Developer Journal 4/30/8

 

The portion of code giving us trouble was originally written in a rather rushed fashion to meet last December's deadlines for 0.2.0.  It was originally intended to be temporary "stand in" code for 0.2.  As these things happen, it worked well at the time so replacing it was bumped from the schedule during 0.3 development and deferred until a future unscheduled version 2.  As a result it was not written properly to be well maintainable and has since received several "band-aids" to keep it working.  This is my own personal fault as I made each of these decisions and wrote the original code.

 

Unfortunately, the recent results of the beta testers are making it abundantly clear that that this area of code keeps coming up as the culprit for a wide variety of problems.  This has resulted in a large number of "11th hour delays" this past month. 

 

The result: we're doing the right thing for our customers... the section of poorly written code is being rewritten/replaced with a properly written one to ensure that we deliver a quality product that can be quickly supported. 

 

In the rumor category: It has not been committed to yet, but a side effect of all of this may allow us to proceed with the SDK (or a portion thereof) for third party plugins and utilities sooner than originally planned.  It will not be part of 1.0, but it may appear sooner in the schedule than it currently is. 

 

Oh wait... most of you don't know about the SDK yet.... hmmm.

 

Well I think thats all I have to ramble on about... Thanks and keep up all the hard work to you and all your beta testers.

 

Slink

 

The slowdown is mostly with the drawing tools.  We've added several (icicle, circle, star, snowflake, leaping arch, curtain strobe, move, resize, individual drawing element delete, and background picture brightness).  Some of these have caused unexpected problems and others have revealed existing problems that had previously gone unnoticed.  The beta testers have done a great job at uncovering these new and unexpected issues.  To add to the fun, I've been sick for a couple days so productivity has been less than expected (isn't the timing wonderful).

 

I'm not going to set a date this time as the dates seem to get me in trouble... but it is really close.  There should be a public release candidate (0.9) by the early to middle of next week.  As already mentioned, all features are present... it's just the bugs being worked out now.

 

I was also wondering if I could update the email address that you send annoucements too? I may have had it set up to go to my last jobs address, and would like to change it.

 

Pm me if I can.

 

Thank again

Slink