Saturday, May 27, 2006

Look to windward!

I've now had had AxCrypt2Go available for download for quite some time, but received very little feedback. Perhaps it's already perfect... It does work! It's not easy to get time for development, the last couple of months have been very busy. The last couple of weeks I've been working on an OEM-version of AxCrypt, and that's very nice since revenue somehow does tend to result in making it easier to find the time.

The experience from this round of OEM deal is very positive, I'm quite happy that the code is still possible to work with, in fact it's quite easy and so far the changes and additions even if minor have been implemented without too much trouble. This is really one of the important measures of code quality in my mind, it's ability to adapt to new situations and be worked with for a long time before you just have to make that decision to rewrite it from scratch...

I'm eagerly waiting when I can drop all support for Windows 98/ME/NT and convert to full Unicode support. There are currently some issues with texts and file names that would be nice to get rid of. I'm still happy that I originally was so careful to make the code prepared for Unicode, so I'm not really expecting any big troubles. The only regret so far is that I decided to encode filenames and passphrases as ANSI. This will require some legacy code for a long time to support even in a full Unicode implementation. Too bad.

So the lesson for today is that if you are aware of a future technology shift, don't just prepare your code for it - ensure that your persistent data already takes it into account from the start, if at all possible. I could easily have done this with AxCrypt, but didn't - a fact I'll now regret for ever... ;-)