The Recursive ISV

OK.  Today was a late start but very productive.  I managed to get heaps done and that’s always a good feeling.  The worst thing that can happen to a dev’ is going sour after the kind of hours pulled last month.  Tuesday’s slack off paid a dividend.

First up I finally did what I’ve mentioned several times now and said I’d do in yesterday’s post.  I pulled the final “meta data” out of the project folder and folded it into the database.  Effectively killing (removing) many lines of code and with it a bunch of complexity.

That means that in a project folder there is only the Project file (database) an a folder with the audio files (media).  This speeds up operations, reduces the risk of inquisitive folks deleting something they might need and breaking the project and as the project file is self healing the risk of corruption is vastly reduced. 

While not rocket science by any stretch it takes a bit longer to do than actually writing about it here does.

I managed to write some nice shiny routines to handle Unicode which basically make this possible.  The grid I’m using remains, fortunate as it has some great features, and the data is all nice and safe in the project file.  <sigh of relief>

This was really bugging me.  I did not want to go to release with the method I was using.  Much too easy to break, a lot more code to maintain and an all round PITA.

Next I finally pulled the shell controls widgets shipped with Delphi that I’d been using out and replaced them with some nice super fast ones.  Again, took a lot longer to do than it takes to describe it, but worth every minute. 

Tomorrow I want to begin polishing up the code for the special effects.  They work nicely but some of their parameters are in the GUI and I don’t want to ship with them there.  It makes adding flourishes like presets a lot more complex later.  So out they come into their own objects, in this instance, and I’ll feel a darn site better about them too.

If I finish this before the end of the day I’ll spend some time, again, testing, tweaking and making sure things are as they should be after all these changes.

Got to get back to doing the website too. 

Saturday is technically family day, this week my wife and I go out to dinner to say “goodbye” to Senator Lyn Allison who’s parliamentary career ended last week.  Given how often my wife and I actually go out for dinner it should make a nice change.  The girls will get to stay with Nona and Nono (grandparents) for the night leaving us - first time in thirteen years - to have some “quiet time”.

What that means of course is that I won’t be back on deck until Sunday night.

Later…

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers. - Lewis Thomas