Friday, May 02, 2008

Software, freeze!

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In "We're geeks bearing gifts...", I posted that I was just putting the finishing touches on Project Nelson 1.0 Build 18. But that was over a month ago. So you might be wondering, what gives?

Well, the truth is, it's already finished.

In fact, it's been finished for quite a while now. After a few last-minute bugs that postponed me finishing it for about two weeks (while I found them, fixed them, and found some more to fix, and so on), I finally froze[1] development on Project Nelson 1.0 Build 18 on the 16th of April 2008 at around 6:30pm. So, what's with the holdup?

Firstly, I've been working on the setup routine. In fact, all the installation stuff is finished, as of about Tuesday (the 29th of April). On Wednesday, I went through and reworded much of the text throughout the setup program. I also slightly revised the EULA[2] a bit. All done, right?

Well, almost. The good news is that all I really need to do is finish off my rewording/reorganisation of the changelog[3] and do the readme[4] and I'll be done. (In the case of the changelog, I've been hastily compiling the list of changes for Builds 16-18 these past few days, and the changes for previous builds earlier this year, and later the last. It's all rather disorganised, (but then again, that's me), so now I'm trying to make it a bit more digestible.)

Since it's almost finished, I hope to put the whole kaboodle on my website in the next few days. I'll see you all when it gets there.

--MarkKB

Footnotes (for those less technically inclined):

[1] To freeze development is to stop making changes to code, and usually to compile a final build (turn it from code to a living, breathing program.)

[2] The EULA is the End User License Agreement, a contract between the software provider and the user that determines terms of use of the product. It's that thing you mindlessly click "I Agree" to when you install software. EULAs for websites are known as "Terms and Conditions of Use".

[3] A changelog is a document detailing the changes that have taken place between versions. Well, at least, mine are. ;) Properly, in the open-source world, a changelog details every minute revision with dates and names; non-open-source software uses versions instead of dates, and only mentions major changes or those that are noticeable to the user. The non-open-source changelog is roughly analogous to the "NEWS" file in open-source.

[4] Readmes contain last-minute details that couldn't go into the documentation in time, information that wouldn't really fit in the documentation, and sometimes just general notes. Yays.