Shift 0.5 in Development

About 4 days after 0.2 went out the door, Crossman and I had a planning meeting to discuss the future of Shift. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Crossman, this UI sucks. Bigtime.
Crossman: Yup.
Me: I mean it's horrible. Steve would cry.
Crossman: Yup.
Me: So we are in agreement? The UI has to go.
Crossman: Yup.
Me: Ok, so what are we going to do about it being a document application? I'm thinking we really want to move this to a source list and tab implementation.
Crossman: Uh huh
Me: This means total rewrite. You know that, right?
Crossman: Yup

So, a mockup or 2 later and some clever hacking by Crossman, Shift 0.5 development is underway. And we would like to introduce it to you now.

What you see below is version one of a Photoshop mockup of the general Shift UI. You can see we have moved to a favorites system where the databases are listed in a source list on the left-hand side in true iTunes fashion. The toolbar is minimal because most table operations will be handled either through contextual menus or actions at the bottom of the source list. External windows (Server vars, etc...) will be pushed out to HUDs. Functionality will be added to Shift to allow for the CRUD of stored procedures in RDMSs (note, we mean more than one...) that support it. View support as well. The schema view is probably the most experimental aspect and will be covered in-depth at a later time. However, think Quartz Composer for databases...

This (below) is where we currently stand. The source list is built out from your server favorites and is editable. Pref panes are in place. Sparkle auto-updating is already in place and will be set to update the alpha releases. We may even come up with a system to target your updates in a pref pane to grab the latest nightly or just point releases. Things are underway and we will be redesigning the entire database connection layer from CocoaMySQL to generalize the application. In other words, this isn't just about MySQL anymore. However, MySQL will likely be the only database engine supported to the 1.0 release stage.

This post has been a bit long-winded. I hope we can garner some support in the OS X database developer community and get some interest in this project. If you have any desire to contribute to the development effort ($, time, code, graphic design, beer, hugs, etc...) please let us know.

Oh, and if you want to build this mess that is Shift 0.5 and give us any feedback, grab it with:
svn co http://trac.shiftosx.com/shift_dev/branches/0.5

11:22 PM | 12 Comments | Tags: ,

Comments

  1. I'm not an application-developer, but it sure is worth a big hug ;-) The pictures look very promising so far. Keep up the good work! (You should get a donate button or have I just missed it?)

    Danie on

  2. Great news that your doing this! Please fix the decimal bug as soon as possible (in the current version, if you edit a row which includes decimal values the values will go to 999999.9999 depending on what settings it has for precision and scale).

    Pege on

  3. Finally someone starts the project I've been waiting for, awesome!

    I've looked through some of the code and noticed a couple of places where the code could be optimized, obviously this is still in early development but it doesn't hurt to catch some of these things early on. Would you like a list with my suggestions when I'm done?

    Stefan on

  4. @Danie Thanks for your interest. We don't have any donation process set up right now as the project is still in a fairly early stage. I think once the project is at a point where more people can use it and rely on it we'll probably set up a way for people to donate.

    @Pege We won't actually be using much (if any) of the code from the older versions because it was so outdated. We will however watch out for that behavior as develop the new version ;). Finally, our bug tracking system is open to the public at http://trac.shiftosx.com/. Anyone is welcome to submit a ticket, we just ask that you take a look at existing tickets before submitting one since our time would be better spent working on the app and not sorting out duplicate tickets. Thanks!

    @ Stefan We'd love to hear more from you. Nate sent you an email this morning. I look forward to hearing back.

    Jonathan Crossman on

  5. That's a clean and minimalist interface. Looks good.

    QRCode on

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