Let It Build!

First of all, we would like to thank our first customers for the right choice! From our side it's time to announce how BuildDesk will serve you even better. The release of 1.5 is scheduled on June 25, 2006. It will contain several exciting features:

• Ability to use BuildDesk as a "application packager" only, without dependency on any IDE. You just create a new "empty" BuildDesk project, define installation layout and put arbitrary files there. The rest is the same -- BuildDesk will generate script to build your application
• Better IDEA importing: per-module JDK support and source file encoding
• Better support for properties. You will be able to easily understand which properties and defined in your build script and set them right in the BuildDesk's "run" page

The price of $99 for one BuildDesk's license will be valid till the release of 1.5. After that, it will return to normal: $199 per license. At the same time it's very close that we open our support for NetBeans and Eclipse. It's gonna be in version 2.0 which is expected to be released in the second half of summer. Please do not hesitate to ask questions and post messages to the BuildDesk discussion group.

We are proud to announce that BuildDesk 1.0 final release is available. To make it short, the thing that you get with BuildDesk is unconditional ease and speed of doing tasks that usually take weeks. Compile, layout, obfuscate, make installer and launcher - just several minutes and your build script is ready. You know that the rest (writing code) is more important and interesting. So just don't spend time on builds, just have BuildDesk do the routine. Since it's the very first baby born by ProductiveMe, we've set up a promotional price for a short period of time. Please check out http://productiveme.com/buy and take your chance to grab it while it's unbelievably cheap! We have many ideas and already working prototypes for the next version of BuildDesk and even one more product. So keep in touch, we are just starting! Enjoy! Quick build demo Download Request evaluation & buy

• You can now disable generated phases such as compilation or obfuscation & etc. This is really handy when you're debugging your build. For instance, you ran a full build once, but found a bug in obfuscation. You apparently don't want to compile it over again just to fix something that doesn't relate to compilation, right? So you just disable both "prepare" and "compile" phases and run the build over again, much quicker! It will just skip that phases.
• You can use any ant variables in BuildDesk's text fields. For instance, you can specify "Version info" like this: And then, just use the standard "-D" option to set up appropriate values.

Please have a look at short overview demo for both features (Flash, ~1.8M).

Download build 524

• BuildDesk tries to highlight any possible problem it can suspect. All the errors and warnings are highlighted in-place and gathered together in a special pane. Now it's possible to navigate from the pane to the place where potential problem resides. See demo (Flash, ~2MB)
• We recompiled our ant extensions so that it's possible to build under JDK1.3+
• BuildDesk now can successfully package classes that were compiled from a single java-source file. It's pretty rare case, but anyway, BuildDesk can handle this.

We've started to polish our site and record cool flash demos for the release of 1.0! Can't wait to release and implement new fantasic features we have never told of!

Download build 496 We have implemeted last two really neat features for 1.0 and since now established a "feature freeze" stage. We're so close to release 1.0 and happy to feel this. So, what's about features last week? They are really cool.

• Now you can insert any custom ant-calls between BuildDesk's generated build phases: It's really easy to setup all the custom things you have in your builds. Just tell BuildDesk what to call and when. To make things even simpler, we integrated BuildDesk with IDEA a little bit. You can easy open your files in IDEA right from BuildDesk. See flash demo here
• We did our own Windows launcher. It's hot. For now it does all the standard things that such launcher should do and even a little bit more:
  • Show native splash screen and shut it down as your app shows first frame
  • Find JRE or run bundled one
  • Use built-in VM parameters or read them from an external text file
  • Windows launcher generator is platform independent, written in Java!
  We're really happy to have own windows launcher since we know that it's gonna be the best.

So please enjoy the latest build. We'll shortly fix all the bugs we know and unleash BuildDesk. Prices are gonna be really good, you will be surpised!