Well it’s been quite a while since I posted here. Many thousands of man hours have gone by. AstroPlanner in now at V2.0b58. So what is the current status of the application?Well, the application is in reasonably good shape, and I suspect in another release or two’s time I will start on the final debugging and manual writing phase. By writing and illustrating the manual as I go, I find a lot of cosmetic and other bugs, and often find small overlooked features that need improving or tweaking. As much as I enjoy adding new features, that’s not going to happen from now on, unless it’s a “low hanging fruit” situation. i.e. something trivially easy to add, without much chance of introducing new bugs or side-effects.
Development has taken a long time, mainly because a lot of internal re-engineering has gone on behind the scenes. As I remarked in earlier posts, V1.x was not in a fit state to be extended beyond its current state. It is/was slow and used old technologies that are no longer supported. V2 uses as much of the latest technology as I can cram in without breaking my brain. It uses the latest compilers and frameworks, which means if something doesn’t work in the vendor’s software, I can lean on them to get it fixed.
Although it’s not perfect, I (and a lot of the beta testers) believe V2 is a much better product than V1.x. It’s faster and more scalable (let’s see how well V1.6 handles a 3,000 object plan), and fixes many (not all) annoyances and shortcomings of V1.
V2.0b59, which should release in a day or so, is looking pretty stable.
John McDonnell | 28-Oct-09 at 2:52 pm | Permalink
Version 1.6.1 handles 3,000 object plans fairly well. It even handles 31,900 object plans. The fun starts when you look for duplicates in a plan with 31,900 objects. It found 10 percent were duplicates. On a 7.5 year old PowerMac G4 it only took 5.5 days to find the duplicates