FreeGuide 0.10.8

I am still working slowly on moving FreeGuide forward. Somehow it seems my itches for FreeGuide are all about making it less annoying for people who are trying it the first time. I guess this is motivated by my desire for world domination.

Anyway, we are one small step closer to my mum being able to use FreeGuide – when the “Choose channels” step (i.e. the XMLTV grabber configuration) goes wrong, you can now see a real genuine error message, and hopefully figure out what went wrong.

Actually, it always used to work that way but the error-catching got refactored away at some point. Anyway, I am slowly taking the ground back…

As I do more and more test-driven development at work I am becoming completely addicted. For this FreeGuide code I wrote a couple of unit tests but they are not within a proper framework, and can’t be launched easily as a test suite. I am considering JUnit.

I also want to set up some component-level tests e.g. for downloading listings for each country and checking everything works as expected. It’s brilliant fun having tests in place, but when you have as little time as I have for FreeGuide at the moment, it’s difficult to decide to spend a long time working on a test framework when I could be fixing a “real user problem” or adding a cool new feature.

But I’ve got the testing bug badly, so watch this space.