Hello everybody, six years ago today we released an embarrassingly plain, simple and immature Sparkle 1.0. Almost unrecognizable. And rather buggy.
This is going to be a huge year for Sparkle, with the release of Sparkle 3. We still don’t have a date but I promise it’s not far.
So I think it would be fun to talk about a bit of the early history in the mean time.
April 24th, 2014. Development had started only a few months before, around mid September of 2013. We had experimented with a couple different ideas, talked to designers, but we bit the bullet and started with the foundation of the Sparkle you know today in September.
Still undecided on what we would do exactly, we started with a rough testbed application that would help us work on the underlying layout engine, this was the status in late September:
That quickly turned into something we wanted to try to ship, so around the end of November 2013 we already had this:
Then come January 2014 we were able to begin mocking up websites that we had been working with conventional tools previously (Prototypes was actually a previous Mac app I had built in 2011):
Looks like by February we still hadn’t added multiple device support (but were working on the toolbar icons):
By late March we had a mostly final Sparkle 1.0 interface, with bugs to fix, but it was all there:
One quiet Sunday morning I put together a beta video, awkward voice over and odd user interface choices all still there:
And this is how we announced Sparkle 1.0 to the world: