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Another week. Another update. With pretty good news...
Solid progress is being made on the serious UI framework problem I outlined in the previous update. The solution entails a major overhaul of the navigation pane for topics and articles. We’ve reached the point where we’re pretty confident (95%) that the new approach will work well. However, there are a LOT of tendrils to this change due to how integral topics/articles are within Realm Works. Consequently, we’re projecting that it’s going to take another full week to get it all completed, and it could even spill into next week. Once fully implemented, we’ve got lots of testing to do so we make sure there aren’t any gotchas lurking. So we’re definitely not out of the woods yet, but it all looks quite promising at this point.
One big bonus of this new approach is that it will definitely provide a significant speed improvement when loading and switching tabs. We thought that might be the case in last week’s update, and we’ve now confirmed it. The performance gains will scale with the number of topics/articles in the realm, so users with big realms will experience huge improvements.
A few more high-frequency crash bugs were also squashed this past week. As I indicated previously, our primary focus is on the things that users are encountering most frequently, and we’ll be continuing to work on more of these bugs. We certainly won’t squish all of them, but the product should become significantly more solid for everyone shortly.
On that note, let me give you a quick heads-up on what we’re currently targeting. We want to put out a new update of Realm Works immediately prior to the long Thanksgiving weekend, which starts November 22nd for those outside the States. The planned release will resolve all the bugs we’ve been fixing, plus it will include 64-bit support. We’re working out how to do it in a way that will be safe for everybody, which means making sure that users can switch back to the existing version if they run into anything serious with the new version. If we can’t make sure of that, we won’t release it until after the Thanksgiving break.
Before closing, I want to respond to a few comments we’ve received over the past week. First of all, the overhaul outlined above deals with only a single component of the UI framework we utilize and is not a wholesale replacement – full replacement would entail effectively rewriting the entire product. In addition, while there are definitely a few Realm Works users still running Windows 7, they represent far less than 1% of our total user base. As we run into difficulties supporting Windows 7 – an operating system that hasn’t been actively supported by the manufacturer for almost 4 years now and will be completely abandoned in one year – we simply won’t be able to continue doing so.
Thanks, Rob
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