Thank you everyone for your interest! Beta applications have now closed.

We will be selecting people at random from the group of you who applied – you should be hearing from us in about a week.

It’s been a while since we’ve said anything public about Notify – so we figure it’s time to update you guys on the progress of 1.1.

The first thing you should know is there is going to be no “1.1″ version – we feel this is such a large upgrade from 1.0 that we’re going to be skipping right to 2.0.

Another thing you should know is why our estimate date was so far off. The original plan for 2.0 was to basically just add Google Apps support, and include no new features. But hey, this wouldn’t be very exciting, right? So instead we decided to completely rewrite the codebase again. We probably could’ve gotten away with sticking with some of the old code, but 2.0 is so different internally it made more sense to just start from scratch. Again.

What’s so different? Well, in 2.0 we’ve moved from reading the Atom feed of your inbox, to fetching the contents via IMAP.

Why? We’ve found some quirks with checking via Atom feeds, such as odd cookie problems since we were sharing cookies with Safari. Plus, the Atom feed wasn’t very flexible – it only showed us the 20 newest unread messages, only gave us a short summary of the message, etc. What does IMAP give us? Essentially, IMAP lets us act like a full blown mail client if we want to – pretty awesome eh?

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.

Hello again! Feels like it was just yesterday when we were talking to you about Notify 1.0.2.. Oh wait, it was.

We’ll try not to do the whole “an update a day” thing in the future, but this addresses one of the major complaints that we can fix in 1.0.x.

1.0.3 obviously fixes non-alphanumeric characters in passwords. If you still run into problems, chances are you’re using an obscure character that we don’t check for.