Frhed 1.3.10 Beta
Posted by kimmov on January 24, 2009
Couple of days ago I did the Frhed 1.3.10 Beta release. This beta release is the last of 1.3.x releases before the 1.4.o stable release. Expect the stable release in about two weeks.
The start of the Frhed development has been very very interesting. The codebase we started working was good, but old. There weren’t many bugs, but the code, GUI etc was designed for Windows 9x. So the most important thing so far has been to make sure Frhed works correctly in latest Windows versions. And update the GUI to match current practices and guidelines. We’ve advanced a lot, but a lot remains to be done after 1.4. release too.
Download counts of Frhed alpha releases have positively surprised me. I expected to get few dozens of downloads. After all it was an alpha release. Intended for testing, not for production use. But there are already over 4700 downloads. So people have already found the tool. It will be interesting to see how much downloads the stable release gets later.
Frhed has been also very refreshing project for me personally. As it is in very early stages (from my point of view we just have started with it). We can just rewrote or remove things we don’t like. No need to think about hundreds of thousands of users. It is sometimes quite hard to improve things in WinMerge since bigger changes always affect to users. And not always in positive way. With Frhed we just don’t care yet.
For Frhed we start really caring perhaps after couple of stable releases. When we have some idea what users want and need from the software. Do they want simple and fast hex editor? Or do they want more features rather than simplicity and speed? We’ll find out but it takes some time. Then we must choose our own way to go.
