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It's time for the weekly update, this time for the week through October 28th...
Progress on the health side for me has been mixed, but we’ve definitely made some meaningful headway on Realm Works this week. After lots of testing and a few necessary adjustments, I believe we are now completely out of the woods with a 64-bit version of the product. We still need to wrangle some annoying build automation wrinkles and all the necessary installer changes, but the product itself appears solid in 64-bit. Huzzah! And thanks to having Steve helping out heavily this past week, a variety of UI issues have been resolved, as well.
We’re steadily working our way through the items that seem to be causing users the most grief and getting them addressed. One of the big remaining issues is something that three of us are now actively investigating. It’s a serious problem with the UI framework that we utilize – one that comes to light only when working with a large realm. After debating a few options, we’ve concluded that we need to do some fundamental rework in order to properly bypass the framework problem. We’re getting started on it this week, but it’s a task that will take many days and probably involve multiple people. I’ll have more details in the update next week.
[Note: We’re hoping that the above rework will also mitigate the slow load times of tabs, which is due to the way the UI framework behaves, but it’s way too soon to be sure.]
With the announcement of 64-bit support last week, a few users have suggested that we completely abandon 32-bit support, so we took a closer look at the numbers from this year. While it’s quite true that the vast majority of users are now running 64-bit computers, we still have a contingent running on 32-bit machines. Since a main focus of the next product release will be fixing problems of various sorts (bugs, behaviors, inefficiencies, etc.), we don’t want to leave those folks out in cold. That said, we will definitely phase out 32-bit support at some point in the not-too-distant future, since it will be too cumbersome to continue supporting it long-term.
Another detail was made clear from looking at those same numbers. There are very few users still using an operating system older than Windows 8. Consequently, we’re currently assessing whether to make this the last release that supports earlier versions of Windows. That’s likely to be the case, so please consider this a heads-up.
Thanks, Rob
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