Tuple for Windows Public Beta

After months of hard work, hundreds of commits, and dozens of tickets closed, we’re thrilled to announce that the beta of Tuple for Windows is now available to everyone! You can grab it here.

It’s been quite a journey to get here, with lots of false starts, dead ends, and lessons learned. Here are a few reasons we’ve come to love Windows:

• Microsoft’s commitment to backwards compatibility: Microsoft has made a huge effort to ensure that programs written for Windows continue to work for a looooong time. This is great on a number of levels. Because not only were we able to make use of some vintage developer tools, we were also able to utilize many stock libraries on Windows without worrying that they’d be quickly deprecated.

• The rich set of libraries available out of the box: as mentioned, Windows comes with a ton of libraries that you can use from the drop, such as an HTTPS client, GDI, and Direct2D. It’s way easier to get started when so many batteries are included (and you can be confident about their stability).

• The diversity of ways to distribute software: Windows gives you a ton of options for how you want to distribute your application, all with different pros and cons (i.e. self-contained EXEs, zip archives with files, installers, etc). We were able to choose a method that made sense for us; we may revisit this as the application gets more complex. But it’s nice to know that we’ve got lots of options at our disposal.

• Working closer to the metal: we initially tried porting our existing GTK app to Windows, but ended up removing this abstraction and using the native win32 APIs instead. Doing so allowed us to gain more control over the most important parts of the pairing experience (rendering, input capture, etc). Windows gave us the freedom to do this, and doing so made the app faster, more reliable, and easier to reason about.

• Our awesome community: since the earliest alpha releases, we’ve relied on a fantastic group of early adopters who were brave enough to use a piece of software that was, at times….pretty raw. The feedback, bug reports, profiling info, and log files that they provided were invaluable, and helped guide our development process towards improvements that mattered. To all of you early testers - we appreciate you so much!

It’s honestly been a blast to work on Tuple for Windows - and we’re just getting started. This is still a beta, so we’re still actively adding features (webcam support is coming next!). And if you have any feedback at all (or if you encounter any bugs), please let us know!

Again, you can grab Tuple for Windows here. Happy pairing!