Project Planing - Future of TextWiz
Status: Alpha
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In this thread I will talk about my current plans on how I think I could renew, improve, and basically make TextWiz a better application.
Right now I have on my agenda this:
- Adding a status bar
It should be for showing stuff like String info,
modifications used,...
- Adding an undo/redo feature
With this I want to make a more usefull
application out of TextWiz. Anyway, it's always
nice to undo a mistake.
While testing TextWiz I've noticed that the programm takes a few seconds to work on large texts (ca. 1/4 MB) and so I'm thinking that a Progress Bar Window would be of use. It would inform the user on the current status of the modification process till it's done.
One of my goals for TextWiz is to make it as scalable as possible (under java) and that means it should be able to handel very large text (>10MB) in the future without any problmes and in mostly linear time.
Now that the Status Bar and the undo/redo stuff are mostly implemented, I can finally focus on making TextWiz more scalable and thus also more stable. Even though there is some error handling code in the application, I'm not very pleased with it right now. Plus I think TextWiz is way too slow when working with bigger texts (>250KByte) than it should be. It seems that there is still a lot of optimization needed to reduce processing time from about 10-20 seconds on my machine to about maybe 2-5 seconds... but perhaps this figure is too optimistic... we'll see (I've still got a few aces up my sleeve)......
Well, TextWiz has just been updated to version 0.2.3. This version is not that different from the last one, but it does have some improvements implemented and even one bugfix... The most prominent new feature is the string multiplication which allows the copying of a whole part of the text x-times on itself. Zero-times is even allowed.
For the future I think it's best to work on the undo/redo functionality which is currently not really 100% operational... especially when dealing with really long texts...
Furthermore the multithreading part of the application is not programmed gracefully enough in my opinion. It too could use some modification.
Recently I've been thinking about a change in the Java Swing GUI appearance of TextWiz. Currently it has the Java Swing Look And Feel theme 'Ocean', a bold font and unetched panel borders. To me it seems that optically and esthetically this is not the best 'look' for the application. So my current idea is to switch to the more classical Java Swing 'Steel' theme, non-bold fonts and etched panel borders to give the GUI of the application a bit more of a 'seriousness' look, which it is currently lacking in my opinion. This will be on the TODO list (huh?) for the upcoming version of TW. Oh, and it's coming!