some of the stuff that’s going to be in 2.1.

Multiple Message Selections: One of the largest requests that we’ve gotten, and it will be in 2.1.

Mail.app / Mail Client Integration: Another large request. It will also be in 2.1. You’ll be able to either open messages via the right click context menu, or by specifying the double click option.

Passive Server Communication: 99% of people don’t care about this, so you can skip it. However, if you’re interested in this sort of thing – we’re currently in the process of reworking the backend to use a queue-style system. Things will now happen in the background, sort of like Mail.app.

UI Refinements and such: We’ve made some tweaks to the UI to make things a bit more logical.

Other features: Gotta keep some stuff secret.

There is currently no planned release window for 2.1. Since this release is a rather major under the hood change, we will be having a beta testing period – we’ll let you know more about that when we’re closer to release.

Originally this blog post wasn’t going to be going up for another week or so, but with the recent explosion of people complaining about the (teeny tiny!) upgrade price of Atebits’ Tweetie application, and the people who seemed to revolt at the idea of paying a very small amount for a wonderful piece of software, a piece of software that they use day in and day out for months on end, I decided this would get posted now.

What is this about? Part of it is how some users seem to think that coding an application is easy. These users seem to think a developer takes twenty minutes throwing together an application, and then gets rich from it. Not true.

Another part is how the iPhone has devalued the mobile software market, and to an extent the Mac software market. These same users who would have paid $20 for an application not 2 years ago now revolt at the idea of paying $10 for the same thing.

Before I start talking about the current version of Notify, I will first take a look at the “first” version of Notify, the version that only a few people got to see. The “first” Notify was actually my first venture into coding a serious Mac OS X application. I’d done some stupid little things beforehand, like writing a lame little number game, but nothing that actually prepared me for how hard it is to write a properly designed, well coded application. For those of you who don’t code, it is hard. You can write something that works quite well, but making it maintainable is another thing entirely. Jeff Atwood has an excellent article on technical debt, and what it means to software projects. Needless to say, the first Notify wasn’t exactly well coded, nor was it exactly well designed.

Earlier today we pushed the release of Notify 1.0.4, which fixes a couple of issues – it’s recommended that all users download and install this update even if you aren’t experiencing any problems.

• Fixed a bug where not allowing Notify access to keychain would cause a crash. (Make sure you still give Notify access to the keychain, though!)
• Fixed a bug where in very rare cases the check mail timer would go “nuts” and cause hundreds of threads to be spawned.

We’re hoping that this will be the last 1.0.x release before 1.1 comes out. We’re still on track for 1.1 to come out in about a month – if this changes we will let you know.

So, the past 24 hours for us has been pretty insane. In the day or so since we released Notify 1.0 to the world, we’ve had over 3200 downloads. Thanks to everyone who retweeted, posted, linked to, or downloaded it! You’re awesome!

One thing we’ve also been overwhelmed with is requests for Google Apps support – We’ve gotten over 60 request emails for it so far. Clearly we wouldn’t leave all these people out to dry, so we’ve got some news for all of you wanting Google Apps support..

Google Apps support is coming in Notify 1.1.

The reason we can’t support this with a simple  1.0.1 update is, well, the current way we get the contents of your inbox is a little bit of a hack – we’re basically parsing the Atom inbox feed for each account you add. This has some limitations, such as it only shows the 20 newest messages, doesn’t show the full message text, etc. It also seems that the feed has some odd quirks in it, as we’ve had reports of users getting email from THE FUTURE! So…

We’re going to be moving to a completely IMAP based system for 1.1 and beyond. This means that we’ll be able to support not just Gmail and Google Apps, but any mail account that has IMAP access. We’re not sure if we’ll open it up to any generic IMAP account in 1.1, but if not it will certainly come in a future release. Moving to IMAP will also allow us to build in things like in-app replies, new message creation, etc. These extra things will probably come in a later release.

You’re probably wondering when 1.1 will be released – we’re really hoping we can get it out the door (at least to our beta testers) in about a month, so maybe the middle of September.. Can’t make any promises though, as  our developer will be starting his Computer Science course at university in just under three weeks. There should have enough extra time to continue working on Notify (and other things we’re working on), but you never know.. We’ll update you on the progress of 1.1 at that time.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and thanks for downloading!

This past week has been an incredibly busy week for us here at Vibealicious! We completely rewrote Notify in nine days, and then pushed beta one on Sunday night. Our beta testers responded with tons of quality feedback, we fixed the issues reported, and pushed beta two. As long as no major issues are found, a public release of Notify should be out by early next week. Thanks once again to all the testers involved!

Now, in other news, we’re also announcing a new project we’re working on. This one is going to be our first iPhone app, called Classes.