Weekly update: 18->25 October 2009

Here I am again!

It was a calm week - read: everything went as planned.

Development

We rolled out the 1.2beta2!

With quite a fat change-log. The most interesting thing is the detachable file panel and the drag'n'drop: now you can drag'n'drop files from the file panel to a tabble on the tabble floor, or to another app. The cool thing about this is that for example you can get your mp3 sorted according to the party you played them or the place your heard them, and throw them into a playing cool.... cool, isn't it :-)

There is probably gonna be a RC before we roll out the 1.2 stable... which is giving us some more time to update the manual and rework a bit our site.

What made it and what not

We temporarily put aside the idea of making a full ZUI-ish desktop replacement. The idea is definitely cool, but we soon realized that there is a looooot of work behind such a thing, and that it has to be bulletproof, both technically and the on the UI side... you can't just throw a desktop replacement that does 1/2 of the stuff of your current desktop and pretend that people use it... not? :-)

The new skin for the app is there! Yeah! It looks pretty neat and gives such a different feeling. It still needs some tune-up as there are a couple of bugs here and there, of course.... it's here.

Also, the GUI went forward in different places: a couple of new effects, some fixes here and there and a redesigned "quick" window which becomes crucial as it's the one coming out when you right click on a file in Explorer.

Explorer integration works also for the 64bits machine, thanks a lot to the guys at ezshellextension for their help! -> Techie stuff: developing functionalities to let 2 applications (Tabbles and Explorer in this case) talk to each other can be pretty painful, specially as you have to write them in C and go to a pretty low level...we couldn't bother coding anything in C and with ezshellextension the integration was working in less than 2 days. Cool!

Well, what else? I'll spare you the 1000 more bug fixes.. :-)

Sales, Marketing and everything else

We installed phplist and we're on the way to create our Newsletter.

Well, this Newletter idea has been in our head for a while, and this week I finally got it kickstarted. I did some research first on the Joomla extension directory and after a couple of hours I realized that 1) I didn't need any integration with Joomla and 2) that the phpbb of the mailinglist software is phplist.

The installation took like 5 mins, I had to fight a bit with the mysql db as the installed wouldn't write one table, but the built-in db check function in phplist did tell me where the problem was and within 2 mins I googled the workaround on the phplist forum.

So basically, I had the first test newsletter sent some 3 hours after I started searching :-D

I found this interesting article on how to set it up and what work and what doesn't, maybe it's a bit outdated but it helped a lot. Then I started googling phplist free templates, and could only find this (ok, I googled 3,5 mins). But soon after I realised that since phplist uses the excellent FCKeditor to edit the templates, all I needed to do was some copy&paste from one of hour web page, in order to have the styles in the email templates...the rest can easily be done in the editor.

Some more messing around with phpbb...it's nearly fun now

I must say I'm beginning to enjoy it: I began to do some work on our phpbb based forum as a complete neophite and at the time my mindframe was like "the less I have to fight with it, the happier I'll be". A few months have gone from those days, and in the meanwhile I've been installing a template, modifying it, installing mods, modifying them some more and eventually I started modifying the HTML files in order to have this or that button displayed or hidden...I found out what the bbcode is, and even try to do some little hacks/modifications myself (with mixed results...hehe).

The coolest thing we'd like to have on our forum is still a post voting system: people need to be able to give posts a vote so that those who come after them will know what is important and what isn't..

Uh, we did setup Mantis so that user don't need to register an account to report a bug, also pretty needed.

I guess that's it for tonight :-)