Baking Alfred - The Release Cycles

I love interacting with our Twitter followers, giving them sneak peeks of things I am working on for Alfred at that particular moment in time. Screenshots of upcoming features, keeping the change log up-to-date, discussing future ideas. However, this poses a bit of a problem.

Alfred is under heavy development and currently releases very regularly with pre-releases every 2 to 3 weeks and a general beta release every 4 to 5 weeks... Even so, posting these tidbits brings a response that I would liken to when I was younger, gently and methodically prodding the back of my dad's seat on a car journey...

While I absolutely LOVE the enthusiasm from the users for Alfred's development, creating and releasing native software isn't an easy thing. Just because a screenshot looks complete doesn't mean it's ready for everybody to use. The UI may not even be wired up or functional, or it may have quirky or missing behaviour, resulting in software that does not yet work properly.

I pride myself on the quality and stability of my releases so I simply will not release something until I am entirely happy that YOU, our fantastic users, will also be happy with it... I re-learnt this lesson 100 times over by releasing the iTunes mini player too early. I spent more time supporting this unfinished feature by email than I did trying to improve it for the 0.7.1 release.

Think of the software release cycle as baking a cake. You put some ingredients in, you mix them up, maybe add a few additional ingredients that weren't in the recipe to make the cake extra special and then you start baking. After spending all this effort making the cake, the last thing you want to do is take it out of the oven too early and ruin it.

With that in mind, just remember that I have big plans for Alfred, and even BIGGER plans for the Powerpack. Be patient and don't make me get the cake out too early, as it will be oh so much more delicious when it's ready. :)

Cheers,
Andrew (@preppeller)