Day 23 - Nearly There, But Not Where I Wanted
24 06 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Today was a better day than the few preceding it over the weekend. Got a lot done, very few interruptions, no weirdness in terms of bugs or strange, unexpected behavior.
Thank goodness!
Would have liked to be further along all the same.
Have just about every menu option linked to functionality now, as well as menus etc reacting to “state” changes in the application. Not rocket science but important none the less.
Scripts, per Act and Scene load and save dynamically so user can write to scripts (stage action, cues, actors lines etc) on the fly and the program simply saves it without any extra action required by the user. Working nicely.
Project archiving now working so the user can place a project into an archive and use that for transporting the project to another machine or as a backup, as they see fit, and includes project file (database), meta data and all Audio. It’s 100% compatible PKZip/Winzip but I’ve changed the extension to make a easier to identify as a file belonging to the program. Self heals if it gets corrupted as well.
Same archive can be opened and “restored” from within the program to any location the user desires.
Miscellaneous tweaks here and there as well to various things.
Still got to do the following:
- Final adjustments to UI where I may have moved an item and it’s no longer aligned.
- Tweaking of any graphics and icons within the UI.
- Template building
- CD Burning (this is a bit of a problem still).
- Implement licensing scheme.
- Implement 30 Day trial stuff.
- Implement 30 Day trial randomized voice over suggesting registration.
- Fill out the About box.
- Wind up the help file.
Most of these will only take a few hours to do. CD burning I’m going to spend some time thinking about while I take a day out to attend my eldest daughters school concert. The voice over stuff is pretty trivial and the About box likewise.
The help file is probably the most amount of work yet to do. Hoping to have it done by Thursday night. However I’ll probably start building the installer before then so I can get the program tested by some external folks who can probably manage without detailed help for the first run through.
That’s all for today. Tomorrow is Tuesday here, as I said above I’m taking a day off and will be back on deck Wednesday afternoon my time. First day off since 7th of June. 
Quote of the day:
It is bad luck to be superstitious. - Andrew W. Mathis
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Scott,
No matter if you get it all done in time or not, you’ve done a tremendous amount of work over the past few weeks.
I had intended to blog more about your software, however as you’d noticed my own blogging had lapsed in favour of getting stuff done. Bad, I know since blogging is a good way to review and reflect on the process of development.
I like your project archiving idea, I think that’s going to work well. How do you handle corruptions (i.e. missing files from archives, etc?)? It would be pretty bad to have an event receive an archive file with a missing track that they don’t test before going “to air”
All the best,
Mike
Hi Mike,
Re the “corrpuptions”, presently as I don’t have time to add “smart” code to scan the media (though it’s all there in terms of referencing, just need to actually write the checking code - but 30 Days limits such niceties) there isn’t any. I’ll be adding that later after release, along with a bunch of stuff I’ve held back. When I mention self healing above I’m talking about the actual archive file, if the archive itself corrupts then it will try and repair the binary. Much like PKZip/WinZip do.
Last night I attended a small “school play” for my daughter. They are in the juniors at high school so it wasn’t critical in terms of execution. However the goofs they did have were pretty major and the beautiful part was that those goofs are exactly what MixAction has been written to avoid. Indeed it’s the entire primary USP for the product. I’m going to blog about it tonight, but it was very heartening (for me, not for them of course) and totally unexpected, though rather fortuitous in a sense given what I’m actually doing here.