{"id":4,"date":"2008-01-01T16:59:52","date_gmt":"2008-01-02T00:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/?p=4"},"modified":"2008-05-17T07:17:09","modified_gmt":"2008-05-17T15:17:09","slug":"current-status-of-v2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/?p=4","title":{"rendered":"Current status of V2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As of today, AP V2.0 is largely feature complete. It has plenty of bugs and things that don&#8217;t quite work right, but I have not been concentrating on fixing them until I have most of the development stuff finished. Here&#8217;s a list of things still to do:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fix up the Script system. There have been several changes to the application that require a fair number of mods to the scripting interface (for example, local\/global observations have gone away).\n<li>Printing. The printing of objects\/observations is currently broken, since changes were made to the app. Also the current printing format and mechanism gets lots of complaints, so I need to rethink it. Also, also, the current code is arcane and rats-nest-like. It really needs major refactoring (think: remodelling).\n<li>Removing the Windows MDI interface. The MDI (Multiple Document Interface) paradigm is &#8220;old-fashioned&#8221;, according to Microsoft, so I&#8217;m hoping to lose it. It should also remove a lot of problems with maximising windows and so on, but does add some other quirks that I need to deal with.\n<li>Adding a Windows installer. Mac folks won&#8217;t understand this, but Windows users <em>expect<\/em> an installer with every application. Most of my support problems are a side-effect of not having this. It has become even more critical with the advent of Vista, which is so paranoid I&#8217;m surprised it doesn&#8217;t command the CPU to explode if an unauthorised disk, device, or application is inserted.\n<li>Changing the application so that it stores files in &#8220;approved&#8221; places, rather than all in one folder. This is no now the way to do things properly, both on the Mac and on Windows. Especially true in the case of Vista.\n<li>Rewriting the user manual. This is a pain in the butt, but does bypass a lot of support problems (&#8220;RTFM&#8221;). If only Adobe Framemaker was available for Mac OS X.\n<li>Revise the Plan Wizard to make it more sensible. This might not make it into V2.0, especially as I can&#8217;t think of an easy way to revise it without a lot of work. I&#8217;m currently thinking that a community effort might work (i.e. you tell me what you favourite objects are, and I create a database that everyone can access).\n<li>Revise web site. V2 will use astroplanner.net as its base of operations. Currently there&#8217;s no matching website.\n<\/ul>\n<p>Some of the above can happen during the alpha period. However, V2.0a1 won&#8217;t be as friendly as previous alpha versions. There will be a lot of bugs. V2 is designed to run concurrently with V1. Although there are many changes in file format, most V1 files are converted\/copied to V2 format for you, including plan documents. Currently, catalogue file format remains unchanged, so you don&#8217;t have to panic about big downloads.<\/p>\n<p>So when is that V2.0a1 version appearing you may well ask? Well there are various problems that are stopping that from happening (some real, others in my mind):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The compiler I am using produces code that has major memory leaks on Mac OS X Leopard. This is, apparently, an Apple bug and difficult for the compiler vendor to work around. However, I believe the Mac OS X 10.5.2 release might fix this. I&#8217;d like to see that happen before I get folks to test the software on Macs.\n<li>The compiler has a major bug that prevents the scripting system from working properly on Windows. I&#8217;m hoping this will be fixed in January\/February 2008.\n<li>I hate releasing software that has known bugs, even as an alpha, but I might just bite the bullet and do so anyway.\n<li>To do the Windows and Mac Intel testing\/debugging, I really need a new computer. I have made the decision to delay this until Apple announces its new models (mid January 2008), in the hope that it will prevent me from buying a computer that becomes obsolete in a few weeks (like this one did&#8230;). My current computer\/s is\/are just too darn slow for development work.\n<li>The longer I postpone releasing V2.0, the better experience it will be.\n<li>I&#8217;m somewhat burned out and not firing on all 12 cylinders right now, which is slowing things down a bit.\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As of today, AP V2.0 is largely feature complete. It has plenty of bugs and things that don&#8217;t quite work right, but I have not been concentrating on fixing them until I have most of the development stuff finished. Here&#8217;s a list of things still to do:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-version-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.astroplanner.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}