It’s been quiet, too quiet. I’ve been at work on a new release for five months now. I wanted this post to be about a release including a halfway usable version of the new tool I’ve been working on all of that time; or actually, the truth is I wanted that a month or two ago.
But instead what I do have is technically a kind of a milestone. To begin with, here I am announcing a new release, one that even warranted changing the minor version number. The “technical” milestone is this release puts a stop to a longstanding problem of debris collecting on Sword of Moonlight’s tool suite’s “windows”; for example when another window is moved in front of one of Sword of Moonlight’s. Luckily it hadn’t been a bigger deal since Windows Vista because it works differently.
However if for any reason you need to use the Basic or Classic modes, or Windows XP (I have a nettop with XP installed myself) then until now there wasn’t much you could do beyond occasionally grabbing your window and taking it to the bottom of the screen and back to force it to clean up its act. Ha! Yeah, not cool. And while it may not seem like a whole lot, especially if you’ve moved on to newer Windows, nevertheless working correctly across the various supported versions of Windows and their various modes as well is at the very least a necessary step on the road to a Sword of Moonlight “beta”.
Of course I’ve been aware of this for the longest time, but to be honest I had no clue how to begin to approach the problem. It was only after I worked on a couple tools from the ground up — that build on top of the existing tools, existing inside of them so-to-speak — when I noticed only a week or two ago that those new tools were not exhibiting the same debris collecting behaviors. For me, that was a lead, or in fact, a clear course of action. And so it was then just a matter of time, both to do the job and before my urge to take leave of this all consuming, time consuming work got the best of me.
BUT wait, there’s more! Also included in this one time offer — er, release — is a new “mouse” input model for SOM_MAP plus a number of quality features I have been sitting on for months, and also a demonstration of the-big-new-tool that is going to be the centerpiece of the next release. One point of interest I’d like to highlight is the text input boxes, which should now include a full undo/redo feature set, and if you have Windows 8 there is even an automatic spellchecker facility that I enabled only earlier today; which I’m not actually able to try myself because I haven’t access to Windows 8 here at home.
Speaking of today: Today I came across two software bugs as I was preparing this release. I had originally planned to announce a forum attachment based demo instead. But if not for them bugs…
Forum Discussion
