Tobi application updates, version numbers, change-log

Since Tobi v1.0 was released (only a couple of weeks ago), we published a number of application updates to fix minor bugs and to improve existing features. During this process, the Tobi forum has been the main communication channel between end-users and developers / support staff. In some cases, we even added new functionality to answer urgent needs. Normally, we would register feature requests into the project tracker for version 2.0 (i.e. "future directions"), but sometimes the well-defined scope and relatively low implementation costs justify an immediate response. - By the way, many thanks to users who are actively putting Tobi in trial mode within their respective organizations, we will continue to address your queries in a timely manner. -

It comes as no surprise that not-so-minor changes are still being made to the application, because of the low community participation in the Alpha, Beta and even Release Candidate phases of the project. Now that Tobi is gaining momentum, the feedback is flowing-in and we sometimes fix major issues that we didn't catch earlier, during our internal testing (typically, problems with computer-specific audio drivers, system-dependent errors, etc.).

Thanks to Tobi's deployment method (based on Microsoft's ClickOnce technology), we are able to "push" application updates directly to an existing end-user installation, and the payload is usually lower than 1MB (out of the 9MB full application download). Should you have decided to skip an available update (when prompted at Tobi's startup), ClickOnce will stop notifying you for an entire week. The only way to update Tobi during this period is to visit the "download" page and click on the appropriate link in the "Install and launch" section (this forces your local Tobi installation to update itself). Please note that this "limitation" is outside of our control.

Recently, we published application updates quite frequently, so we encourage you to take a look at the Tobi change-log to see what is going on. In future versions of Tobi, the ClickOnce dialog prompt will offer a direct link to the "change-log" page, or even better, it will display the description text corresponding to the update. In the meantime, please keep a bookmark of the Tobi website.

Last but not least, some of you may have been wondering about the logic behind version numbers. At the time of writing, Tobi has reached v1.3, which seems a little high given how fresh v1.0 still is ! Well, this is actually a technical mishap in our build script ... from now on we will stop incrementing the second digit for a while unless duly justified by a major feature update. Although this shouldn't create any problems per say, we apologize for the confusion it may cause.

Kind regards, Daniel