Association Subscribers Manager and Open source stuffs

Hi,

A bit after the Association Subscribers Manager v3.1 release, I was contacted by Lee Schlesinger from Sourceforge.net for an interview about Association Subscribers Manager. The result of this interview is available here:

http://sourceforge.net/blog/along-comes-association-subscribers-manager/

You can learn some fresh things about the futur of Association Subscribers Manager. Speaking of that, I currently have a very interesting conversation with a French association (I'll put the link in the comment after asking for the permission) and the person I'm talking with have lots of good ideas that will be implemented in the next release (mostly because I should have had those ideas before the release).

Enjoy !

Arnaud Dupuis

  Hi,

after a look at the auto-updater issue, I found out that the problem is deeper than I first thought. Mainly built on the QHttp class, this updater's architecture is old and poorly done. I will re-code it before releasing anything.

So the new (estimated) release date is the 22th of February. This date is a maximum and I could release it before if the work is finished and tested earlier.

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

Today I will continue to unveil Association Subscribers Manager new features. Actually it is not really a new feature, it is more an improvement.

Anyway, settings was sure a hard part in previous version of Association Subscribers Manager, until now ! Started with the 3.1 version, ladies and gentlemen, behold the new simplicity of the settings system ! Basically settings have been splitted in two : association settings and application ones. They are both accessible through the toolbar.

The idea is to make users life more simple by presenting only relevant informations. What I mean is : when you want to add a new activity with new fees, you do not really care about the locales of the application. So even if the amount of options have not decrease (actually, with custom fields, it increased) the settings system is more easy to use. Mainly because there is now only 3 or 4 tabs of settings instead of 8 !

That is certainly not the killing feature of the 3.1 version of Association Subscribers Manager but it sure will make life easier for many people. Here is some screenshots of the new settings organisation :

Application settings:

(please note that in those screenshots Association Subscribers Manager was not compiled with the updater support so the "Updates" tab is missing).

Association settings:

Enjoy !

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

First of all, happy birthday blog ! This is the 100th post of this blog ! Woohoo ! Ok then if it's a birthday I have to come with something big and nice... Let's say custom fields in Association Subscribers Manager !

The first beta version of Association Subscribers Manager v3.1 will be out in few hours and will have a long requested feature : custom fields. The principle is that there is a bunch of pre-defined fields in Association Subscribers Manager and they cover a large scale of classical associations/clubs needs, but they certainly cannot covers for all the needs of every users. So for this users, it is now possible to add user defined fields and to use them like any other fields in Association Subscribers Manager.

Custom fields can be of many types:

• "One line text" : create a one line input field (based on a QLineEdit)
• "Multiple line text" : create a multiple line input field (based on a QTextEdit)
• "Date selector" : create a date input field with popup calendar (based on a QDateEdit)
• "Ok/Not ok combobox" : create a yes/no combo box with editable label (based on QComboBox)
• "Multiple value selector" : create a free combo box with customizable items (also based on a QComboBox)
• "Fee field" : create a fee input field, fee being a floating point number (based on a QDoubleSpinBox)

Check this video for an introduction:

Until the official release of Association Subscribers Manager, I will feed you with videos and screenshots of the new features of the 3.1 version.

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

First things comes first : happy new year ! I wish you all the best for this 2010 year (a bit late... as usual).

Then, after a quick come back to my Perl modules, I now am back to Association Subscribers Manager ! Things have changed a lot on this side. First, the settings' user interface was to complicated so it have been split in two : association's settings and application settings. During this part of the work Association Subscribers Manager got a highly requested feature : the custom fields.

Custom fields are user defined input fields. This feature, as well with the settings part are all implemented and I now only need to fix some remaining bugs before the release. This "release" thing leads me to another point : the initial release plan was out of scale. Current changes are already lots of changes and I would like to not confuse Association Subscribers Manager's users with to many changes. And, by the way, it took me so much time to get all those working that the next release will occur next year if I keep waiting for the perfect finished program ! So the 3.1 release will feature 2 main things/changes :

• a complete re-organisation of the settings mechanism (under the hood as well as user interface)
• the brand new custom fields mechanism

I will post again about this specific feature (custom fields) soon.

Arnaud Dupuis

I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of Association Subscribers Manager 3.0.1 !
This one is a major bugfixe version of the 3.0 branch of Association Subscribers Manager.
I want to particularly thanks all testers for their feedback and particularly two of them : Fabrice Eyraud for all his bug reports and his French translation of the documentation and the French association Forme et Santé (from La Couture Boussey) for the feedback on live usage they did.

You can download packages and installer at :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/assuma/files/

You can report bugs and ask for new features at:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=211536

You can also visit the website for more information :
http://www.associationsubscribersmanager.org

Here is a list of the main changes :
Association Subscribers Manager version 3.0.1
 - integration of the patches from Sascha Manns and David Haller from OpenSUSE packaging team
 - fix a bug in the re-translation of the UI's tooltips
 - fix a bug in the passive message system (messages still visible after being hidden if the window is made biggest)
 - fix a bug in the federation editor (see bug 2848046 on the tracker)
 - fix a bug in the search feature
 - fix a bug in the mail sending system
 - add French documentation translated by Fabrice Eyraud
 - made packagers life easier by adding an install target to the Makefile and possibility to configure the install destination (see README file).

Association Subscribers Manager is available as a source package (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, BSD*, Windows, require a compiler), binary package for Linux and windows installer.

Enjoy !

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi !

Back from my holidays I resumed works on Association Subscribers Manager : 

• Here is the new (English) video tutorial which covers the presentation of the Federation Editor (watch on You Tube).

• And here is the new You Tube group that I created to promote Association Subscribers Manager (See on You Tube).

Hi,

I am very pleased to announce the immediate availability of Association Subscribers Manager 3.0 !
This one is the first stable version of the 3.0 branch of Association Subscribers Manager.
I want to particularly thanks all testers for their feedback and particularly two of them : Lucie Moore-Dupuis, my wife who was a great help with user interface tests and who successfully bears with my Open Source obsession ! The second one is Patrick Dupuis, my father who is the one who came with the original idea of Association Subscribers Manager (it was originally developed because his own association was in need of a software like this... it helps a lot when your son is actually a developer) and gave some very useful advices about the version 3.0.

You can download packages and installer at :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/assuma/files/

You can report bugs and ask for new features at:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=211536

Here is a list of the main changes :
Association Subscribers Manager version 3.0

Branch main changes from 2.1.2 are :
 - software completely recoded from Perl/Qt3 to C++/Qt4
 - more efficient database file format
 - huge performance improvement
 - brand new UI
 - more powerfull addon system
 - internationalization support

Releases main changes are :
* Translations:
Association Subscribers Manager now supports the following languages :
  - Romanian (Lucian Lupescu - http://lucianlupescu.co.cc/)
  - Swedish (Daniel Persson)
  - Brazilian Portuguese (Diego Ferreira)
  - French (Arnaud Dupuis)
  - English (Arnaud Dupuis)

* Software changes (from 3.0rc1):
  - fix many bugs (please see the bugtracker at Sourceforge for a complete list of corrected bugs)
  - many UI fixes
  - new federations files
  - new first run wizard
  - fix many real time data reload bugs
  - new system for in-place edition
  - performance improvement
  - federations and license systems now works properly (with new and old database format, new format have been changed a little)
  - brand new UI graphical effects
  - new user documentation
  - complete API documentation
  - in-place edition system have been polished

Association Subscribers Manager is available as a source package (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, BSD*, Windows, require a compiler), binary package for Linux and windows installer.

Enjoy !

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

Today is the Association Subscribers Manager 3.0 release day, so the entire day is dedicated to integration, last translations, last bugfixes, last documentation efforts, packaging and testing !

Let's hope the release will occur without any problem, but I'm quite confident about bugs and software issues. All possible problems may comes from the other part of Association Subscribers Manager : uncomplete documentation, packaging issues, uncomplete translations but somehow, we will manage to deliver a nice piece of software !

Arnaud Dupuis.