We're releasing CaseBook - a rewritten, more focused version of Investigator - this week, in time for the New England Conference on Child Sexual Abuse. This is going to be primarily a single user desktop or laptop application - aimed at sitting on a unit secretary's or supervisor's computer, or an individual investigator's laptop - to keep track of the status of active cases. When I was still running the detectives in Poughkeepsie, we ran an earlier version with great success on several complicated fraud and missing persons cases, one of which is still under investigation almost five years later.

But I digress! What I'm thinking about now, taking a few minutes off from doing just this, is arriving at the point where you say "This version is done, ready, finished" and hit the button that produces the end result. The point at which the product is frozen and deemed Good To Go.

PolicePro, if the last ten years actually happened, has never reached that point. We never stop adding to it, removing from it, or tweaking it. Since we provide ongoing technical support for it, this is the way it goes. While we do have loose versioning, it's hard to point at any one install and find that it exactly matches any other from that or any time period.

CaseBook, being particularly focused and not aimed at network deployment, and very inexpensive, has to be done differently. While PolicePro is arguably a product in a loose sense of the word, CaseBook is specifically just that. Therefore, once I hit the Create Runtime button, the result is intentionally frozen so that no one, programmer or otherwise, can make any functional changes to it.

That last mile of arriving at this point is the toughest. Something that may be "finished" is not necessarily "done" in this game. Every detail has to be right - there will be no more jumping under the hood and just fixing some minor (or not so minor) bug or gremlin. The last week has been nothing but compiling, testing, finding one more damn thing, fixing that, compiling and testing again... Loop Until Done.

And now that it's been beaten hard and found to be durable, and the all important first time install/setup experience - a whole different thing - has been arrived at, we can of course start keeping track of what will be added or changed in the Master file here between now and whenever the next release occurs. There's the discipline part! With PolicePro, I've always just gone ahead and made the changes to client versions as they arose, and anyone with a brain will tell you that is NOT the way to go. We're trying to take that lesson to heart, but with CaseBook we're living it.

We've made Windows as well as Mac versions of this one, since we may step outside the strict police world into some more social work or security type environments, where Macs may be found. I can happily say for once that there is such a thing as a program or function that is far easier and more pleasant to run on Windows - creating the install packages.

I've been using successive versions of Indigo Rose's outstanding Setup Factory install creation tool for nearly ten years now, and the thing is always a pleasure to fire up. If it were only cross-platform! I have not yet found a cross-platform or Mac specific installer that can touch it, and even if I did, I wouldn't walk away from it out of sheer loyalty for the suffering it's saved me over those years. I think it's one of the great friends a small ISV can find.