I've updated the site last night; some internal changes and many external ones. Let's tackle them.

• What changed exactly?

At a glance: the Fall '08 preview was added. The index page's bottom links have been reshuffled, and a Fall '08 link has been added in the Afloat and PlugSuit pages. The nightlies page has also been updated.

• What's the Fall '08 preview?

The preview page allows you to download the Afloat 2.1 and PlugSuit 1.5.6 betas (currently beta 1, but also all future betas for this release).

• What's new in the betas?

Mostly internal fixes, and two new features in Afloat. Also, PlugSuit is less of a system resources hog, or at least tries to be.

• Wait, where did "preferences saving" in Afloat go?

It was planned, but it would have required too big a rewrite for me to ship anything this fall. So it's planned for The Future, whenever it might be.

• What changed on the index page?

Alongside a new Fall '08 link below the product badges, the links to Coinpurse and ∞link have been dropped. Neither is front page material, as far as I'm concerned. The black nightlies link takes the place of the ∞link deep-red in the link trifecta at the bottom, and the Fall '08 link replaces the Coinpurse hype link.

• Does this mean Coinpurse is dropped?

I have absolutely no idea. No time for it lately, and the for-pay plan went down in flames when I finally figured out the costs of starting a company in Italy (yay more than fifty percent real tax pressure!).

Which means I have to figure out how to support a third app without exploding.

Maybe in the spring.

• I hoped you'd do something to make the web site, you know, better than this.

That's not a question. Anyway, I am working to make a better website, starting from fixing all the little things in the current site stack that nag me. It's in the works, but not ready yet.

Yes, I also think that index page is ugly. I've been planning for something with a little more, you know, grandeur, but it's taking quite some time.

• Anything else?

The biggest internal change is that now statistics are provided by Quantcast; for the rest, nothing new. Have fun with the betas and do not hesitate to call me if you see anything not working!

I really, really want to give a huge "thank you" to Afloat donors, who have helped me ever since I started nagging people about dropping a coin in the bucket (and I'm here still hoping my "WILL PROGRAM FOR FOOD" jokes never come to pass).

A huge thank you to iChat buddy Geek Peak Software for having basically given me enough to renew my domain and hosting for another year. :) Also a huge thank you to Simon Wheatley and all other supporters for the last months. I'm thinking of something cool just for you :)

Lovely, isn't it? Afloat 2.1. No timetables yet.

Well, you haven't heard much of me lately, haven't you?

Oh, just kidding. If you follow me through any other channel I post on (including in no particular order Twitter, Usenet, Erica Sadun's iPhone SDK mailing list, XcodeItalia's chat room and more), you've seen plenty of me. Possibly listened to me ranting in some bizarre fashion. Talk about new anime. Despising the new season of Heroes. Wishing for a PS3 and an HD TV to boot.

But the blog languished. Oh well. So, thanks to the power of the long-form blogging medium, here's what I was up to in the last months of silence: lots and lots of ∞labs development.

You might notice I'm not saying "Coinpurse". Coinpurse development stalled in late August, when my most hated alma mater chose to resume my ongoing torture. I have written very few lines of actual product code since then; I did not, however, abandon my precious software projects. In fact, I have been working on the project that underlies all of them -- "Multiverse", which is my source code repository, build system and coding/organization practices all rolled under one catchy name.

Multiverse has undergone radical changes. I switched to SVK as my version control system; projects can now live outside the Multiverse folder thanks to the magic of Xcode's source trees, which allows me to branch them at will; and, finally, all projects are built at every commit through the magic of the Hudson continuous integration system. A failed build can be spotted right away, and a successful build triggers unit testing and a pass under Apple's clang static analyzer. It builds both Mac and iPhone projects with ease; two weeks ago, it started packaging Diceshaker for App Store submission and Ad Hoc automatically, and this week it has been signing and packaging PlugSuit into DMGs with ease -- as soon as I refactor out the scripts, it will be signing and packaging all projects, including Afloat. Even marking betas with revision information and releases with the correct versioning.

All of this, automatically at every commit.

What I'm working on concretely, beyond the build infrastructure, is an updated web site -- one less clunky under the covers than the current one. I'm troubled by the lack of "comfortable" PHP frameworks (yes, I'm stuck with PHP because managed hosting is damn cheap). With "comfortable" I mean that it can be used as a templating system without additional levels of clunkiness (having to create methods for actions that actually display just a static page); my interactivity needs are few. The final site will be probably done with "pure" PHP pages, Core-powered (I need to clean up and release that damn corpus of PHP code, it works very well now).

Oh, well. Back to work. I have a site to make, a site to update, three apps to work on, two new books and two old ones to study :(

∞labs's hosting is having trouble and for some reason the Nightlies page is misbehaving. I'm working to have it back up ASAP.

Sorry for the mess!

EDIT: Nightlies now back up. :)