A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
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A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« on July 8th, 2011, 05:40 PM »
The unlucky streak had to come to an end, so it seems like my life is relatively back on track. I was at least able to devote way more time to Wedge this week, and hopefully can keep doing so in the coming weeks (and months.) And because good news come in pairs, Pete is back to work as well.

In the ten days or so since my last post, we made a total of 26 commits (at least another coming from me later tonight), some of which are, as usual, really huge with dozens of changes.
The most interesting one (in my humble bastard's opinion) is another redesign of the default theme, urged by the upcoming day when I'll release the first official screenshots. See, it's interesting to give oneself a target release date for something, because then you start wondering whether you'll be happy with it on that day. And when you decide you won't, you get back to work and try to fix that. As a result, Wine has evolved even more, most notably in the choice of fonts. You'll have to trust me when you see it: Wine used to be okay, but not exciting. Now I think it is. As least those who could see it seem to agree I'm on the right track. One day, mastery of web design will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine. So... Screenshots, eh? Not today mates! But soon, very soon. Hopefully next w... uh, I mean when we reach 100 Likes on our Facebook page.[1]

Pete committed, among other things, his first version of the new admin homepage.
It's certainly a good start for finding motivation to strip even more things away from the old SMF codebase. Bad menu structure. Options that have been there for years and that nobody ever used. Chocobos and Peruvian pan flute players.
Discussions are still ongoing on many more features. We're active and excited again. Well, when I say "excited", we always were, we were just tired -- working on a secret project for a year was never gonna be easy, it turned out to be even harder. And when I say "active", I mean in comparison to last month. I mean, I now spend about 8 to 12 hours a day on Wedge, when I used to work only 4 to 8 hours on it, mostly because of my computer troubles. What a slacker really!

My to-do list is still filling up faster than I can actually empty it, but I'm used to that now -- my to-do list for Kyodai Mahjongg was miles long when I stopped working on it. There just wasn't anything on it that was worthy of the time I'd have spent on it. So, just like in the good old times, my to-do list is mostly there as a reminder of what I can do if I find myself out of new ideas. Which usually never lasts more than a few minutes. And believe me, the ideas I regularly get and put into my to-do are pretty good overall. I keep thinking, "hopefully I won't have to be the one implementing them... But I'll do them, even if it costs me years. And my social life."

So... Screenshots next week, and hopefully an alpha at the end of the month. Although I wouldn't hold my breath for a public release by then -- a private release is likely, but others will probably have to wait until late August. And yes, that does mean I get to spend my entire Summer working like crazy on Wedge. Isn't that cool? What do you mean pathetic? Oh, now you flatter me. Two sugars dear, please.
 1. Apparently, that's how people do it. I think we'll release Wedge Gold when we reach one million fans. Hopefully that's in less than 5 years. Would be fun to have you wait to get a product that's been ready for years. Would be like SMF 2.


Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #2, on July 8th, 2011, 09:38 PM »
As a sophisticate French, obviously my origins had an influence over the name. Drink moderately! Except for great wines. :P

I don't like beer so you'll hardly see a styling of mine called Lager!


Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #4, on July 8th, 2011, 11:30 PM »
Yeah, I like wine way more than beer. Nao we should exchange italian and french bottles! ;)

Regarding Wedge: great progresses !! What about TE's converter?


Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #6, on July 9th, 2011, 01:07 AM »
I always try to get high before writing a blog post, because I know people are watching and it makes me nervous.

Of course, it'd be better if I actually had had anything under the hand to get high in the last 10 years, which sadly isn't the case. (So I had to settle on a chocolate crêpe for a similar effect.)

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #7, on July 9th, 2011, 09:25 AM »
Quote from MultiformeIngegno on July 8th, 2011, 11:30 PM
What about TE's converter?
The generic importer engine (import.php) still need's some tweaking (mostly code documentation) and features (merging forums, full ajax support) but it works as expected. The import description file (smf2_to_wedge.xml) isn't finished yet but that's not much work...


Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #9, on July 9th, 2011, 12:52 PM »
Awesome.

Anyway, it's nice to hear that you're back on track. I'll hopefully write a couple of themes for Wedge once it's out, even if I don't end up using it, hehe. Can't wait to see how that works.

I'm looking forward to seeing how well the import function works, too.



Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #12, on July 9th, 2011, 08:58 PM »
Shouldn't be, but it's starting to add up... The amount of things that need to be converted is staggering by now.
Thankfully, the whole concept of having an *importer* allows us to easily test it on live websites :)

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #13, on July 11th, 2011, 01:48 PM »
Quote from Nao/Gilles on July 9th, 2011, 01:31 PM
Themes or stylings? :P
I've all but given up on learning new words like this for new softwares. Themes, skins, templates, stylings. Call them what you will, my word for something that modifies the look and layout for a piece of software is "theme".

If I have to divide it further down "template" is what I call the content part of the process, and "skin" is what i call the design/css part of the process.

All of this is, of course, just words...

Re: A wedge in the hand is worth two in the wild
« Reply #14, on July 11th, 2011, 01:51 PM »
Quote from Norodo on July 11th, 2011, 01:48 PM
I've all but given up on learning new words like this for new softwares. Themes, skins, templates, stylings. Call them what you will, my word for something that modifies the look and layout for a piece of software is "theme".

If I have to divide it further down "template" is what I call the content part of the process, and "skin" is what i call the design/css part of the process.

All of this is, of course, just words...
Themes and stylings are actually 2 different things in Wedge, themes are full fledged templates which contain proper HTML customizations of their own, stylings are the CSS and images used on top of the theme.