The refactoring of our network code has been mostly finished. We have a few minor enhancements and bug fixes top make but the majority of the work is done!
We are also planning to do a significant refactor of our configuration system (Issue #163). We hope to have all of this work wrapped up in July and release a new version!
Today we hit a milestone of 2,000 commits into our code repository system. Woo!
The next version of Owl will include significant refactoring not just of the networking subsystem but also of the memory management. Most of these changes should be transparent to the user except for a significant increase in performance.
We are confident in saying that the next version will be released some time in July. Stay tuned for an exact date!
As mentioned, we have set out to do a significant refactor in this upcoming version of Owl. Instead of using the Qt libraries networking libraries, we are switching over to libcurl. So far we are seeing a significant increase in network performance. We are still early in the process but the results so far are promising.
If we don’t encounter any significant road blocks, we may be able to get this version out some time in July and move on to other features for future releases.
The next version of Owl will be version 0.7.6. This version will include a major rewrite of the networking code that Owl uses to communicate. To the end user the next version of Owl will seem very similar to the existing version since most of the work being done is “under the hood”.
We have identified a few bugs with version 0.7.5, namely related to Tapatalk and the OS clipboard. Issues such as these will be resolved in the next release.
We hope to have the next version released some time in August!
Many of the tasks we slated for the next version of Owl have been complete. The one remaining issue we have for this version is Bug #181 which affects only some boards that use Tapatalk. We anticipate that this issue will be resolved tomorrow and hope to have Owl v0.7.5 submitted to the Apple store tomorrow afternoon!
We are already looking ahead to the next version, in which we hope to add support for user avatars in order to improve the visual appeal of the application. We are also exploring other features such as a way to filter and easily search through forums, threads and posts that are displayed, as well as Reddit support.
The Tapatalk issue that saw the connection in Owl timeout after a certain amount of time has finally been resolved. This was tracked as Bug #117 and ended up being rather easy to fix, once the fix was known.
In case you’re curious, it so happens that Tapatalk issues login requests every 15 minutes. For some reason the sessions will not last longer than 15 minutes and this seems to be true with multiple message board software (we tested vBulletin 3.x, vbulletin 4.x, XenForo 1.x) and for the Tapatalk Android and iPad clients. While this seems like an odd design decision it was one that was easy to implement. The next version of Owl will duplicate this behavior so the sessions should, in theory, last indefinitely.
We are still working on Bug #168 and Bug #150, both which we hope to have resolved before releasing version 0.7.5 in early June.
We have known about the Tapatalk quoting issue for some time. Today we implemented a fix that uses the same mechanism the Tapatalk app uses. This will definitely be in version 0.7.5.
XenForo support for 0.7.5 is almost done. There are still a few tasks to finish up but once that is fixed and Bug #117 is resolved, we will release 0.7.5.
We are planning one major feature addiction for Owl 0.7.5 and one minor feature addition. The major feature is native support for XenForo 1.x boards, and the minor addition is displaying a visual notification of locked threads. There are several other minor enhancements we hope to get into the next version of Owl.
Right now we anticipate a release date of late-June to early-July.
As always, your feedback and suggestions are welcome!
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