So, a full 244 days since the release of Minim 1.2, I've finally got round to writing and releasing 1.2.1. It's nothing spectacular, in fact is only fixes one minor bug with file types. But it unfortunately highlights the fact that Minim has been neglected, so I think it's only fair that I give people an indication of the future of Minim.

First thing to get out, Minim is not going anywhere. I still use it myself, albeit not as regularly as I used to. The problem is simply finding time. It is stuck in a catch 22, I don't want to spend too much time on it as it doesn't bring in a significant portion of my income, but it won't bring in a significant portion of my income unless I spend time on it. The time that I would be spending on Minim is unfortunately otherwise occupied, mostly with university.

So what am I going to be doing about it? Well I have 3 major releases planned before the end of the year. The first is a new product which you'll hear more about in the coming weeks. The second is Code Collector Pro 1.3, which will address two of the core usability flaws that still exist. The last one will be Minim 2.0. I'll outline now what Minim 2.0 will and won't be:

- It will be Leopard only. I have planned for a while that the 2.0 versions of my existing apps will be Leopard only. There is a lot of new stuff in Leopard for developers, which not only makes life easier for us, but also allows us to do things in a few lines of code which would've taken over 100 in Tiger.

- It will be a free upgrade for existing users. I'm not expecting Minim 2.0 to be ready until the end of 2008 (which means there is a small possibility of it slipping to the start of 2009) so this means there will have been 4 updates in 2 years. This is too slow a rate of progress to ask existing users to pay for a new version.

- It won't be a huge update. This is another reason for not charging. It won't be as big an update as one would usually expect from a 2.0, but it will be big enough to not just be a 1.3. In fact it essentially combines the best bits of what was going to be 1.3 and 2.0 initially.

When I have the free time to work on it, I expect to ramp up updates to Minim and give it the attention it deserves. Until then it unfortunately is taking a back seat to other applications, but I'm hoping that it will ultimately allow me to produce better applications faster.

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