Path Finder 4: One week later

January 21, 2006

It’s been a week since we released Path Finder 4 to the world. Where does the time go? Now that the dust has settled a bit, I thought it might be of interest to post a bit of a look back at the last seven days, and a quick look forward to what’s in store.

A thousand merci beaucoups

First of all, thank you so much to all of our beta testers, customers, and everyone who has sent us comments, feedback (good and bad), and congratulations this week. Pardon the cliché, but the response really has been completely overwhelming and exceeded even our wildest hopes.

Here’s some of the awesome press that we’ve been lucky enough to receive:

• Productivity maven Merlin Mann at 43 Folders gives Path Finder 4 his “official okey dokey” and calls it “one badass Finder replacement that power-users will find pretty foxy”. He then went on to fill everyone in on seven things he liked about Path Finder. Thanks, Merlin!
• Michael Tsai (editor of the swank Mac magazine About This Particular Macintosh and creator of some mighty fine Mac OS X appications said that Path Finder 4 was “well worth the wait”.
• CreativeMac calls Path Finder 4 a “must buy” and says that “if you use a Mac, you need to be using Path Finder 4. Period.” Yowza!

Last Saturday night was filled with answering emails, monitoring the forums, and making sure the web server was up and running. I think I slept maybe a couple of hours. We had Slashdot-levels of traffic for most of Saturday night and throughout Sunday, and at peak there were over 300 people downloading Path Finder simultaneously. Luckily, though some elite nerdly mumbo-jumbo I managed to keep the server up and running (except for just at the start, sorry!).

Some vaguely interesting stats:

• Nearly 11,000 downloads as of this writing
• Peak simulatenous downloads: 312 on Saturday at around 7PM EST
• Over 2,500 emails received (and an equal number of responses sent out)
• Over 700 upgrades given away to eligible users
• 400 new forum members
• 8 (the number of cups of espresso I drank on Saturday night)

Updates are a-comin’

As hard as we try to avoid them, bugs can sneak in and Path Finder 4.0 is no exception. We made sure to test Path Finder extensively but with such a major code rewrite there were bound to be things that we and our alpha and beta testing groups missed. The good news is that our first maintenance release is already being put through its paces and we should have it in your hands in the very near future.

Besides fixing our #2 crasher (the bug where if you change shelves it can crash Path Finder), this maintenance release will have a number of smaller (but still important) issues fixed. As usual we will post a complete changelog when we release.

Our #1 reported issue right now is a crash caused by the new visual effects in Path Finder. It turns out that we may have stumbled across a Cocoa bug and Steve is working with Apple to try and track down the root cause. If you experience any beachballs or crashes when dragging and dropping items, check the “Disable superfluous visual effects” preference. This should work around the problem.

Path Finder is a constant work in progress, and you help us make it work better. We make an effort to read every email, forum thread, weblog post, and hastily scrawled note on the back of a cocktail napkin and we’re listening. If there’s something you wish worked differently, better, or something that you think is missing, get in touch with us.

If you’re looking for more information on features, bug information, and other useful tidbits, check out the forums.

UB, UB - do (with apologies to Frank Sinatra)

Okay, that was incredibly lame. Anyway, one of the questions we’ve been getting a lot is “what’s going on with Path Finder and its status as a Universal Binary?” The good news is that we’re waiting on one last framework to go UB and then we will be releasing a Universal Binary of Path Finder. And yes, it will be a free upgrade to existing Path Finder 4 users.

So all of you bleeding edge, early-adopter lucky-pants-wearing folks that have brand new iMac Core Duo machines or MacBook Pro laptops on the way will soon have a native version of Path Finder to play with.

Getting the most out of Path Finder

Over the coming weeks I plan to post quite a bit more here on tips, how-to’s, and getting the most out of Path Finder. I’m also taking questions, so if you have anything you’d like me to talk about with regards to Path Finder, get in touch.

Thanks once again to everyone for sticking with us, sending us your feedback, comments, and criticisms, and continuing to support us and independent Mac OS X software. We appreciate it all and know that we couldn’t do it without you Pat yourself on the back and buy yourself a big latté / coke / juice / beer / tasty beverage on us.

We have lots of cool stuff planned for Path Finder, so keep checking back and keep sending us your thoughts. Thanks, everyone!

Neil

Posted by neilio at January 21, 2006 11:34 AM