Work continues to progress. Some basic controls have been created, but pending a preliminary UI design, not much more will be done in the way of custom controls.
I decided I wanted to go ahead and write the image importer to populate the DB. Unfortunately, to do that, I need to be able to traverse .ZIP and other archive files. Actually, I don't necessarily need to be able to traverse them, but I need the infrastructure in place for dealing with it so I don't have to rewrite the import routines later. So, to that extent, I've created the FileSystem class and started implementing the first IArchiveProvider- and IArchive-derived classes in the ZipProvider plugin.
To help me test the FileSystem class and its integration with the IArchiveProvider, I've decided that scripting would be a good system for testing it, as it doesn't require adding a test plugin or test code into the actual app. Though, once it's actually debugged, I intend to provide unit tests for it.
Anyway, all of this has led to fixing of glitches in the scripting code, both in the script editor and in the main application.
I've been trying to estimate when we might have an alpha release. I was estimating the mid to end of summer not too long ago, but I'm beginning to be more optimistic, as the progress lately has been quite substantial. I'm now thinking that by the end of May or early June, we might have an initial release. I have two vacations between now and then, so that's factoring in my vacations.
The one major unknown in all of this is with regards to UI design. I'm hoping that won't hold us back from a May or early June release, but it may. It depends on when we get a design and how much work that design will entail.
Writing custom controls is a good deal of work as there is a great deal of detail involved in terms of implementation of logic, designer handling, and rendering. I will continue to add controls, concentrating on the first two issues; logic and designer handling, while leaving the rendering fairly simple so that rendering will be the only real hurdle, once we have a design. Hopefully that will help to ensure we deliver more quickly.
In terms of what I expect to be in the initial Alpha release:
- MS SQL Server, SQL Server Express, SQLite, and MySQL support
- Support for multiple databases (that is, to be able to create multiple databases and to switch between them at runtime)
- Importing of images into the database
- An album navigator/editor
- Thumbnail viewer
- Image viewer
- Scripting
- Some basic color handling and filtering (brightness, contrast, gamma, sharpen, blur, etc)
- Support for importing images from .ZIP files
- Export to at least some image hosting services (Flickr, ImageVenue, etc)
- Metadata tag (EXIF, IPTC, JFIF, etc) reading, possibly some editing as well. This will likely only include a subset of the tags we eventually want to handle, but we'll try to get the most important and most commonly used tags in first.
I think this will be sufficient for an Alpha release and it will account for a vast majority of the infrastructure needed for most of the other functionality we'll be adding for the beta and final releases.
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Work continues to progress. Some basic controls have been created, but pending a preliminary UI design, not much more will be done in the way of custom controls.
I decided I wanted to go ahead and write the image importer to populate the DB. Unfortunately, to do that, I need to be able to traverse .ZIP and other archive files. Actually, I don't necessarily need to be able to traverse them, but I need the infrastructure in place for dealing with it so I don't have to rewrite the import routines later. So, to that extent, I've created the FileSystem class and started implementing the first IArchiveProvider- and IArchive-derived classes in the ZipProvider plugin.
To help me test the FileSystem class and its integration with the IArchiveProvider, I've decided that scripting would be a good system for testing it, as it doesn't require adding a test plugin or test code into the actual app. Though, once it's actually debugged, I intend to provide unit tests for it.
Anyway, all of this has led to fixing of glitches in the scripting code, both in the script editor and in the main application.
I've been trying to estimate when we might have an alpha release. I was estimating the mid to end of summer not too long ago, but I'm beginning to be more optimistic, as the progress lately has been quite substantial. I'm now thinking that by the end of May or early June, we might have an initial release. I have two vacations between now and then, so that's factoring in my vacations.
The one major unknown in all of this is with regards to UI design. I'm hoping that won't hold us back from a May or early June release, but it may. It depends on when we get a design and how much work that design will entail.
Writing custom controls is a good deal of work as there is a great deal of detail involved in terms of implementation of logic, designer handling, and rendering. I will continue to add controls, concentrating on the first two issues; logic and designer handling, while leaving the rendering fairly simple so that rendering will be the only real hurdle, once we have a design. Hopefully that will help to ensure we deliver more quickly.
In terms of what I expect to be in the initial Alpha release:
- MS SQL Server, SQL Server Express, SQLite, and MySQL support
- Support for multiple databases (that is, to be able to create multiple databases and to switch between them at runtime)
- Importing of images into the database
- An album navigator/editor
- Thumbnail viewer
- Image viewer
- Scripting
- Some basic color handling and filtering (brightness, contrast, gamma, sharpen, blur, etc)
- Support for importing images from .ZIP files
- Export to at least some image hosting services (Flickr, ImageVenue, etc)
- Metadata tag (EXIF, IPTC, JFIF, etc) reading, possibly some editing as well. This will likely only include a subset of the tags we eventually want to handle, but we'll try to get the most important and most commonly used tags in first.
I think this will be sufficient for an Alpha release and it will account for a vast majority of the infrastructure needed for most of the other functionality we'll be adding for the beta and final releases.