Posts from September 2006.

CaseDetective 1.2 Beta/RC going great guns.

Thought I’d better drop you all a quick updated as to how the beta of CaseDetective 1.2 is going.

It’s doing really well; the first beta had just a couple of very minor issues, so minor in fact that from the second version I’ve renamed it as a release candidate.

Since then a couple of issues from previous versions of CaseDetective have been brought to my attention, and I’ve decided to make sure they are fixed before v1.2 makes it’s final release, so I’m working on them now.

While working on those fixes I’ve had the chance to find a couple of other bugs and cleanups that also need sorting, so I’m glad I decided to take the extra time, I’d much rather delay the release a short while than have to release a bug fixed version soon after.

Can’t say for sure how long it’s going to take to get the final version fixed and out, it should be pretty soon, but it’s tough now that I only have evenings to work on CaseDetective.

All the while my EyeTV is accumulating shows for me to catch up on, and I’m not even that much of a TV watcher, it’s going to be hard finding time to watch them all.

CaseDetective 1.2 Private Beta Almost Ready

Just like Jon trainer, I haven’t met my self imposed deadline of releasing the next version of CaseDetective for private beta.

I had hoped to get the next version out by the end of August, but things have been very very hectic in the real world lately. Even though I’ve been trying to catch up recently by seriously burning the candle from both ends, it just hasn’t come together as quickly as I hoped, even with cutting some features.

But, the good news is that I’m nearly finished, it’s just a case of testing all the combinations that I need to support, i.e. Windows and Mac OS X versions connecting to MS SQL Server, MS Access and MySQL (4 & 5) databases on various hosts, and then I’ve got to get some docs together etc. But the chances are I’ll skip the docs and update them while it’s out being tested.

What are the major changes in CaseDetective 1.2 apart from bug fixes? In this release I’ve addressed the 4 top requests:

1) DSN less connections on Windows.

2) Direct connections to MySQL 4.1 and 5.

3) Printing of cases.

4) Less painful initial sync.

Since people started using CaseDetective they’ve been confused by the need to use an ODBC Data Source Name (DSN) when connecting to either MS SQL Server or MS Access. This has now been addressed for the Windows version, you can now enter database connection details directly into CaseDetective’s preferences window. This should make getting started much quicker and easier.

Along the same lines, now that FogBugz supports MySQL 5, I’ve been getting lots of requests for being able to connect to such databases. It seems that the Beta MySQL 5 ODBC drivers aren’t too stable and have been causing people problems, CaseDetective 1.2 will support connecting to MySQL 5 without the need for ODBC.

CaseDetective 1.2 has rudimentary printing of cases and saving to PDF. Why do I say rudimentary? Well, although many people will find the printing capabilities sufficient, it’s not as feature complete as it could be, and there’s no print preview yet. I’m hoping to get some feedback from the release so I can find out what printing features users are looking for.

And finally, but certainly not least, some users have been having problems doing the initial full sync that CaseDetective 1.1 does. 1.2 addresses this by syncing the “big stuff” (comments, emails and attachments) in the background, slowly catching up. If CaseDetective is closed before the case events are all sync’d, then it’ll just carry on syncing on the next run.