Over my Christmas “vacation” I decided I needed a project. Something to do during my son’s naps for my own enjoyment while visiting the in-laws. After a short amount of mulling it over, I decided to attempt to tackle a project I’d been idly thinking about for quite some time.
And when I say quite some time, I mean it. I actually started looking into solving this problem three years ago, and had come up with a proposal back then of how to fix it and posted that to the application’s forum site. But…the original developer of the application stopped updating the app in 2006, rather abruptly.
It was a little bit of a mystery why he stopped developing it, at the time, for a while there were new editions every few months, keeping up with the latest version of the programming environment, adding and improving features with a nice wishlist of changes for future releases, and then all of a sudden, it just stopped in it’s tracks. I never really knew why he stopped–on the forums I saw something about the application “met his needs sufficiently” so he decided to stop updating it. But that was three operating systems ago! And that was before e-mail was frequently sent with subjects encoded in UTF-8, that look almost illegible when displayed as plain-text.
I kind of understand why open-source development can just spontaneously stop, especially when there’s really only one guy doing everything. Maybe it starts out as side-project that just gets out of hand, and starts sapping your free time, until you no longer enjoy working on it. Maybe you get a new job, or your life circumstances change, and you no longer can devote the time. Maybe your computer breaks down or gets stolen, and you no longer have access to the development tools you need. Things happen. Its life.
But that doesn’t mean that one little nagging un-fixed bug in the application doesn’t keep nagging at you. Back in 2008, I took a look at the source-code to see whether I could find the cause of the bug. I had a pretty good hunch where you needed to fix the problem, and what needed to be done. But I didn’t take it a step farther and implement it at that time because I didn’t know the programming language, I didn’t have the programming suite I needed, and there were several steps in my outlined solution that relied on knowledge I didn’t know. There was a little bit of hand-waving as in, I’m not sure how you do this in Delphi, but in programming languages I’m familiar with it’s not too hard, so this should be doable, I think.
So at that time I proposed my solution outline on the forum, hoping someone else who might not want to spend as much time figuring out why it’s a bug, or even the original developer, could take my outline of a solution and implement it.
Three years go by. During that time I’d considered changing mail notifiers a couple times. I even downloaded just about every other free one I could find. But none of them were as good as the one I’d been using for the last ten years. Yes, some of them handled international characters much better, but I was quite content with the user-interface and functionality of the application I was using, and didn’t really want to get used to a different clunkier interface.
If in all this time, nobody else has taken the time to solve the problem and fix it, and nobody else has come out with a better alternative application, maybe it’s just time to bite the bullet, overcome the hurdles, and fix it myself.