Since we're about to go live with version one of FeedGhost, I thought I'd have a little look back over FeedGhost's development.

We started coding proper back in September 2005, working off a Subversion repository running on Lee's home machine. We've since invested in a proper server, of course.

We started working on FeedGhost full-time in June 2006. I think the big jump in LOC at that time was the coincidental introduction of the Lucene.Net search library.

It's been a seven-days-a-week, all-day affair.

Again you can see where we shifted from working evenings, to working during the day. I obviously tend to favour small, frequent check-ins, while Lee seems to do bigger, less frequent ones.

And finally, a little bit of nostalgia, via the magic of source control. Here's what we had produced when we quit our jobs. We've come a long way since then. Let's hope it was worth it!

[ Charts produced by StatSVN ]

One bug that was found recently was an inability to run in XP's "Classic Theme" (oops). I've now fixed those issues, and generally tightened up switching between window frame styles, theme handling, and classic theme colours.

As you can see from the screenshot, you can now run FeedGhost in "Classic Mode" with a standard frame and standard colours, and toned-down toolbar colours.

I've pretty much completed the design of the new website now. The current/old website was put together in a hurry as a purely functional placeholder, and it showed.

It's taken a week but it's worth it: I've tried to extend the shiny theming from the application into the website, navigation is now much clearer via primary tabs and secondary left-bar, and the text has been generally improved.

The new website will also include forums and payment systems, so a full version one release isn't far off!

I came across this article about a newly-released XP theme called "Royale Noir", and liked it so much I've done a matching colour scheme for FeedGhost. Enjoy!

I find myself getting continually annoyed with aspects of software, and the usual thought in my mind is: it should be easy for the user, not for the programmer. I think we sometimes forget that.

So to start this category off, I'm going to start with one that really wouldn't have taken too long to fix: New Word Document.

Now I type a name, press enter, and hey-presto:

Why couldn't it highlight the name only, and not the extension?

UPDATE 12/12/2006:

I've been doing some development work on Vista, and I've noticed that the behaviour is now exactly as I wanted, so I'm a happy man now.

Now that I've pretty much run out of bugs to fix in FeedGhost, I decided to finish off the new tree control I've been working on, on and off, for the past few weeks. We always wanted a custom tree control, to complement the custom list and toolbar, but until now it's never been important enough to push itself to the top of the list.

It's finally complete and integrated into FeedGhost, and will be available in the next build. We now have:

• Consistency with the glossy toolbar buttons;
• Glowing and fading effects to match the toolbar, on mouse tracking and expand / collapse marks;
• Differentiated display of unread counts;
• Animated updating overlays;
• No horizontal scrollbar, instead the text is truncated;
• A little bit of animation when expanding or collapsing.

Unfortunately I'll now have to re-take all the screenshots...