Bundle of updates

I was planning on following the new format for the release announcements, but since almost every single app has the same changes, it would be quite repetitive. I updated basically every single program to have better installers on Windows and the Mac, and fixed the compile process to not have extra warnings during release builds.

The important thing is that I updated to Qt 5.11, and this means that FocusWriter should be able to save to Dropbox! I say should because the bug report is closed as fixed, but I don’t use Dropbox so I can’t test for myself. Enjoy!

More releases!

I just realized I forgot to announce the releases I made at the beginning of the month! Oops. This poor, neglected blog.

I updated all of my projects, and for the most part it was a very minor release that fixed an installation bug in Linux or updated the translations. Of course, FocusWriter had a few more fixes than the rest, but that is to be expected as it is a much more complicated program. And Tanglet actually had a feature release, thanks to Markus Enzenberger. If you have not yet updated, enjoy!

Releases galore!

Over the past week and a half, I have made releases for all of my projects. Most of them were pretty minor, and just amounted to updating the translations (and fixing an issue where the Qt-supplied translations were not being properly loaded). Packagers will now need to depend on lrelease, because I no longer include the precompiled binary .qm files.

The projects with actual feature releases were CuteMaze, Hexalate, Tanglet, and Tetzle. For the most part, the features added will not be obvious unless you have a 4K monitor, because the biggest thing I added was support for high-DPI displays. I did also finish moving my projects to be Qt 5 only, and to use C++11.

As usual, report any issues you have. Enjoy!

NovProg is alive!

It feels strange to bring an old project of mine back to life, but here we go: I have updated NovProg and made a new release, version 3.0.0! It has languished quite by accident, as I have been distracted by bigger and shinier projects. No more!

New in this release is a tab to show you the progress on each day. I find this to be far more useful than just seeing the total graph. The graphs now include bars to show you how much you have to do each day to meet your total goal, and the days which you meet it have green bars.

Daily graph

This is the first release for Windows that uses a static build of Qt. This makes the total install much smaller (a reduction from 48MiB to 17MiB is pretty significant), but it makes the executable itself much larger. If it works well I will be switching all of my future releases of the rest of my projects to work the same way.

Another new feature is the ability to specify a starting word count for your novel. So, if you’re already into a project, say a certain novel writing marathon in the month of November, you can jump in the middle. Enjoy!

Development version numbers

Now that I am switching to release branches I am finally going to also tackle something that has always bothered me but I’ve never taken the time to solve: the development source code has the same version number as the most recent release. I have always wanted it to be some sort of automated number, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted it to be. And I didn’t want to have to update it myself with every single commit.

At first I had wondered about a number that gets incremented every time you compile the project, but I quickly realized that was a pointless thing to track. I may build a project 5,000 times and have a huge build number, but someone else might download the source and compile it only twice. Same source code, different version number. That’s frankly pretty silly.

Instead, I got inspired by the idea of using the git revision ID. It is obviously unique for each commit, and it identifies the specific source code for everyone. Of course, you can’t embed the revision ID because it is a hash that is created of the source code that you’re trying to embed it in. A hash that contains itself? Impossible! Of course, all you have to do instead is simply ask git for the revision ID, and pass that as a definition to the compiler:

VERSION = $$system(git rev-parse --short HEAD)
DEFINES += VERSIONSTR=\\\"git.$${VERSION}\\\"

The source code also needs to make use of the new compiler definition:

QCoreApplication::setApplicationVersion(VERSIONSTR);

This means that I finally have an automated version number for the development source code. I’ve only updated Kapow so far, but I am going to make this change to all of my projects.

The end of PowerPC support

I should have announced this sooner, but better late than never I suppose. I will no longer be creating new PowerPC builds of my programs. There are many reasons, but the biggest two are that my iBook G3 finally gave up the ghost, and that Qt has dropped support for PowerPC. I know that this is an inconvenience for some of my users, and I am sorry about that. Still, I hung in there as long as I could, but Apple has moved on.

No install for you!

While testing things yesterday, I discovered that none of my projects install the executables when compiled from source. Oops. I don’t usually try to install them, so I’m not surprised I missed it. I guess nobody else does either, otherwise I expect I would’ve heard about this already.

I am going to be making releases of Gottet, NovProg2, and Tetzle today. I am also planning on making a release of CuteMaze, but that is being delayed while I work out the last few details of porting it to Qtopia4 — thanks go to Alessandro Briosi for porting CuteMaze and Gottet to Qtopia4.