Hi all,
Unfortunately we haven’t been able to do much over the past month. My main computer’s motherboard sadly failed after 4 hard years of rigorous use. As a result it has become extremely difficult for me to code, as managing multiple source code files and trying to design windows with a small 15-inch screen and a trackpad is an extremely difficult task, and sadly I haven’t been able to pull it off.
However, I’m going to make sure that it doesn’t happen again by having two computers. My old computer will be fixed, and I’m also building myself a new computer that I can store plenty more code on, and with a much larger screen so I can do lots of things at once. I expect to have my old computer fixed within the next two weeks, and my new computer built by the second week of March.
Rhys has been busy optimising things ready for me to get back to work on. As soon as I’m back to work my main priority will be perfecting our new profile viewer, and getting DMs working properly. Pingr is not far from finished, we only have a lot of small features to implement now, rather than having large features (such as streaming). Rhys has managed to heavily optimise our animations, meaning that he has cut Pingr’s resource usage dramatically. After all – we did promise that Pingr would be pretty AND reliable!
I will keep you all updated in the mean time.
We thought it was about time that we got the profile viewer working properly. While we were there, we thought that the current design in the last Pingr release isn’t really living up to it’s hopes, so we’ve decided to redo the entire thing form scratch. Not only have we got a nice shiny new profile viewer, but it’s far more efficient than the previous one in terms of API requests.
In other news, we’re working hard to make Pingr extremely data-efficient making sure that we don’t make any requests to the API that we don’t need to. This has led to more than its fair share of arguments between myself and Rhys over who’s code is more efficient…! With all sorts of reverts going on we’re somehow managing to churn out usable code.
Once we’ve finished Pingr, we’re going to release it as it is as Beta 5. We’re then going to re-write Pingr from the ground up (with all the same design and features) but with a lot more internal restructuring and performance improvements, so that Pingr would win the Twitter Olympics if they existed!
We can’t wait to get Pingr out to you, but it isn’t in a usable state at the moment. As soon as it is, we’ll launch it up onto the Internet with as many rockets as we need to get it there as fast as we can.
After 2 months of hard work, we’ve finally released Beta 3. We’re very pleased to announce that it’s a lot more reliable, has a lot more exciting features, and it well on the way to becoming what we’ve envisioned Pingr being from the start.
New features include:
Let us know what you think!
Our fingers have been hard at work smashing our keyboards to bits lately, and we’re happy to announce that Pingr has made major strides. Major strides. A few things we’re excited to tell you about:
However, we’re not entirely sure when we’re going to have the new update polished enough for you all to test for us. Sure, the point of testing is for you users to let us know what you don’t like, what you can’t use, or what doesn’t work properly. But, there’s no point in testing something that clearly isn’t ready yet. You wouldn’t test how fast a prototype car can go without fitting the brakes first. We know that our prototype is a lot faster than our previous one. But we’re still busy putting the brakes on.
When it’s ready, we’ll release it the minute we can. You don’t have to re-download Pingr, or re-install it. It’ll update all by itself. But make sure you’re following us on Twitter to make sure you’re kept us in the loop. http://www.twitter.com/#!/ConvergeSoft