∞: the voice of

Mover’s not perfect. Unfortunately. I’m a one-man band here, working all the time on other stuff. I do listen, though, to all mail and iTunes reviews and Twitter laments surrounding Mover.

Also, more interestingly for you, I act on what I read.

The following two things are currently in Apple’s hands:

• Mover+ 2.0.3 is in review at Apple. It fixes the two most commonly reported crashes (contacts on all devices and images on iPod touch), introduces crash reporting and streamlines a few things in the engine. This comes out as soon as Apple says yes.
• Mover (free) 1.0.3 includes new localizations and a limited amount of new features (for example, inline image and contact display). This also comes out as soon as Apple says it does.

After these, Mover+’s third release line (tentatively versioned as 2.1) will include the result of the Adequately Awesome Project™, an effort in replacing the core transmission part of Mover with a new protocol with lesser overhead. I announce it now, even though I have a policy of shutting up until done, because it’s working right now, although with stuff to iron out before shipping, in my development version. It will include progress reporting for large transfers and will be quite a bit faster for images and other large-content stuff.

This fixes the third most common complaint, transfer speed. AAP makes the transfer run as fast as it can possibly do. Of course, it also makes possible transfer of iPhone 3GS-shot video clips. That’s coming too. (I need to make the storage engine a little more intelligent and mindful of RAM and disk space before it can be done.)

The fourth most common complaint is a little trickier. It’s the “doesn’t show up arrows! doesn’t work” one. That’s harder because I have no idea what actually causes it — in fact, there are a ton of possible causes, and I strongly suspect most of the time it’s your network’s fault. (Bonjour can easily be hindered by firewalls or wireless access points that don’t route traffic the right way, by accident or choice). Still, I do see bizarre situations from time to time, and I’m working overtime to come up with theories and workarounds in my code. In that regard, Mover+ on the store is much better than free Mover, although the 1.0.3 update learns some tricks from its bigger brother.

Unfortunately, fighting adverse network conditions is a losing battle; but it’s one I will keep fighting.

That’s it for the future I will reveal. What comes next, it’s a secret that I’ll be happy to show you in due time.