elvanos
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A slightly delayed New Year's report for ya'all!
🕑 Added 2022-01-04 22:48:47 +0000 UTCI finally have some good (I hope?) news for y'all!
First off, let's get the health issues off the table: They got marginally better! I won't torture you with excruciating details this time around; especially for those wishing to not lose their dinner over such things. And while the problems aren't fully gone yet, I am trying my best to follow the doctor's advice along with the medicine I was prescribed - So hopefully stuff should fully fix itself in a couple of weeks/months.
With that out of the way, let's talk Fantasia Archive - I spent a lot of my off-work time during the holidays planning the general structure of the whole app, and here is how I intend to continue with the rewrite.
The whole app will be redone in a way of containers that will host extensions and projects in it, which will lead to increased modularity and improved extensibility.
If you're not a programmer and didn't understand a word of the previous sentence, here is a more humanly readable summary of it along with a bunch of extra info!
- The core of FA will work as a shell that gets filled with various things!
- One of these things will include extensions - Pieces of code that will provide added functionality to the app (for example stuff like the current Noteboard). This will open a way to allow user-made extensions to be made for the app (once I figure out how to incorporate such functionality).
- Another thing that will fill the shell will be the content itself - If my plan works as intended, users will be able to work on multiple projects at once if needed as this was quite the requested feature.
- Each of such projects will exist in its own individual directory and will no longer persist in the app memory as is now - While this might be a little inconvenient, it will allow for file handling (PICTURES!) and more intuitive saving/loading of the projects similar to how most other desktop apps function.
- We will be replacing the Hierarchy tree component - I am not sure if that one will get replaced by another library or if I will end up writing my own, but the current state of the tree is horrible when more than 200 items are added to it and it drags the performance of the whole app down as a result.
- Different document types (Characters, Chapters, etc.) will be treated as extensions - Which means that the user will be able to turn off the default ones as they see fit, and adding new ones should be entirely possible to most of at least a little tech-savvy users (some graphical UI will be added a bit later for this functionality specifically).
- With the move towards the file system approach instead of the temporary databases - FA's mobile version might be eventually a possibility. If things would turn out REALLY well, even integration in some commonly used cloud storages could become a reality (Dropbox, pCloud, Google Drive, etc.)
- Translations support is coming to FA in the next release - There will be a big announcement for all willing to take part in the translations to help with the projects - The translations themselves will be done via GitHub due to the incrementally increasing amount of texts in the app as the development continues (of course offering a one-time help via DMs is also a possibility).
And now that you finally know my grand plans with the app (hopefully not TOO grand so it will actually see the light of day?), you might be curious about some kind of schedule for the app:
I will start once more working on the rewrite around mid/late January and start posting updates/teasers once I have something to show.
As to some release date: I will admit that I am not sure when, since this is the biggest project I ever started and therefore have a very hard time answering the "when" question right now - But I sincerely hope to have something to show before May/June.
Wishing y'all (once more) a slightly delayed New Year's,
Elvanos
Comments
Hagelslag
Happy new year! Excited to see the changes to the project, it all sounds amazing!
