The Roadmap
Two years ago, I thought for sure I was hanging up my guns and walking away from Yasu. Life was full of other commitments, and my professional life had changed to a new career path. I found that I had less and less time to work on Yasu, and that it was getting a little too long in the tooth. I decided letting it slowly fade into internet obscurity was the best thing to do.
In that time, I had a few offers by others in the Apple community to take over development. While I toyed with the notion, something inside me always said I shouldn’t. Yasu was my child, and I just couldn’t bear to let it go — even though I had convinced myself it was dead in the water.
Then the other day something in me decided it was time to pick the project back up. I realized it was an enormous source of satisfaction in my life that I’ve missed for a very long time.
After opening the project just to see if it would build, I was pleasantly surprised to find it did. When that happened, I was drawn into seeing if I could fix little bugs here and there, just for fun. Before I knew it, I had a functioning El Capitan build that does most of what it’s supposed to do. I have some other things to fix, but I guess you could say it was a pretty productive weekend.
And with that success, I’ve decided it’s time to focus on Yasu again. It’s a part of my life I missed too much to let it die. I’m glad I never handed the keys over to someone else.
So, what’s the Yasu roadmap?
Well, to start, it means an update to address issues running it on El Capitan. Mac OS X 10.11 has some fundamental changes that the 2.9 version of Yasu doesn’t handle too well. I’m currently working on a 3.0 version to address those problems. I anticipate a new release in a week or so; two at the most.
Then, releases will become macOS version specific, meaning I’m ditching the huge effort it takes to maintain backward compatibility. Version 3 will only run on El Capitan. If you’ve not adopted by now, you’ll need to use an older version.
Once v3 is out the door, I’ll be starting from scratch (again) with a full rewrite. I’ll also be moving away from the AppleScript based app, using the Swift development language instead. It’ll be a learning experience for me, so it may be some time to get to a solid v4 release on the market — but I promise there will be fun previews along the way.
This where it is at the moment. All I can say is it’s good to be back in the saddle, and I look forward to recreating an app that’s “still the simplest macOS utility there is.“