Association Subscribers Manager and Open source stuffs

Hi,

First of all, sorry for not giving life signs. Like Everyone I have a busy life and sometime it takes me more energy than I have to code after going home very late.

That said, the purpose of this blog post is to require our great community to share some of its might with me. In Kurabu (was Association Subscribers Manager) 3.3 I have redesigned the storage method to be able to add many storage capacities (Databases, cloud, Akonadi, etc.) but I am currently struggling with a design flaw/issue : Kurabu/Assuma is based on XML files (many XML files like : subscribers list, postal codes/city equivalence tables, fee details, etc.) and it looks very odd to put all those files in one big interface (and it is not that easy because of the wide variety of files AND because of some design errors I made early in the conception). So I am facing a dilemma : should I let the legacy code for current XML based files like that and use the new Kurabu::Core::StorageInterface only for new storage methods (and advice users to switch to SQLite for example) or should I put lots of effort in making my old and not-so-well-designed XML file based code fit my new abstraction ?

If you have an advice please let me know, you can contact me through comments, IRC (Arno[Slack]@Freenode), mail (a dot dupuis [the sign that embodies email] infinityperl dot org), Twitter (ArnaudDupuis) or Skype for those of you that already have my Skype user name.

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

with Kurabu 3.3 the add-on (or plug-in) system is finally complete. There is still work to do though but it is usable right now (even from the trunk). And since I hope to see many add-ons for Kurabu (and because I plan to write quite a lot myself) I just putted on the SVN a script to help developers to create a add-on.

Kurabu's add-ons can be ECMA script (a.k.a QtScript) or binary one, the init-kurabu-addon.pl script can create both of them. This little Perl script create for you the directory structure, the addon.xml file and all needed code files with sample code inside. What the current version lack is the ability to fine tune what the developer wants for binary add-ons (like if the add-on should have a menu entry, an entry in the previewer's add-on menu , both or none, etc.). The current Kurabu's add-on system do not allow script to have a menu entry but I'll correct that before the release (it is now on the TODO list ^^).

If you want to try this script, just update the SVN code and run it ! It is here /trunk/association_subscribers_manager/tools/init-kurabu-addon.pl. The embed documentation is sufficient for you to understand how to use this command line tool.

Enjoy !

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,
after what seems to be an entire year, I'm back online !! You can't imagine how long it is until you actually are unwired...
On my Open Source duties my first priority is to aggregate contributions to Association Subscribers Manager with my own code and then commit all those to the trunk.
My second priority is to get a working version of AndroBuzz to the Android Market. This project is not going fast enough and I will do my share to accelerate things here


On all this things, do not expect as much code as I use to produce : I now realyze that a baby is a hell of a project to contribute ! It takes so much time I sometime wonder if it's not an exclusive process !

Arnaud Dupuis

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

Hi,

After Daniel's recent update on the Swedish translation, it is now the Portuguese Brazilian translation's turn to be updated.

This allow me to introduce a new contributor to Association Subscribers Manager: Márcio Moraes (marciopanto <atnospam> gmail <dotnospam> com). Márcio have updated Diego's initial work on the Portuguese Brazilian translation. And what update ! All the interface is now available localized for Brazilian users ! Thank you very much Márcio. Here are some screenshots:

I don't know if you all know how important those contributions are, but they really are and they really count for me and all users of Association Subscribers Manager.

Once again, thanks to all the contributors !

Arnaud Dupuis.