Treasured finally comes to Windows in native form.

Why did it take 15 years to port the app to Windows?

For the first version back in 2008, I choose to develop for Mac, because most of the customers back then were using a Mac, and creating an app on Mac from scratch both fulfilled my aspirations and matched my skillset.

After a few years operating the Video Repair Service exclusively on Mac, the bar of 1000 different repair algorithms had been crossed, in other words the code base had grown considerably, and porting it all to Windows was not just difficult, but would need years of work.

This is when I convinced myself that instead of a native Windows app, I could develop a web app that would address not just Windows users, but also Linux and mobile devices. Server-side, it would run on a Mac, so existing code would be reused. A very bad idea, but you only know when you try…

I took this road, first came MP4repair.org, now defunct, whose heyday around 2017 just happened when GoPro and small drones had their peak of popularity. Having demonstrated its value for short video clips recorded by “amateurs”, I decided to develop a professional version of the video repair web app, inspired by Treasured.

It shipped in 2016, and quickly became a fairly competent tool for Windows users, who could not run Treasured on their PCs. Still, it remained a web app, and as such the user experience can never be as polished as with a native app.

Unreliable Internet connections, slow processing, differences between browsers, and no access to hardware… the web app would never get close to Treasured.

Finally in early 2023, I considered that Treasured code base was mature enough and that repair algorithms had converged and standardized, making a Windows port a possibility. Even with a healthy code base, porting is hard, because between Windows and macOS, objects like an application, a window, a file, … behave differently. Each of those dozens of subtle differences is a challenge on its own, sometimes with consequences on the whole app architecture.

I’m proud to announce, after almost one year of work, that Treasured for Windows has shipped.
Next months will bring it to feature and reliability parity with its Macintosh elder brother, then in 2024 we will start adding exciting new features to the Treasured app again.