After 6 months of work, 20,000 lines of code, and countless amounts of blood, sweat and tears we are happy to announce that Minim 2.0 is finally available. It has been a lot of work and involved learning quite a lot but I feel it has been worth it when you see the finished product.

It now requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or higher to run (previously it only required 10.4 or higher) and now costs €25 (around $36). You can find out more about it at minimapp.com

From 1.0 to 2.0

Minim 1.0 was released over 3 years ago in November 2006. Since then it received just 2 updates, version 1.1 and 1.2. It suffered right from the start from my inexperience, not only at coding, but at creating a product that can sell. Since then I've released 2 successful products and become a much better developer.

So when it came to working on Minim 2.0, it made sense to treat it as an entirely new product. I used the experienced I'd gained over the past 3 years and re-designed and re-coded it from the ground up. I added some new features that weren't in 1.x and took several features out that weren't particularly useful. I made sure to justify everything that went into the app, rather than just saying "Well that would be cool" as I did with 1.x.

It is also the first app I've worked on that had designers heavily working on it. This has been an interesting experience, as it involved doing a lot more custom UI elements than any other app. It also meant the release schedule wasn't just in my hands as well.

The result is what is quite easily the best application I have created to date. It is a sign of things to come from future versions of Code Collector Pro and Lighthouse Keeper, as I'll be able to give them the attention of a full time developer.

Accessibility

Last year I made a pledge about accessibility, that I was unfortunately unable to fulfil. Lighthouse Keeper and Code Collector Pro are 90% accessible but not the 100% I was aiming for. But Minim represents an important step in the direction of making all M Cubed's applications fully accessible. It has been extensively tested and features several unique features that mean it provides as good an experience to disabled users as to fully abled users.

The lessons I have learned from making Minim 2.0 fully accessible will be invaluable to making Code Collector Pro and Lighthouse Keeper reach that goal as well. I'm hoping that by the summer I will finally be able to say that all of M Cubed's apps are fully accessible.

Open Source

Over the next week I will be releasing various open source components, as well as improvements to existing ones. All of this code comes straight from Minim. I will also be sharing a lot of the lessons I've learnt while developing Minim, so keep an eye on the blog as I get into the nitty gritty of the redesign, responder chain hacking and a detailed look at the drawing code behind the recording view.

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