Well, this have been really quiet lately, but definitively not unoccupied.

Once again, I had to recode core code in order to have a series of advantages

• Date and time support
• Simplify plug-in development
• Plug-in added custom menu commands
• Multi-language support (just for the main interface, not for plug-ins)
• Ironically, redesign the code, so in the future, recode of the core won't imply doing so much work.

I haven't upload new code to the SVN just because until now I manage to have compiling code. It was a nightmare, but totally worth it.

You wouln't believe the diference of code needed to generate a field to store data (e.g. a name or phone number) now compared to before in the plug-ins development. By the way, I know I haven't release a plug-in development guide in order to someone else to develop their own plug-ins, but there is a good reason for this: I changed the way plug-ins are developed like 3 times. Not to worry, I think this method is almost lock in, so I can share a guide with some examples.

I hope to release new binaries in a couple of weeks

Well, it's been almost a month later without posting, but this is not dead. I would really like to publish some real content according to this time frame but it's not the case.

Still some development has taken place. I'm working in some new features for the plug-ins to take advantage of. As for now, an user can introduce values and there is now data checking. I'm introducing some data checking mechanism soe the plug-in developer can check for inconsistencies.

Also, the yu-gi-oh sample plug-in will have a major modification which will make current cards with some invalid values. So a tool for allowing corrections for current cards is being added.

It could seem that this are in fact the same issue. Indeed, they are related but are not the quite same. While the first one is for correcting values while being entered, the other one is for correcting values  from already edited cards.

More to come

Multi-thread implementation is ready but buggy. Random error appears indicating that files are being open while other process is using it. This is because the thread are not being created in efficient manner. Maybe I'll put on hold the multi-thread design.

Thankfully, the multi-thread work force me to do another check to the interface design and implementation due a big design mistake that end up in a deadlock of the program. This error involved a redundant update of items on screen. With this redundancy resolved the loading of items is much smoother, so the past work will not be totally wasted (short-term wise).

Right now core implementations for loading collections are changed. The tricky part is making the application multi-thread to handle loading in the background while the interface elements are being created, which is not yet implemented.

While I was changing some loading functions, I took the opportunity to clean a lot of code and change bad code design decisions, including plug-in needed implementations. These means that the plug-ins already implemented need to be changed. But as result, the future implementation of plug-ins will be easier.

With the core funtions changed, the next thing to be change is the way the interface is handled. After a short glance at the code already done, cleanning is clearly a most. This is the work I am doing right now.

After this, a small release could be released (though I haven't decided this already). This would include the update for the plug-ins and the inclusion of the file plug-in, which instead of showing the information within the file, will show de file information, like filename and size.

The idea is that with the new release of the software, cards created will be still compatible. But I have been thinking of changing the yu-gi-oh plugin, which will imply that cards already created by final users will not be correctly loaded or not loaded at all. More of this soon.