*Coder Blog

Last Tuesday I was pleasantly surprised to find XRG featured as the MacOS X Hints Pick of the Week. Robg had a lot of good things to say about the app. Getting reviews like this is what makes all the development time I’ve put into XRG worth it. The amazing thing is how much traffic I have gotten in the past few days just from their site alone. Their site has generated almost 3,000 visits (over 40,000 hits) since Tuesday morning, more than twice as many visits than any other Mac news site that XRG has been featured on, including this article on MacSlash. It’s a good thing I’m not paying any hosting fees for my bandwidth.

As a lot of you probably noticed, XRG 0.5.0 was released this morning. Version 0.5.0 includes many new features and bug fixes. Some of the new features include contextual menus for each of the graph modules (mentioned in an earlier post), the option to change the graph font, a new highlight border feature to help with window resizing, a graph minimizing feature that will minimize the graph into the title bar and optionally expand the graph whenever the mouse is over the title bar, and the option to set the graph window level to stay in the background.

Anyway, if you have any comments on the release, feel free to leave them in the writeback.

During the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to add functionality to XRG that breaks beyond the bounds of the application itself. One area that I’ve finished is adding contextual menu’s for each graph with additional statistics and links to other applications and web sites. For the weather module, I wanted to link to an online weather site, but most sites go off of US zip codes and not the international standard ICAOs that XRG uses. I finally found a company online that offers free CGI weather server software as long as you have a link to their web site on your server. I gave it a go and modified the templates to match the XRG web page. You can check out the XRG Weather Server here.

Contextual menu support will be included with the upcoming release of XRG 0.5.0. I still have a ways to go before I finish 0.5.0, but it’s looking pretty nice so far. I want to get some feedback on the contextual menus before the release though just in case there is something blatantly obvious that I’m missing. Here’s a list of the menus for each module:

• CPU Graph: Shows top 5 processes’ CPU usage, and a link to Apple’s Activity Monitor.
• Memory Graph: Shows top 5 processes’ Memory usage.
• Battery Graph: Link to open the Energy Saver System Preferences.
• Network Graph: Shows separate total RX and TX stats for each network interface and links to open the Network System Preferences, Internet Connect, Network Utility, and NetInfo Manager.
• Disk Graph: Link to open Apple’s Disk Utility.
• Weather Graph: Shows more detailed current weather statistics and links to the XRG Weather Server for your configured ICAO.
• Stock Graph: Links to detailed web stock information for configured stock symbols.

Am I missing anything? I’m sure I’ll get comments on it after the 0.5.0 release, but I’d like the menus to be as good as they can be for the initial release.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I was going to post this sooner, but I got caught up in the holiday weekend.

Looking at the web stats, this release of XRG was pretty successful. The first two days are always the busiest, mostly because software sites like VersionTracker and MacUpdate will post new software on their front page for a two day period. Anyway, in that time frame, the web site served 3517 pages to 1650 visitors. In the first 5 days of the release, there were approximately 2200 downloads of the application (some people from the software sites above download the app directly, instead of visiting the web site) and 153 downloads of the source code. I wish some more of those people who downloaded the source code would contribute new features.

Anyway, overall, I’m pretty pleased with the release. It got posted on the MacNN and MacInTouch news sites, which was pretty cool. If anyone who uses XRG is reading this, let me know what you think in the writeback.

Well, after a lot of hard work, XRG 0.4.0 was just released this morning. Check the web site or the Changelog for update details. The last release was very successful and got an incredible response from users. I’m hoping that this release will be the same. I want to thank Philippe Martin his blog posting about XRG. Philippe has given me a lot of great feedback for several of the previous versions. Thanks Philippe!

I’ll post in the next couple of days more stats on the number of downloads, web hits, etc.

I’m trying to get XRG 0.4.0 ready for release next week. It looks like it’s going to be pretty good, so I’m pretty excited to get it out the door. The release will fix some bugs that XRG had with Panther, adds a battery graph and a few other new features.

Recently, I had some people email me asking how to donate to the XRG project. It was quite a shock, since I’ve always considered XRG my gift back to the open source community. However, it is difficult to turn down free money, so I added a donate button on the web page about a week ago, so we’ll see how that goes.

In case you didn’t notice, I also added a web page to the XRG site for href="http://www.starcoder.com/xrg/old_versions.shtml">past XRG versions. It’s hard to believe just how far XRG has come in the past year or so.
One interesting statistic, the first public release of XRG had around 2,700
lines of code, where 0.4.0 is currently 10,600 lines of code.