When I look out to the window, all I see is snow. And cars. And people. And lots of other things, but the snow prevails. It's not too unusual for this time of the year - the white substance naturally comes as a part of the bundle the nature calls "winter" here (by "here", I mean St.Petersburg, Russia, of course).
I can't say I am a big fan of the whole snow thing. Yep, skiing is fun, but the overall "freeze your butt off for 4 months of the year" experience is getting old and boring very, very fast.
However, there's an animal that enjoys snow (or at least that's the common concept about it - who knows what it thinks about snow in reality). By coincidence, the name of that animal have been picked by Apple for their last edition of Mac OS X - 10.6 - the one many of us already use and love. Or hate.
Either way, this brings us to the topic of… haxies. They haven't been updated for ages. Some have not even been updated for Mac OS X 10.5 (for a reason). And we're taking this opportunity to rewrite some of our most popular haxies for the latest and greatest OS ever.
While they are not yet ready for public consumption (even in the public beta form), I'd like to share what we've accomplished so far and also clarify on our plans.
First of all, future versions of our haxies will be compatible with 10.6 only - we're dropping 10.5 and below. If you still use an older version of an OS, you can keep using the versions we currently have out. The reason is simple - many haxies have ancient and scary code dating back to 2002. The APIs in the system have changed so much during these 8 years the code became increasingly hard to maintain - heck, some of it is no longer used because the OS has evolved but it is still there. Granted that we're now moving into 64 bit space, with lots of system calls being deprecated, it's a good time to re-engineer the code. As a side effect, we lose compatibility with the older revisions of the Mac OS X. On the bright side, however, it gives us a chance to clean up code and use more modern technologies, where available - such as Core Animation, for example.
Second, our team got bigger - we welcome one of the experts in the Mac OS X low-level programming, Cyril Murzin, to our team.
So what is the current state of things?
We got Application Enhancer working solidly under Snow Leopard - in both 32 and 64 bit modes. Obviously this was the first thing that had to be done - without it, other haxies just won't work. This part is considered done, and it ate most of the time to accomplish.
WindowShade X was largely redone, with the MIP system rewritten from scratch. It is currently in the internal beta, and requires some more attention before I could consider it "publically consumable".
FruitMenu is now in caring hands of Rosyna. It will tell you about it later, I guess. From what I can say, it runs, yet some things still have to be fixed about it.
Labels X was rewritten from scratch, and this one is probably the one closest to the public beta stage at the moment. Yes, it can colorize icons, change label colors (and they change live in the Finder), turn on and off these label bubbles -- basically, everything you expect.
Mighty Mouse is due a renewal -- Jason is rumored to work on it in February when he gets some spare time from his insanely busy schedule.
Other haxies are currently on hold. As soon as we're done with the above mentioned ones, we'll switch to our other paid haxies. I am not yet sure whether it will be possible to keep Xounds or ShapeShifter alive, however, we will keep you posted here.
You can also follow us (@haxies) on Twitter - it usually contains more inside and up-to-date information. You can also communicate with us there.
And last but not least, thank you for being here and being our inspiration. You guys rock.