Shipping software sucks.
It's not that we don't want to put the software in the hands of our users. And it's not that we're not proud of the work. We do, and we are.
What sucks is that you always ship with bugs. Always. Some of them you know about. Some of them you don't.
Anyone who does this for a living knows how this works. You keep track of everything you find in the software. Some things are reproducible. Some things aren't. You draw up general approaches for investigation for the latter, and propose fixes for the former.
You then prioritize things, hash out a schedule, and decide what's worth fixing and what you can, in the end, live with...for now.
"We need to fix this post 2.0"
During the run-up to SuperDuper v3.1.2 (available today, see below), we were dealing with this whole investigate-prioritize-allocate-test cycle, when someone brought a sheet to our attention that's been a known low-priority thing for years.
12 years, to be precise.
It's the basic "Stop the copy in progress" sheet that comes up when you want to stop a copy. It's something you can do by accident, and throw away a lot of progress, so we show a sheet that asks you whether you really want to stop.
Sensible, as far as it goes. But during the development of 2.0, there were a lot of potential cases that would have to be dealt with during a cancel, and while we were working through them, and how to present them to the user, a temporary cancel sheet was put in place.
A sheet that was immediately logged as "this has to be fixed" in our tracking database, because it was poorly worded, confusing and (please don't hurt us) had "Yes/No" buttons at the bottom. Enjoy this example of our overwhelming UI genius:
So many problems with that sheet. It's wrong, it uses crazy terminology, it doesn't match the rest of the app, it uses Yes/No buttons. I don't even...
There was a lot to do for v2.0, and development proceeded, other tasks took precedence, this sheet isn't used very much, and eventually we shipped 2.0 with the sheet in place, with the bug tagged as low-priority, known-terrible, embarrassingly bad, "we need to fix this post 2.0".
That cycle repeated over and over. It was an easy fix, but other things took precedence. This stuff happens. Shipping software sucks.
Well, it was terrible, and it's now 12 years post 2.0. So for the new year? Start celebrating, because it was fixed.
More Fixes!
This version also fixes a bunch of other relatively minor things that should please one or more of you:
- On some systems, the default settings didn't save if you had available snapshots and then went into Options, changed something, and exited.
- If your drive had a "#" in its name, an erase-then-copy backup would generate an error.
- Renaming a drive wasn't always reflected properly in the UI.
- Sometimes the Stop button would beep and not stop
- In some regions, snapshot date parsing could cause a crash at startup or drive selection
General cleanup, nothing too exciting, but a fix is a fix, and now they're available to you. Download away!
