RepoWatch (formerly: MenuMonitor) has undergone an incredible amount of changes since the last time that it was written about here, and not all of them are in naming or marketing.
The most important change, however, is related to the new name. Instead of monitoring everything and putting it in your menu, RepoWatch now monitors one type of thing, Distributed Version Control Systems, and does it well. Some of the other Things may come back, eventually (time tracking, for instance, fits in well), but it will never again be as much of a hodge podge as it once was.
The Beta
I have been using Mac Developer to Push a beta of RepoWatch to strangers. I have never had strangers running software that I was this directly responsible for (with professional software written as part of a company, there’s always a middleman, or at the very least my name is not on the product). The simple problems were taken care of immediately. For instance, I had forgotten that OS X 10.6 will run on a few 32 bit machines. I forgot that there were Intel Macs that were not 64 bit. So I had to start compiling as dual architecture.
Now we’re into deeper issues. Issues made more problematic because I am clinging furiously to my no-preferences status.
There are a few vocal testers that believe that no extra information should show up in the menu bar. It should change color, and that’s all. I strongly disagree. So who is right? There are some testers that don’t seem to mind the menu bar getting expanded.
Should the program scan for repositories at startup? This one was easier to decide, at least in the short-term. The hard-core users had hundreds (!!) of repositories and scanning at startup made them effectively unable to open the program at all. Until I find a way to deal with such volume without completely choking, it stays at a manual Process.
How do I handle branching? Currently, I don’t, but I want to.
