Hidden Progress

Over the nearly 2 years (or more realistically 1.5 years) that Tenseg has been around there have been some software releases, but not a steady stream as you might expect. Some of these releases have been significant ones, but none have been mind-blowing.

One reason for this is simply that one of the two people (myself, Alex Celeste) is a full-time college student during the academic year, so I don’t have the time to be constantly moving projects forward 365 days/year, and the other person (Eric Celeste) likewise has more important money-making endeavors to look after. Every couple of months an update to one piece of software or another may be sent out (like the unmentioned minor updates I released to Fact Triangles, Blackjack, and soeMatrix earlier this week), but again, these have been minor updates. The release notes of these products have over time hinted at some of what we’ve been busy with: Across the entire first semester of this past academic year I cooked up a massive collection of integrated backend tools that will help us support released software going forward, but naturally you don’t really see the tools reflected in your experience with Tenseg software, they just make our lives much easier.

However, it is summertime (as the heat wave currently engulfing Minnesota is proof of…) and so we both have had a little more time to devote to programming. I wanted to point out that summertime aside there are a couple projects that we’re working on that at some point may result in a piece of software you all can play with. For the most part these are projects we’d like to keep under wraps and first mention days (if not minutes) before public release, but I might as well mention the Sprouts app that I’ve been helping Eric put together as of late since he mentioned it on his personal blog.

If you are a Cocoa or Cocoa Touch developer yourself (if you don’t know what those two are just skip this paragraph :) ) then there is something we’ve started putting together that you may find useful. As you know, coding involves lots of research and experimentation. StackOverflow is a blessing for this, but we wanted to make sure we had a place to put our own tips and samples (even if mirrored from questions at StackOverflow). So, that was what gave birth to our new Developer Tips and Samples page. Regardless where else on the internet we share tips and sample code they will all be centrally accessible on that page here on our website. We anticipate that more tips and samples will be added to that page as we do our own coding. If any of the tips and samples on that page help you out we’d love to hear from you.

So in a nutshell… More progress is being made then you would see just by checking this news page and looking for updates in our software. The bulk of our (somewhat strained during the academic year) development time is given to currently unreleased software, most of which we aren’t mentioning publicly at this time. Therefore most progress these days is what we like to call “hidden progress” because we can see it easily enough, but none of you have a clue it is being made (without a post like this one).