Scribes: Roadmap to 0.4

I got burnt out working on Scribes. So I took a break from it to work on another project. I'll blog on the project some other time. This entry is a boring exposition on what to expect for version 0.3.3 of Scribes and the roadmap leading to 0.4.

The Case of Acute Featuritis

Open source development has a mantra I thought I understood until recently. The mantra is also esteemed by Agile methodologist. It goes.

Release early. Release often.

There's a key point implied by the philosophy, but absent in the wordings. The point is that releasing early and often means releasing increasingly less features at a constant rate. In other words, it is better to make a release with one stable new feature than one with ten new mediocre features. Unfortunately, one new feature does not make for an exciting release note. But I digress. Many Free Software projects are moving to this development style or have been using it for a while with success. Linux, Ubuntu and GNOME come to mind.

Focussing exclusively on a few features per release not only allows developers to devote more time to testing them, but it also does not overwhelm users with too many features to test and provide feedback on. My experience with Scribes shows that overwhelming users with features usually means they don't test all of them effectively enough. This is no fault of users. After all, users have better things to do with their time. It is the responsibility of developers to package features in a manner that can be effectively tested by users and that does not overwhelm them.

My unproven theory is that the fewer features I make per release, the more users will provide feedback and suggestions on the features. Thus I'm revamping the way I develop and release Scribes in the hopes that I get more feedback from users. This means I'll focus on:

• releasing few, stable, well-tested features per release, not more than 3 new features per release, if any.


• releasing often;


• and getting rid of the development releases, as nobody seriously tests them.

Hopefully, more releases and less features per release will get more users involved in the process. It will also allow them to stress test the fewer new features exhaustively. This is good news for translators too. It means they have less strings to translate and test per release.

Bugs For Version 0.3.3

So do not be alarmed if future releases of Scribes just have one new feature with other enhancements devoted to bug fixes and polish. It is intentional. Without further ado, here are my plans for the next version of Scribes.

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  Revamping the saving system

  
  
  Scribes most underrated feature is its automatic saving system. The fact that I never have to worry or think about saving documents is the greatest psychological and productivity gain I have using Scribes. I wish other applications follow suit.
  
  In software engineering, Input/Output operations such as saving files are traditionally expensive and slow. So expensive that in many poorly designed applications such operations make graphic user interfaces freeze or unresponsive. In user interface design, having interfaces freezing or not responding is a taboo. Fortunately, Scribes does not suffer seriously from this problem.
  
  However, there are times during editing when Scribes hangs for a few milliseconds during saving. Most users won't notice this, but this minor peeve bothers me. The problem usually becomes apparent when your computer is under very heavy load. For me this problem tarnishes Scribes' otherwise smooth text editing experience. Under no circumstance should the text editor hang while editing even for a few milliseconds. It's annoying.
  
  So, I have decided to take a drastic approach to solving the problem. An approach that worked well for the word completion system. The completion system too had a similar but nastier trait. The problem was fixed by outsourcing the system to an external process and having all Scribes instances share the same process.
  
  The same approach will be used for the saving system. Benefits to this include, improved design, robustness, efficiency and performance. Most importantly, it'll get rid of the hiccups that may occur while editing during saving and some other queer design issues.



• 
  

  File Modification Detection

  
  A user requested this feature for version 0.3.1 of Scribes. He had valid reasons for the feature with compelling use cases, so I implemented it. However, it exposed design limitations in the saving system. And I feel the current implementation is somewhat hacky. Under very heavy load, it is possible to trigger the file modification alert dialog, even when the application that is modifying the file is Scribes. The file modification alert dialog is also ugly. These problems will be addressed in the next release.



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  Document Statistics

  
  Perhaps the only user visible new feature. This will be a dialog that shows metadata information about a file, such as its location, size, type, last modification time, last creation time, number of characters in the file and so on. Perhaps a future enhancement of this plugin will let users append notes to the dialog to serve as annotations (this is speculative). Or perhaps that is better left to another plugin entirely. The document stats dialog will be activated by pressing (alt - enter).



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  Squash Bugs

  
  Close all, or most, bugs in the database.

Vaporware For Version 0.4

Here is my roadmap for version 0.4. I will discuss each of these features in detail immediately before or after they are implemented. For now, I'll just list them.

• Refactor and cleanup the trigger system for plugin system.


• Refactor and cleanup the generic plugin system.


• Implement the language plugin system.


• Opening files with user defined encoding via the terminal.


• Symbol browser for Python (language plugin).


• Smart indentation for Python (language plugin).


• Class, function, block selection for Python (language plugin).


• Class, function, block navigation for Python (language plugin).


• Line operations for Python (language plugin).


• (Un)comment plugin for several languages (language plugin).


• Selectable locale/language spell checking (new dep, pyenchant).


• Documentation for extending Scribes and writing plugins.


• User interface for managing plugins.

Longhorn-Style Release Date

I will start working on Scribes after I've made an initial release of the other project I'm working on and when free time permits.