QRecall

Paul Mann

Hi James

Wondered how you are doing with the further updates you mentioned on email?

I couldn't hold out asking any longer

cheers
Paul.

James Bucanek

Hello Paul,

The next beta for QRecall is still several months off, but here's what's going on.

I've spent the better part of this summer replacing the aging mach ports inter-process communications (IPC) infrastructure with XPC, Apple's modern IPC service. I'm also rewriting the whole of QRecall to use automatic reference counting (i.e. modern memory management). These change are the last of the major rewrites to bring QRecall up-to-date with the latest core technologies and should provide stability and improved performance. I hope to have this all finished and tested by the end of September.

After that, there's a short list of new features:

A UI facelift. This is a work-in-progress, so how radical this will be has yet to be determined.

A new "Stacks" feature, inspired by work done by Bryan Derman, that lets you incrementally offload a copy of your archive to remote storage. Initially this will be targeted at optical media, but I hope to evolve it into a multi-fasciated feature that supports a variety of file transfer protocols (SFTP, WebDAV, ...) as well as cloud storage services like iCloud, DropBox, Amazon S3, BackBlaze, and so on.

I want to implement a long-overdue feature that allows you to run a script before an action starts and/or after it finishes. A script could mount a specialty filesystem, wake up a server, export a database, suspend a daemon, and so on.

Paul Mann

Hello James

Thanks for the full explanation as usual

Good to hear there maybe some speed improvements, to show for your summer of rewrites.

It maybe short, but its a sweet set of new features in my view and ones that I am excited to try; especially bullet 2, which will allow me to use qrecall at all stages of my workflow.

Thanks! and keep up the good work

Paul Mann

Been a while since I asked James and I am looking forward to some remote backup support.

Hows things

Cheers
Paul.

James Bucanek

Paul,

Things are actually going pretty well, just not on schedule.

The XPC and memory management changes are all done and appear to be working well. There's a bunch of fixes and some small new features have been added.

The work now is entrenched/mired/submerged in the UI changes, which continue to progress nicely but the scope of which has grown to be much larger than I had originally planned. It's like the pulling the proverbial thread; redesigning one features of the UI opens the possibility of redesigning two others, and so on, until I've found myself reimplementing most of the interface. I think you'll like the changes, it just taking up a lot of time and energy.

Once the UI is settled, I'll probably launch a beta to ferret out any problems with the aforementioned changes while simultaneously adding some of the new remote archive features.

Paul Mann

James Bucanek wrote:Paul,

Things are actually going pretty well, just not on schedule.

The XPC and memory management changes are all done and appear to be working well. There's a bunch of fixes and some small new features have been added.

The work now is entrenched/mired/submerged in the UI changes, which continue to progress nicely but the scope of which has grown to be much larger than I had originally planned. It's like the pulling the proverbial thread; redesigning one features of the UI opens the possibility of redesigning two others, and so on, until I've found myself reimplementing most of the interface. I think you'll like the changes, it just taking up a lot of time and energy.

Once the UI is settled, I'll probably launch a beta to ferret out any problems with the aforementioned changes while simultaneously adding some of the new remote archive features.

Sounds good James, thanks for the update.

I can imagine the scope expands, but try and refrain

as we don't need everything redesigned, just something a little easier to navigate for new users like me (although I am getting used to the interface a lot more now).

All the best
Paul.

James Bucanek

Paul,

The UI changes are half redesign and half technology refresh. I've raised the macOS requirement for QRecall 2.1 from 10.7 to 10.9. This allows me to take advantage of a lot of UI goodness that was added to OS X 10.9, like stacked views and advanced auto-layout constraints. The result is a much nicer, cleaner, consistent and far more flexible interface.

Here's a sneak peek at the new calendar pane:

And the revamped action document:

Paul Mann

Looks cool James, thanks for the info.

Shame about the bump in required macos version, but understandable.

Will the database structures still be compatible, so users on 10.7 can still use the same db, using 2.0.x, or will that be an upgraded format.

Is the calendar pane the vertical light blue area on the main screen of the app at the moment?

James Bucanek

Paul Mann wrote:Will the database structures still be compatible, so users on 10.7 can still use the same db, using 2.0.x, or will that be an upgraded format.

Currently, yes. I haven't added anything to 2.1 that modifies the data structure of the archive in a way that earlier versions of 2.0.x can't continue to use them. Most of the changes to 2.1 are on the client side (interprocess communications, background services, UI, command-line tool, and so on) which doesn't affect the data.

Is the calendar pane the vertical light blue area on the main screen of the app at the moment?

Yes, the new calendar/timeline view replaced the old timeline view on the left. The new view can be shrunk down to a thin linear timeline spanning a year or more, or stretched out (as shown above) to zoom into detail down to the minute.

Paul Mann

Sounds perfect.

Will let you get on then and concentrate on coding rather than answering my forums posts

cheers
Paul.