Well 2014 has arrived, and straight out of the gate we have been flat out. Over the Xmas and new years period, development has been forging ahead with the first beta of the year being released a week or so ago. On the surface there may not look to be many changes, other than the manager and server addin, however under the hood approximately 80% of the entire code base has been either updated, or entirely rewritten… our experience with v1 over the past couple of years has given us a good insight into what we need to change for v2, and what we need in place for future development.
While talking about v2, we have been receiving many requests regarding the release date, while I would love to cement a date, the world of software development makes hard deadlines difficult to hit (for those wanting to know how hard, read a book called “Dreaming in Code”). However there are many fixes, updates and additions to the current v2 beta, so we are planning on releasing “Drive Bender v2 ER1”. ER1 (standing for Early Release 1), is a production ready snapshot of v2 that will become our release version while the rest of the v2 features are being bolted on. I should also make mention of Cloud Xtender, this is also under development and we are hoping to get a beta out when Drive Bender v2 is close to being sort.
In other exciting news, we have just acquired another pooling product called PoolHD (www.poolhd.com). For those not aware of PoolHD, it is a pooling product very similar to Drive Bender, except it’s target market is more desktop focused. I can hear the punters asking “why do you want another pooling product”? Well under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be high on our list of things to do, however PoolHD is close to our heart… the app started life as a custom solution for a company to pool proprietary file systems and databases, from here they modified it was branded it as PoolHD. However over the past 12 months, this proved to be difficult for them to maintain… so we landed it for the right price!
So what happens next? We will be working on getting v2 ER1 out the door, and continuing with the v2 final. With regards to PoolHD, because it shares a large portion of its code base with Drive Bender, we will be releasing PoolHD v2 soon thereafter… onward and upwards!