The peril of premature preferences

I released the first version of ViewMyCurrency 6 days ago and since then there have been more than 3000 downloads and 100 comments on Mozilla update and on this blog! Great motivation to keep on programming.

There have been many requests for an option to add to or edit the currencies. I agree that would be a great feature but therein lies a peril. There are some major changes in the pipeline, for example, using different currency recognition depending on the URL to help out those poor guys who have to share the $ symbol.

These changes will inevitably result in the format of the preferences changing and if people have already invested time in customising them then they aren’t going to be happy when an automatic update comes along. Yes, I could write migration code. But not yet.

So first will come the features that don’t impact the preferences format too much. You can expect

• lots of new currencies added (especially for my Scandinavian friends)
• show/hide in statusbar
• option to select brackets for either the original currency or the converted value
• Using the URL to modify the currency recognition (probably not in the next release)
• lots of (hopefully) invisible bug-fixes

There should be a beta-version on this site within 24 hours. Keep the feedback coming!