Have you considered adding an option to enable PhpED to automagically check for new builds and notify the user? Something came over me today, I logged in and saw that build 5029 was available.

I wouldn't complain if the news forum /http://forum.nusphere.com/viewforum.php?f=2/ hadn't been abandoned in may, with build 5025 as the last release. I added this forum's feed to my Google Reader to get new build updates and it was fun while it lasted (:

If automatic checking isn't an option then please don't forget to update the news forum when releasing a new build.

There's a new build? Huh, had no idea. What's new? (Unfortunately, I'm not the purchaser of record for my copy, so I can't log into the site and get any information about latest releases.)

Yes, an auto-check feature would be most welcome. Even better, include an option--after notification and the opportunity to read the release notes--to have the IDE automatically download the update, install it over itself, and restart itself. I love software that does this, and I'm glad that it's becoming quite popular.

No matter about the IDE, I agree about the News forum. Please keep it updated, NuSphere.

mostly bug fixes I guess


the news forum was a good place for this, but I think they forgot about it (:


that would be too much to ask - a simple "there's a new release available. visit our website and download it" would suffice (:

It's nice to have it in the forum to pick up with RSS readers or whatnot, and for non-users (e.g., development team managers) to pick up on it. However, it's great for users if the program can detect the new version and show the notes to you right there, enabling you to decide immediatley whether/when to update.



Too much to ask? Why? Lots of programs are doing this nowadays, and for good reason: users absolutely love it. With the traditional way, there are lots of steps: go to the web site, log in to your account, find the download, download it, unarchive it, quit the running version, run the installer, delete the installer, and finally run the program again. (And for PhpED, add in re-replacing the MySQL library.) Self-updating software reduces all that to a single click. The program does its version check, tells you there's a new version and shows you the release notes, you click Install, and a couple minutes later, you're staring at your code again. Of course, you are also given the option of being reminded later or simply opting out of the update (or opting to do it manually in the traditional way).

With software that requires me to go download and run an installer for updates, I find I often put off updates until something is added that I *really* want. It's just too cumbersome a process that I don't have time to do a dozen times a day as all my various software packages get upgraded. However, with software that updates itself, I find I almost always switch to the latest release almost immediately, since I can just click, flip to something else for a minute, then flip back to my newly updated software. And I can tell you that this sort of user behavior is very, very common. That's why the OS vendors are all doing this for their OS updates.

An additional benefit to NuSphere is that they can (with notice) pass along anonymous system information, such as memory or OS version or even data like crash statistics and how many times some feature has been used. This sort of data is extremely useful in planning the development road map.

Note that I don't think this needs to be added right away. For now, I'd be happy if NuSphere just updated the news forum. However, I think this is definitely something that they should consider for the future. That being said, there's an absolutely fantastic library out there called SparklePlus (http://code.google.com/p/sparkleplus/) that lets developers add this to a Mac OS X app in literally about five minutes without adding a single line of code. It's free and open source, so it's usable by any and all. Being the much larger market, I assume there's something similar for Windows, which would make this feature quite easy to add.

check http://www.nusphere.com/news/changes50.htm

thanks stappel,

Though it's weird, I thought the changelogs for new builds were located in the 'News' section of the forum. But it is not updated since May, the 31st.

@medifirst: so thought i but they seem to switch once in a while. they had a change log for version 4.6.1 on almost the same place like the 5.0, then they started using the News section for build before 5028 and with the 5.0.1 release (build 5028) we got an email with the link above. strange it is.