Holiday is over. Haven’t done any work so no real news. I was planning to code the SVN snapshot uploader, but was too lazy. Anyway, looking forward to start working again tomorrow. It’s going to be an interesting year. CE should reach 1.0 status before summer. Also I’m hoping to launch at least one other program. Although last year was a disappointment because of the slow progress speed, I did learn a lot about project management which has been problematic for me. There’s still a lot to learn but I think I’m on the right road.

This year I’m hoping to make the work more structured and routine like. I’m also going to build a new office which should help in creating more structured work environment. And maybe if I can save some money, I’ll buy new work computer. My hard drive is dying so I’ll need to at least replace that.

Anyway, I’m going to implement the new settings engine and dialog to CE next week.

It’s been fairly productive week. I managed to design half of the settings scheme. The other half is the harder one so we’re not out of the woods yet. Also I did more work on CE’s UI to make it function well with the new SpTBX. I still have to do some work with breadcrumb and address bars, maybe even rewrite them. Anyway, here’s a SVN snapshot of CE:

CubicExplorer SVN (0.81.0.953)

Installer 2,0MB:
http://www.cubicreality.com/downloads/cubicexplorer/CubicExplorer_SVN_Setup.exe

Zip 1,9MB:
http://www.cubicreality.com/downloads/cubicexplorer/CubicExplorer_SVN.zip

Note, this version is probably not stable so you might want to use it only for previewing the new skin support. I’m working on a script that will automatically upload this type of SVN snapshots every day or at least few times a week. But more about that once it’s finished.

Have a nice holiday everyone

No big news. I’ve been working this week with the options dialog for CE and now have a working base. As I was designing it, I decided to rewrite the whole settings scheme of CE. Currently it’s a bit messy and I’ve never been happy with it. Since there aren’t that many settings used in CE yet, changing the settings scheme shouldn’t be a major issue. The biggest problem is to come up with a design that can scale well for many type of features.

The options dialog is very basic with left side (tree) navigation. There’s going to be two modes in it, basic and advanced. Here’s a screenshot of a prototype:

I was meaning to release a SVN snapshot of CE last week, but because I started to work with the bug tracker there were no time to make CE work properly with the new version of SpTBX. I’ll see if I can cook up something for next Friday.

I’ve been working this week with the new version of SpTBX library. It’s a set of controls that I use in CE (menu,toolbars,buttons etc.). Thanks to Robert Lee’s great work, the new version now supports skinning. I had to do quite a lot modifications to CE to make the new version work correctly but it’s mostly up and running now.

There’s few cool new themes available but some old themes are missing, like Aluminum.

I wrote a simple skin editor that makes it easier to create your own skins.

SpSkin Editor, source + exe (852KB)
http://cubicreality.pp.fi/files/misc/SpSkinEditor.zip

I’m still not sure when the next release date is. I’ve done some work on the options dialog and have pretty good idea on how it will look and feel.

I spent last week on hacking the LSLive NAS box. It’s now up and running. I’ve already moved CE’s sources to it. I’m using svnserve as the SVN server. The CE repository is automatically copied every night to a net drive that I’m subscribing. I’ll still have to do some plans on how I’ll backup my other important files but at least CE is now safe.

Anyway, I’m down with the flu now . Tried to do some work yesterday but can’t really concentrate at this condition. I decided to change the strategy as a result of the writers block. I’m now working on version 0.90. It means that the next release of CE will have some sort of options dialog (or at least a skeleton of it).