Author: Andy Balaam

Take a look at the latest TODO list. There are several categories of things on it:

1. Already done e.g. “Add firefox to the possible browsers.”
2. Completeness features e.g. “Use Java’s printing capabilities to print”
3. Feature creep e.g. “Automatically make a channel set when you right-click a channel and choose
   “Move up” (or even drag!)”
4. Difficult-to-trace bugs e.g. “Make it not say no listings after midnight”
5. Difficult features e.g. “Minimize to system tray”
6. Subtle UI improvements e.g. “Remember where you were in the Options screen”
7. Major features we are in the middle of e.g. “Run an exe when a programme is about to start and/or end” (this is actually recording)

I should go through and make sure everything is relevant, but also I need to prioritise what to do before 1.0 if we are ever going to get there. 7s are being done by Alex and others, 2s really need doing if we are going to call it finished, 4s should get cleared up during the beta stage (hopefully), most 5s are likely to get dropped, and 3s and 6s are good potentials for a public vote – then the most wanted ones will get done and the others will have to be post-1.0.

I may go through the list and actually classify them this way, and then we can see what we’re doing.

I couldn’t sleep last night, I think because my viva for my DPhil (PhD) is coming up on Monday. Work is going to be a struggle, but at least I got a chance to think about FreeGuide.

Alex is working on a plugins system (it’s sort-of-working in CVS) that will allow us to split the grabbers out from the main program, and allow people to innovate with new plugins without delving into all the code, which is quite large and a bit messy to say the least. Both of these things are really good, especially because my own time is very limited, so allowing people to work on plugins seperately means progress can continue without me being such a bottleneck.

However, handling plugins means we need to change the way FreeGuide is packaged. I’ve had some thoughts about how to do it, and I’ve put them together into an OpenOffice.org Impress presentation (or try the PDF). I’m looking for comments on this before we finalise the system. Once it’s established it will be hard to change, so I want to try and get it right.

If there are a couple more sleepless nights we might even see FreeGuide’s 0.10.x branch going stable … Alex has a few more bugs to fix, but we’re getting there.