menuet is kinda copying synergy advance

  1. zerock

    i was trying an app called menuet , and it has some nice features, i just hope synergy advance is tons times better (for all the time that its taking of course). wincent do you you know about this app?

  2. martin

    have to admit that i switched to menuet already. synergy advanced promised interesting features, but so far they are only promised. menuet has what i want, and it's implemented. sorry to say this...

  3. Greg Hurrell

    I didn't know about the app, but if it is copying my products then that's really nothing new. There are about 20 Synergy clones out there, as far as I know.

  4. Krypton

    I think this post summarises very well why there are so many clones...

  5. Greg Hurrell

    Although you only hint at it, Krypton, I presume you mean that the clones exist because the features are too slow to come to Synergy.

    Hate to be cynical, but I don't agree. Having started this back in November 2002, I watched clone after clone mindlessly copy features as soon as I added them into Synergy. This wasn't a case of other developers "innovating" to fill a gap; it was straightforward copying. And worse still, it wasn't free software advocates thinking "this sort of functionality should be available in a program licensed under the GPL!"; it was shareware developers seeking to make a buck off the ideas of others!

    Nevertheless, point taken. I do agree that the is build up of requested features that needs to be addressed. I just don't agree that the speed with which I implement features has anything to do with the number of clones.

  6. Krypton

    Although I admit to being harsh, because I wanted to see a Synergy Advance as much as anyone, had you shipped 'the killer iTunes controller' by now things might be a little different.

    As it stands because Synergy Advance isn't finished (or anywhere near in the form of the preview releases) there are plenty of market opportunities for these other developers.

    It may be true that these developers are largely inspired by your work, but if your superior product fails to materialise then it can only be you who is missing out; on revenue that is.

    I am fully aware that Synergy Advance doesn't pay the bills, and your consulting (etc) is more of a priority but I still remain disappointed with the current situation.

  7. Greg Hurrell

    For what it's worth for the last month or so I've been devoting a good 8 to 10 hours a day to Synergy Advance exclusively. It's low-level stuff, but it will pay off in the end because I'm laying a good foundation.

    Today, for example:

    - wrote a new class WOArgumentArray, for processing arguments, along with a suite of unit tests

    - spent a fair bit of time trying to improve my stack trace generation but unfortunately turned out to be a dead end so trying another tack

    - renamed WOKernelEventQueue to WOKernelQueue and moved it from WOBase into WODebug so that it can be used by the Wincent Crash Reporter

    - other refactoring such as moving methods from my NSArray category in WOBase to WODebug so that it can be used in the debug framework

    And during this last month:

    - wrote the WOEnumerate family of macros to speed up enumeration and make code easier to write, read and maintain

    - WOMemoryBarrier family of macros for better thread safety

    - huge amounts of work on WOTest and hundreds of new unit tests; I am extremely pleased with the results already as this has lead to numerous bugs being caught and fixed already; I've been using WOTest "in house" for some time now but with the recent work I now feel it's "1.0-ready" and would be happy enough with the code to release it once I'd fleshed out the tests a bit more

    - malloc wrappers for simulating out-of-memory errors during testing

    - improvements to build process to reduce unnecessary building of dependencies (which means a faster turnaround time and more builds per day) as well as more pervasive embedding of build information in executables

    - writing more documentation for Synergy Advance

    - and believe it or not, miscellaneous bits and pieces in the Synergy Advance code base itself (ie. not the foundation)

    I haven't been very active on the forums but if you keep an eye on the news page, the knowledge base, and my personal weblog you do get bits an pieces of news about this kind of progress. I've preferred to get as much work done as possible rather than flooding the site with "news-bites", but occasionally I've made weblog posts when I've needed to clear my head.

  8. zerock

    Wincent, just keep the good work, and dont let this kind of stuff get you down, i'm sure Synergy Advance will be worth it. (been waiting since the beginning)

  9. Greg Hurrell

    Don't worry, zerock. I don't let things get me down because I enjoy what I do (programming) even when there's negative feedback.

  10. zerock

    i did try menuet, and well i kept thinking i cant wait for synergy advance, so yeah i would say thats positive feedback.

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