Skeinforce Newsletter - January 2010

The Skeinforce GUI has recently been finished and unit tested OK on Mac (except the Help file.) I now focus on building the static version of the application on Mac.

The Qt SDK installation and QtCreator that comes with it bind your application to use Qt framework's dynamic link libraries.

Whereas I would like my users to install Skeinforce with a single click and without installing the Qt framework or any other library. Therefore I am now building Qt statically.

Things to do:

• Build stand alone static version of Skeinforce and test on a Mac without Qt installed.
• Scan source files, add licensing info and doxygen comments.
• Write the help file and integrate into Skeinforce online help
• Lock the release branch with label 1.0 and zip the source code.
• Port the whole thing to Windows
• Update website, upload the product, documentation, and source code.
• Launch 1.0 and start learning.

Closing on to version 1.0

The first releasable version is almost ready. Code completed, and unit tested.

Most notable difference from earlier versions is that I now use a suggest-box similar to Google-suggest.

Here are the screen shots:

This is the suggest box that makes a lexical analysis of the letters you type and reduces the options as you type (similar to Google-suggest.) Unfortunately I could not capture the suggested list, as screen capture keyboard entries caused the list to collapse.

I am very happy with the simplicity level I have achieved. There are no tree controls, combo boxes, groups, sophisticated grids. All search interactions are done through the use of a simple suggest-box.

I need to pack the Qt binaries and the application code on Mac first, then do the same on Windows. This should be followed by the update of web site with download instructions and the release.