While this is mostly a maintenance release, I couldn’t keep myself from address a couple of feature requests from you guys. I’ll highlight the major changes below and you can find the entire release notes here.

Security​

Sometimes we just have to talk about security. This is one of those times. WhatPulse takes security and privacy pretty seriously, ranging from backend security controls and monitoring to giving you complete control on whats counted and what’s public. In our 15th years (!!!) of existence, we haven’t had any issues.

This update addresses 2 security concerns that we discovered in the last couple of months.

1 — Passwords One is about your password. We don’t save your password, we save a hash of that password so we can compare hashes when you’re trying to login. We had a lot of portability concerns, because that hashing had to be the same on the website and the clients (Windows, MacOS & Linux). That meant the hashing method was held back by the lowest denominator and therefor wasn’t as accurate as we’d hoped. The result was that it only looked to the first 9 characters of the password. If you have a 10 character password, you’d be able to change the 10th character and still get in. Not that earth shattering, but still not what you’d expect.

So, we centralised the hashing and started using the securest modern hashing method we could find.

TL;DR: logins now looks to more then the first 9 characters of your password. Thanks to Caboose700 for the initial report.

2 — Client to website communication The second item on the agenda is the client to website communication. Meaning stats pulses, logins, account refreshes, stuff like that. This communication goes over HTTPS, so it is by default encrypted over the internet.

An awesome user (who rocks, but wishes to stay anonymous — you know who you are!) reported a way to see into the requests from the client to the website, depending you were in the same network as the clients computer and do some hacking magic. Basically they would be able to see what stats you were pulsing. While this is a corner case and pretty unlikely to happen, but as I said — we need to take security seriously.

This update makes sure someone else can’t look into your pulses (unless you make them public on the website) and enables end-to-end encryption.

TL;DR: The client talks more securely to the website.

Phew, security stuff out of the way. Here’s some more fun stuff.

Easier & Quicker Startup​

There have been a couple of changes which make the client startup faster. But it’s also become easier. Why? For one, the client now saves your local settings to the website, so whenever you reinstall the client (or your entire computer) — the client will now ask you if you want to download your old settings. No more manual work. Also, if you’re installing on a brand new computer, the client will present a setup wizard (not Merlin) so that you can quickly set your preferred settings.

Setup wizard. Click headings to show more quick settings.

Other Mentionable’s​

People with high resolutions on should be happy about this one: the text and images in the client don’t look HUMONGOUS anymore.

Also, sometimes in 2.8.1, the keyboard heat map wasn’t loading. We called its mother and it has promised to load each time now.

I’ll close with this other cool addition, which has had me kick myself on not doing this sooner. All the date picker widgets now have a “custom” option on it, where you can select a custom date range for the period you want to see.

I’ll leave it at that for this post, but if you’d like to see all changes — check out the release notes.

As always, you can use the “Check for Updates” button in your settings page to update your current client, or download the installer and update that way.

The system behind these emails was in need of an overhaul. Because it is so popular, the amount of email it sends has been rapidly growing. This has led to a few quirks in the system. It sometimes forgets to send certain people their email and about 1% of the calculations were off. So, time for an overhaul.

I’m proud to present the new version of the Weekly Update emails, with a new and robust system behind it. Check out the new format:

As you can see it contains the same information as the old format, with a few additions. You can now quickly see how you did compared to the previous week. How cool is that?!

Also, don’t panic — but this new report will start appearing in your inbox on Thursday, instead of Friday. Next Thursday will be the first run.

We’ve also made sure that we’ll be able to add more stats to this weekly gem. Stay tuned!

Milestones In WhatPulse 2.8, Milestones were introduced. Milestones are an easy way to remind you to take a small break every hour, or to reward yourself with a cup of coffee once you’ve reached your goal. To get started, check out this article.

Computer History Computer information has been a feature for a while, and now we’re extending it to include Computer History. This new feature allows you to keep track of changes made to your hardware and Operating System over time!

Answer the question; "did that OS upgrade cause my computer to act funny, or did something else?". You can find your history when you click on one of your computers in your public profile. Here’s an example:

CyberMonday 2017 It’s become a tradition on the internet to celebrate CyberMonday after the American Thanksgiving. We have a lot to say thanks for, including you. That’s why we’re chipping in to CyberMonday with a free 2 month Premium membership. All you have to do to redeem is click below! (the code expires on December 1st)

Redeem free Premium here

We hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and Stay Geeky!

The older 1.x clients still continued to function and generate stats just fine, but that’s going to change on 1 December 2017. That’s the date when we’re going to be disabling the access to the website for 1.x clients.

The reasoning behind this is pretty simple;

1. It’s been 5 years since we moved on from 1.x.

2. Technology keeps evolving and the website platform is evolved to where it has a modern backend and the functionality that’s needed for 1.x communication is not compatible with the used software anymore. We’d need to rewrite the entire 1.x communication scripts to match.

3. It’s been 5 years.

There are not a lot of people still actually using a 1.x version, but they will get a direct email to remind them to upgrade to 2.x to make sure they get surprised and so they can migrate.

“Project WhatPulse”​

WhatPulse started 14 years (!!!) ago to replace an existing key counter that was retiring. There was a bunch of us on IRC using this counter and didn’t want it to go away, so I took the existing client & website and started hosting it so that we could continue using the counter.

That was right around I started with a programming class in trade college and decided to take what I’ve learned and unleash that on the client to start extending the feature set. Adding click counting (the original client only counted keys), mouse mileage and a bunch of features on the website. This was all just toying around and only me and my friends were using it.

In the course of a few years people found the public website with a registration form some how; mostly by word of mouth (“hey look how cool this is!”), as I never did advertise for it. The user-base kept growing and growing until WhatPulse had around 50.000 active users in 2005.

Enter Premium Services​

This was when I needed to do something about the hosting costs of the website, as it was basically costing more than I was willing to shell out for a side-project (couple hundred a month). This is when the premium version first came to life (with awful features like upload space and an email address on @users.whatpulse.org). People subscribed to help out with the hosting costs and I could continue to dabble without going broke. This went on for a few more years, releasing versions with features I wanted to build and geek out on.

WhatPulse 2.0 & Project Deimos​

Another milestone was in 2011 when the user count hit 150.000. This was the time when the premium income didn’t cover the hosting costs anymore and I needed to level that out again. At the same time, Robbie Groenewoudt from the Deimos Project (similar to WhatPulse) contacted me about wanted to merge his client and users with WhatPulse. This was when we started working on WhatPulse 2.0 together. Cross-platform with all the same features. We added networking and uptime capabilities. My inner geek was going nuts. This new version would also have better premium features (application centric) which would help keep WhatPulse self-sustaining.

WhatPulse 2.0 was also when I got the stats bug again and began doing a lot more work, especially on the website. Dabbling went on, only a bit more frequent. Robbie eventually moved on to other things.

Sometimes the client sucked.​

After 2.7, I wanted (and needed) to do more with quality control, as the project had grown to around 250.000 users and they all had different computer configurations — some who did not like the way the client was built and there were some nasty situations for users (corrupted databases, crashing all the time, etc). All client builds and installation files were manually and well, I made stupid mistakes here and there. This frustrated users and be proxy, me.

Automate all the things​

With the help of James Newton, I began to automate the client builds and add tests to make sure the client was of a certain quality. This took a long time to get right. I needed a system that could build and test the client on all platforms. This probably took 9 months alone. It didn’t help that I was creating the new dashboard (it’s awesome, though right?!) at the same time.

This automated build and test pipeline was finally done in May of this year and I focused on fixing some bugs in the client itself, plus adding some stuff here and there (Milestones for one, which I’ll cover in an upcoming post).

Before having automated it, a manually build & test procedure took me around 12 hours on every version release. 12 hours are pretty hard to find when you’re working a 40 hour job and have a couple of other side gigs, which basically meant just releasing a new version took a week or two of scrambling for time. Now, it takes 10 minutes. -micdrop-

Things like releasing a new version in a day is now possible. Which was convenient when I forgot an automated test in 2.8 which caused the client to crash on certain configurations when making a database backup. The result of all this was that I was able to fix the client and release 2.8.1 within 2 hours.

Summary​

So this was a very long way of saying that WhatPulse is still a “project” and that things are going to take time. However, to all the new and awesome tools out there to support development like this, releases can be sped up tremendously.

Moving forward​

Ideas for WhatPulse are pretty much endless. My own ideas are on a huge backlog and I’m getting more and more ideas from you guys. Since introducing the “I wish this page could..” feature on the website, I’ve implemented 50+ of those ideas. Awesome stuff, it feels like we’re in this together.

Continuing on the same positive note, James Newton has agreed to partner up and start to work on that backlog together. This means WhatPulse has two dabblers now, which should increase productivity. ;-)

I’m looking forward to getting more of our ideas to you and I hope you will enjoy them. We’ll also be sharing more stories here. If you have any ideas or commentary on WhatPulse, please let us know.

Thanks for reading!