Ivolution – Development status 36

Below is an update of my progress on the Ivolution ! As you can see, the software has never been so close to be released :)

• Hunt for bugs and crashes

I spent a lot of time the last week pushing buttons like crazy, having incoherent behaviour and testing whatever could crash the software.

It allowed me to find several ugly things, like a random crash on exit !

There is not much to say about it, but that the software is now more reliable and stable. Not sexy to say, but I’m sure users will be happy !

• Add new notifications to the interface

Test the software made me realize that some of the unexpected events where not reported to the user. There was nothing warning if the input folder was empty for example.

To solve that, I simply added new notifications to the interface. This way, the user can now that the software has not actually crashed !

• Create a compressed installer for Windows

My biggest achievement of this week has been to create a full installer for Windows. 

Windows users now a once click install solution to use the Ivolution. It was more challenging than expected, as (of course) the installer behavior is different depending on the Windows version of the user. But the opposite would not be fun, would it ?  ;)

I especially struggled finding solutions for the uninstall script to be reliable, and also give access to the icons to the software.

But I am proud to say that the Ivolution now can be properly installed on a Windows machine, and the user is even given pretty shortcuts ! To create this installer I used NSIS, a tool created by the developers of Winamp (amongst other great software). And I must say I was impressed how simple it was to get a simple working example. I definitely recommend using it !

My objectives for next week:

• Write a proper documentation/manual.

Now I need users !

But for that, I have to spend some time working on the documentation and present it nicely. I also need a homepage for the project. I think about registering to SourceForge.

• Warn early users, get the product tested.

Even though the interface is still not perfect, I think it is time for the product to be shipped. There is nothing better than users to kepp you motivated.

I don’t present any other objectives today. My whole mind is turned towards product release.

So let’s write this documentation !

To get the last version of the Ivolution, clone the github project.