join the Queue

A few users have been asking for some improvements in the overall speed when monitoring large folders. I hadn't really anticipated people using NeverOverwrite for monitoring anything other than say Microsoft Office type documents. But several of you are routinely using it for monitoring folders of around half a gig(!) with photo's etc. While the database NeverOverwrite uses scales very well (I've tested it with several gigabytes of test files, constantly adding and retrieving) the user experience was far from ideal since when first instructing NeverOverwrite to monitor the large folder, it must wait until the initial versions of all files are saved in the database before continuing. For Half a gig this can take a couple of minutes as you can imagine. All this manifested as a huge perceived delay when clicking on the "Start Monitoring" button.

Happily I can now announce this is a thing of the past! These large processes are now queued to be processed in the background and NeverOverwrite will now return straight away with "... now monitoring your folder" message. You can even tell it to monitor other folders straight away, these being added to the queue. Note though that if you open a Previous Versions window somewhere, and a large background task is running, you'll be shown the Previous Versions dialog with the version list greyed out. The version list will automatically be enabled and show the file versions when the background tasks are complete (no need to click the Retry button).

I'm hoping this will make the user experience a bit more palatable when dealing with these big folders. Give the new version a go if you're one of these "power users" :) Version 1.0.11.0 with the changes in was added Sunday 4th October. Uninstall you current version if you have one (opting to keep your data files). Also a restart of Windows is required after installing the new version in order to pick up all the changes.

Feel free to comment on how you find it!

Generating more traffic to your MicroISV

After much searching around for a good solid starter resource for getting traffic to your microISV site I found the following:

http://www.followsteph.com/how-to-generate-traffic-to-your-website.html

Steph's blog has been around for a long time and the eBook isn't advice from a fly-by-night but really solid and practical. Importantly for me I can read and digest it in a day. Some other resources looked good but were so wordy I doubt I'd get through it before losing interest in the whole idea! Definitely a recommended purchase (I'm not affiliated).

On becoming more visible

The price of NeverOverwrite went up a few days ago. I was a bit concerned this would put people off buying it but having done some research on similar apps out there it actually fits in quite well with the average price now.

I've also done a round of registering the software on shareware sites. Most of these I doubt your average user will ever visit, but for the links back to neveroverwrite.com they are valuable. It's also a nice feeling seeing your software listed on another site for the first time :) I can recommend RoboSoft which I used to do the job. It's not quite as "automatic" as I'd hoped, still requiring a few hours work, but the end result is your software registered on hundreds of sites.

One happy outcome is that today when i google "neveroverwrite" I have taken over the page one results. This wasn't the case even just a few weeks ago, google would say "did you mean 'never overwrite'?" etc.

I've also shortened the trial period to 30 days. While 45 days made a lot of sense to get people used to the software, it makes less sense from a business point of view. All those extra 2 weeks add up. 30 days seems to be the industry standard and I don't think it will stop users installing and trying out the software.

Reviewers wanted

Anyone interested in writing a quick review of NeverOverwrite? If you have somewhere visible to post it and you’d like to write a small review for public consumption then drop me a line. There’s a free license in it for you :)

Increase price for more sales obvious move(!)

The world works in a strange way, I am coming to believe. Ever since I asked the joelonsoftware forum for an opinion my neveroverwrite site i’ve had comments that the software is too cheap. I am slowly coming round to the logic that having a sub-20 dollar program might give out the message that neveroverwrite is a cheapie fly-by-night product - which it isn’t (some serious work went into it readers!). The original idea was to make it so cheap people wouldn’t think about parting with a few bob to have it in their tool kit. But since sales have been so slow (zero to date) could this counter-intuitive step actually work? Or could it hurt potential sales? Well I guess so but since everyone to date seems quite happy to run the trials down I can’t be too worried about that.

I’m blogging about it as I’ve decided to put the price up to $29.95 in what feels like a bold-time-will-tell move. This will probably happen in the next few days so if you want to take advantage of the current price then get your orders in now folks.

Next is the matter of if the 45 day trial is too long... hmm

Tips on keeping versions trimmed

I’m monitoring a file at the moment which I’m making lots of changes to. It’s a text file that I keep adding to and taking away from whilst I build up a list of blogging sites to look at (with text notes after each one). It’s a perfect candidate for NeverOverwrite since there’s stuff coming out of it I might later realise I need. I’m finding it easier to manage the list of versions by keeping a the Previous Version dialog open in the background. After I save a new version of my file, I Alt-Tab to the Previous Version dialog, click the refresh button, and check last the version was added. At this point I can trim the list a bit so only the versions I really need remain in the list, the important versions and not all the clutter.

Works quite well for me. I’m starting to think it would be nice to add a “Notes” column too, so I can label any version with a text comment – what do people think?

Roadmap

There's been a few requests on the email for features and I've tried to gather them together rationally in a plan for the next few minor version updates. I say minor but they're pretty good features I feel. Particularly being able to look at the files that have been deleted in a folder, and browsing the versions of each deleted file!

Some users are requesting more options to delete versions too. Though you can delete individual versions presently, it would be nice to have more control over this. I think part of the reason for these suggestions is people are concerned about this the size of the repository growing large. So in 1.3 there will be a way of controlling the number of versions saved (either by date, number of versions, or size) which I'd always planned to do and it does make the whole solution more solid.

Summary of the roadmap below. I can't give a time for these as at the moment I'm looking for the next C# consultancy gig to fund more work on NeverOverwrite. Or even better, some sales!

1.1

• "Browse Deleted Files..." on the context menu of a monitored folder
• "Purge All Versions" on the context menu of a file in a monitored folder
• "Purge All Versions" button on the Monitor Settings dialog (removes all versions from a folder)
• "Preview With..." option in the Previous Versions dialog to use another application other than the default (this may become "Send To...")

1.2

• "Link to Deleted Versions by Filename" option on the Monitor Settings dialog (workaround for issue of Windows copy/replace appearing to remove a files history)
• Allow monitored folders to stay monitored when moved

1.3

• Monitor Settings dialog to allow control over the size of the repository