Sprint 2 status

After a lot of responses have reached us, development has started with an agile approach. The status is for team members available via PivotalTracker, a story-based project planning tool. The sprint period is set at three weeks, at the end of which there is a executable version for the supported platforms. I hope that I can give some realistic prognoses after sprint 4 around the begin of April.

Supported platforms

Currently windows and Linux/Ubuntu are supported. Linux with just an executable, no fancy stuff and Windows through an installer. I hope to be at the head office of my company within three weeks. When I’m lucky this will give me access to a Mac and possible Mac Support.

WinGuide: Continuation of The Guide Version 2

The Guide seems to be more alive than ever. Not only is there involvement of developers on Version 3, but also is version 2 being continued. A direction a welcome very much as Version 3 is not yet available.  Checkout the site at Google.

V3 development started

A lot of people who are enthusiastic users of The Guide asked for new features and bug solving. After a period of silence  the development of a new version has started. Mahadevan, the original author of The Guide, found a new contributor in the person of Maurice B (Me).

At the moment the first code of V3 is shared in the development team :-) . The codebase has been prepared for new changes and the Windows Installer (NSIS) is used to create the first development version.

As we build the application on the Qt framework, we can install V3 no only on Windows, but Linux and Mac as well. The first two have our active attention, for Mac there is a vacancy.

Next steps are creating a product backlog, a request for features has been issued to the users group. Good responses are coming. Great, it’s always good to see it’s alive. In the mean time we’ll work on stabilizing the development process.

Further support

At the moment the development team is small, excellent for the time being as we’re just starting. Never the less I’m looking for further support for people who want to help use with:

• Testing development versions, dirty job but somebody has to do it. Don’t expect to get an early version you can use for production guides! It’s just a way to see where the available version as weak spots and to get some user feedback.
• Translations.
• Apple development. Mainly verify the build process and functionality on the Mac.

v2.0 Released.

The long journey of v2.0 comes to a conclusion today, with it's release. It's mostly the same as v2.0beta1, with a few bug fixes. Thanks to all for the encouraging words and the patience.

Wish you all happy holidays; enjoy The Guide!

2.0 Beta 1

2.0 beta 1 was released today. It fixes a couple of minor bugs since 2.0dev4, but otherwise there are no major changes. No major changes are expected further for 2.0 also -- only fixes for newly-found bugs will be included.

The 2.0 line should be fairly stable by now. 2.0dev4 has had 1100+ downloads from sourceforge alone, and no serious bugs have been reported.

Do let me know any bugs that you come across, and it can be fixed before 2.0 release. Unless there are any major troubles, the next release would be 2.0 final, probably in a couple of weeks time.

This release also ensures that the application picks up all the UI text from resource files, so that localization is possible. If you're interested in translating The Guide to your native language (or any language!) do let me know.

Thanks are due to the patient users of The Guide, for encouraging the development and spreading the word -- Thank You!

Your Checkboxes Are Here

Here come the checkboxes!

You can have icons, checkboxes, neither or both, as decorations on the tree:

Sounds good?

Icons, icons, icons!

Node icons has been a long-requested (and long pending!) feature. It will finally appear in the next release. Here is a preview:

There are forty icons (well, one is the default, so that's 39 actually) for you to play with. The icons themselves are from the "silk icon set" from Mark James.

I replaced the regular book/page icons also with nicer-looking true color icons from the silk icon set.

So, as usual, do let me know your thoughts. Oh, and the set of icons will be fixed (at least for now), so if there are any suggestions for new icons, do let me know before v2.0!

Development Release 3 of v2.0

2.0dev3 is out.

The main feature in this release is the portable mode support. When in the portable mode, Guide will save (and load) preferences to a .ini file (that lives alongside guide.exe). To use the portable mode, either enable it from the preferences dialog:

-OR- open up guide.ini (this is just a text file) from the same directory as guide.exe. You should see something like:

[main]
portable=0

change portable=0 to portable=1 to enable the portable mode.

There are a few other intutive improvements too -- remembering node state, the first visible line per node, search dialog improvements, better east asian language support etc.

So download, have fun, but remember this is an alpha release! Enjoy!

Links: 20dev page, download page.