Boxer

Developer diary: plans and progress reports.

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Archive of March 2011

Boxer Turns 1 Friday 25th March 2011

That’s right boys and girls: after 2 years in development and 4 months in beta, Boxer 1.0 is finally here.

You can see a list of what’s new in the update feed; this isn’t a huge update if you’re coming from one of the Release Candidates, and by any measure RC2 was already final-quality. But hey, now it’s official!

For those early adopters among you, Boxer 1.0 is now compatible with OS X 10.7 Lion developer previews—although full screen transitions are currently disabled in 10.7 as they conflict with Lion’s own full screen handling.

I see a lot of new faces

To my giddy delight and my server's abject horror, Boxer got pimped by Kottke.org and Daring Fireball this week: two of the biggest rallying points for afficionados of good Mac software. As a result Boxer has gotten a lot of uniformly rave press and brought thousands of new users into the fold. Welcome one and all, and happy gaming!

If you see other articles pop up about Boxer then do please let me know, because I am a vampire who feeds on attention.

O, how far we’ve come etc.

Since the initial 1.0 public beta a few months ago, Boxer has seen major improvements to game importing, game compatibility, rendering, full-screen mode, games folder handling, you name it; and tons of smaller fixes and UI polish along the way. It now sports built-in Apple Help too, searchable straight from the Help menu.

And since the venerable Boxer 0.87, well… let’s just say this is a whole new app. One I can finally be proud of.

What next?

Now that 1.0 is out I can finally get back to sane release numbering, and can work honestly on new features rather than furtively sneaking them in under a “feature freeze”.

I have the following tentpoles in mind for Boxer 1.1:

From here on in, I'm hoping that releases will be frequent and improvements incremental, rather than major feature dumps once in a blue moon. That means you shouldn't expect these features in 1.1, but by 1.1—they’ll come out one by one as I go.

After 2 years of alpha and beta hell, I’m also hoping to avoid beta cycles altogether. However, we’ll see if that wish survives contact with…

The Mac App Store?

…yeah. I’ll be bringing Boxer to the App Store sooner or later, once I get over my dread of one-star-reviews-from-people-I-can’t-contact-to-find-out-what-went-wrong. But Boxer will remain free and open source on the App Store, and I’ll continue to distribute a Sparkle-updated build separately via this site, for at least until I phase out OS X 10.5 support (which won’t be for quite a while yet, don’t worry!)

Boxer would probably need a few tweaks in order to pass the App Store submission process:

More on that topic when the time comes.

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