Posts Tagged with: nWire

We are working hard on improving nWire towards our final 1.0 release. We will be releasing more updates in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned. The current release, 0.9.1 (see full release notes) focuses on two areas: improving the performance of the analysis process and final usability touches to the navigator.

The analysis process was already profiled and optimized in previous released. In this release, we improved it some more: accurate progress report, less repetitive analysis which is not required and overall performance improvements. We are very happy with the results and we hope you will be, too. In the next release, we are working on the search area. Improving the search and indexing process means that the performance will be improved further.

We also improved the navigator in this release. After the last release, which added the toggling of showing associations hierarchically, we introduce some more improvements. The most noticeable one is the hovers. The hovers appear when the cursor is above an item in the navigator. It will show the full information on the node below, unlike the compressed view of the navigator. Check out the following screenshot for example:

The hovers were critically missing from previous releases and we intend to improve them to show more information in future versions. Other than that, we also improved the resizing of columns, both in speed and in the ability to easily resize the last column past the screen boundaries. Check it out and let us know what you think. Finally, the fonts and colors can now be controlled by the preferences. A common request was to enable enlarging the fonts and changing the contrast between the colors and the selection. This is fully adjustable now.

Version 0.9.0 was released yesterday. We are very excited about this version, as this is the first that shows enhancements based on users' feedback. There are many minor enhancements and fixes in this version. This post will highlight two major changes: the auto analysis and the toggling of showing associations hierarchically in the navigator.

Auto enablement of the nWire analysis means that nWire will automatically enable itself on any relevant project: new or existing. This makes nWire even simpler to install and use: run the installer, activate and start using nWire. The auto-enablement will occur only after the "getting started" dialog is shown. Existing users, or users wishing to turn this feature off, may switch this on through the preferences.

To understand the affect of showing associations hierarchically take a look at the following two images:

Show Associations Hierarchically On (current option)


Show Associations Hierarchically Off (new option)

The left column is clearer and easier to understand. Notice that the middle column, showing classes grouped by package, is not affected and still shown in a hierarchy. Behind the scenes, this view is controlled by a configuration file. Future versions will expose this configuration so you will be able to design your own, personalized, view.

As always we welcome any feedback as we gradually improve nWire towards the 1.0 release.

We take customer service very seriously. It is something we believe in. We are not a big company with a support help desk, that is true. However, that also means you will get the service from people who care. People who know the product like the back of their hand.

As part of this effort, we decided to host our users' forum at GetSatisfaction. It provides everything you want from a forum and a lot more. Here's a few key features which are unique to GetSatisfaction:

• It has a great search capabilities. You start typing your question and it immediately suggests answers.
• You can categorize your post: question, idea, problem or just praise.
• If supports multiple products and tags. It is very intuitive and easy to filter the forum and see only the interesting bit
• It provides a cool feedback widget which appears at the edge of this page and enables painless feedback posting. We will incorporate feedback capabilities in nWire as well.

We invite you all to join the discussions at GetSatisfaction.

We had numerous requests from (potential) users to provide Linux support and we're happy to announce that it is finally here.

nWire was tested successfully on Ubuntu 8.04, running Eclipse 3.4.1 with Sun's JDK 1.5.0_15. It should be fine on Eclipse 3.3 too and other JDKs. We don't expect any problems with different Linux distros: it should run just fine where Eclipse can run. If you do encounter a problem, please let us know.

There are some minor known issues at the moment when running on Linux, in the visual area of the navigator: the selection color hides the selected text and the column resizing is a bit slow. Other than that, it works just fine.

The installation is just like any other platform, using our Eclipse update site. If you are running on Linux, we invite you to download nWire today.

We made some major updates to our site. First, and foremost, we are now officially open for business. You are welcome to take advantage of our $39 introductory offer and get your full copy of nWire today. So head on over to our virtual shop and buy nWire today. The offer is valid until the end of 2008.

I'm also happy to announce that, as of today, downloading nWire does not require entering your details on our site. Anyone can install nWire using our update site at http://update.nwiresoftware.com/. More details can be found on our download page.

These two major updates required an upgrade to our software. We released version 0.8.7 today. We added a new section on our growing site with Release Notes. Due to the nature of this change, customers buying a license are required to upgrade to the latest version. If you are still in trial, you do not need to upgrade and if you already got your invitation but did not install nWire you may just go ahead and install the new version to begin your trial. You won't be needing a trial license key for that.