First, welcome to the new Blue Static! The site has a fresh coat of paint, it has been made more
mobile-friendly, and I have updated much of the content, pruning extremely old things while keeping
still-old-but-maybe-interesting items around for posterity. For the first time in the history of
the site, Blue Static is no longer powered by PHP: the entire site is now rendered as static files
by Hugo.
It has been well over seven years since this site was last updated, and that is because I no longer
have the substantial amounts of time I once had to dedicate to Blue Static software. Since I now
spend all of my working hours writing and maintaining software, the allure of doing so as a hobby
has unfortunately diminished.
Over the past few months, I’ve pondered how to move forward with the various Blue Static projects.
I’ll outline some of those decisions now:
MacGDBp still has a large number of loyal users. I’m happy to report that in these intervening
years, I’ve worked sporadically on the next major version. The first beta of MacGDBp 2.0 will be
released before the end of the year! The entire core debugging engine has been rewritten and made
more robust, which has fixed many bugs and added new features. The new version will also be code
signed and notarized to be compliant with Apple’s increasingly locked-down macOS.
RGB Converter will remain available for download, but because Apple has removed
Dashboard
in macOS 10.15 Catalina, the widget will not be updated anymore.
Bugdar is the project that I’ve struggled to make a decision on. It is fairly safe to say that
any 2.0 greenfield rewrite will not happen. However
all of Blue Static’s bugs remain in the Bugdar instance that runs on this site, so it cannot go
anywhere over night. I am not currently enamored with other options, such as Github’s issue tracker, so
despite Bugdar’s visible age I will continue to run it for Blue Static’s purposes. There may be an
infrequent maintenance update, but I do not expect to make major changes to the software at this
time.
What drove these decisions is that I have largely stopped writing software in PHP. It is
no longer my language of choice, and my interests have moved on to other programming languages and
software domains. MacGDBp remains important to me beacuse others find it useful and the code is
still fun to work on.
I’ll close with a teaser: there is at least one new project that I will be publishing in the future
under Blue Static. It has to do with email and is geared towards power-users.
Look forward to MacGDBp 2.0 Beta 1 coming to a Sparkle update near you!