Association Subscribers Manager and Open source stuffs

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,

I am resuming the work I did more than one year ago on some of my Perl modules. I don't know why but I got tired of Perl coding (certainly because I did a lot of Perl in my professional life). But in holidays, before or after snowboarding, Perl looks fun again ! After updating my Games::CroqueMonsters module, I resumed the work on Geo::Coder::GoogleMaps.

I looked at the CPAN's RT, noted bugs and feature requests and start working again on this module. Then I though that it would be nice to have a code repository for this work. Being a Sourceforge fan I tough about it first, but the over long new project form convinced me that it was not the right choice. So I gave Google Code a chance, and fortunately it do the job pretty well ! So, the new place to find development code for the Geo::Coder::GoogleMaps Perl module is here :

http://code.google.com/p/geo-coder-googlemaps/

Do not hesitate to drop by and even do/request a code review !

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.

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.

Hi,

I have been quite lazy on blog update recently... Sorry for that. In the other hand I was not for the development of Association Subscribers Manager !

First, I fixed lots of the remaining problems and at the top of the list was the license system which gave me headaches ! It is now the past and it cost only a little change in the susbcribers database file format (.adb). Changes in the source code are heavy (of course...) but the good news is : it do not break backward compatibility with development releases !

Talking about release, the Association Subscribers Manager 3.0 release will be on the 25th of july. It lets enough time for writting user documentation and to polish translations.

There is lots of changes I would like to talk about (the new possibility to print the database, the new first-run-wizard, etc.) but today is my first wedding birthday so I will give time to my wife instead of OSS for once

See you later.

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

I made tons of modifications in Association Subscribers Manager this week end, I will blog about them next time. For today, I just wanted to let a quick post to show you the most visible update : the look and feel.

This is how Association Subscribers Manager used to be (click to enlarge):

and this how Association Subscribers Manager now look like (click to enlarge):

From my point of view, it is a big improvement !

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

There was tons of progress during this week end in Association Subscribers Manager. We are quickly heading to the 3.0BETA1 release and as time pass I think that it will go all smooth !

First things comes first, it is all thanks to all Association Subscribers Manager's translators ! A huge thanks to Daniel Persson who's doing a lot to help me by taking care alone of his SVN part. As a bonus Association Subscribers Manager may be translated in Romanian but I am still waiting for translations files so I'll keep you update.

Now for code updates, during this week end I have made the following fix/improvements in Association Subscribers Manager :

• fix the bug 2778971
• finish the addon system
• add addon management interface to the settings window
• suppress the blinking in the passive popup windows
• change settings windows behavior to prevent users to remove items (email, fees, activities, etc.) by mistake. Now all those windows are disabled until users confirm or cancel the deletion
• add a default account for the update server (oss_user, oss_user_password)
• fix lots of errors issued at first run (mostly by setting better default values)
• fix UI bug which was allowing the edition of unselected members (now you have to select a member for the edition features to activate)
• fix a bug in the postal codes writing code (postal codes files were unconditionally written at application close, now it is done only if there was modifications)
• and the most important of all : I made a new splashscreen !

(Click to enlarge)

All this works leads to 3 important points :

1. This week end was string freeze date, no new string will be added before the beta release (though I already spotted some error messages in need of modifications).
2. This week end was feature freeze date. Until the beta release there will only be bug fix modifications, no new features.
3. I officially call for artists and packagers. Association Subscribers Manager could really use its own icons theme (instead of borrowing Oxygen's ones), and I will need packagers for different GNU/Linux distributions and for Mac OS X.

See you later !

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

As the title states it Association subscribers Manager is on Ohloh and that's good :).

Unfortunatly there is some problems with Ohloh's automatic tools and Assuma is not well analyzed. For example, it is analyzed as mostly written in Ada... since I don't know a word of Ada it is highly improbable that this analyze is true... But maybe it have to do with the Qt code or the users' database being named .adb. Anyway, it is a good way to see what I do bad with this project, so I will do my best to fix those project. One of the first measure was to suppress the huge amount of test users' database from the test/ directory. Another measure will be to accept both of the .adb and .assumaml file extensions for users' database.

Still a lot to do

Arnaud Dupuis

Hi,

I am still very busy with the upcomming release of the 3.0 version of Association Subscribers Manager, right now I am testing the iso-functionnality with the previous version (2.2).
While doing those test, I ran into something very funny... funny because it was quickly fixed, else it could have been a real drama for Association Subscribers Manager users !
The actual problem was that I forgot to include the "Address" field in the new version. While it look like something completly harmless it is the total opposite. In fact, the 3.0 version introduce a brand new subscribers database XML based file format named ADB. Obviously the old XML format is also supported and Association Subscribers Manager users can import their old file in the new version and Association Subscribers Manager will automatically convert the old file into the new format. All those are pretty well tested features and very bug resistant (since the original file is not modified no informations can be lost). This is where the critical point is : between an old file and a new one Association Subscribers Manager loose the address since it was not supported by the GUI...
Fortunatly, this awfull "bug" is now corrected in the SVN trunk and hopefully I will not run into such big mistakes again !

The final release of the 3.0 version of Association Subscribers Manager is planned to be release by the end of april.

As already described, this software is completly FOSS and can be downloaded and installed from the SVN for free under the term of the GPL.
Additionnaly I will provide purchasable binary build of this software for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Arnaud Dupuis.

Hi,
It's been a while since I last post here... Sorry, I have tons of super-bad excuses for that (working too much, not enough time, etc.).
The truth is that I am so busy coding that I forget to post on the blog !
Lately, I have coded a lot on one of my project out of slack-get. The project name is Association Subscribers Manager (short name is Assuma) and it is an associations subscribers manager !
The source code is available on Sourceforge's SVN as usual. This software is a little different than my other traditionnals Open Sources ones because I am selling the packages.
The source code is available for free but all services associated with it are not free. In time, when the 3.0 release will be fully ready, you will be able to buy working binaries for the main plateforms available on the market.
The source code is completly free (as "Free Software" and "as a beer"), only the services of compilations, auto-update, etc. will be costing you money.
The reason why I think this software can be better than another ? Because since the 0.1 version (we are now aiming at the 3.0) it has been developped in collaboration with French sports associations.
So I am pretty confident in the application fitting for small and middle sized associations. The application is daily tested with databases exceeding 1000 subscibers, so it can be used for pretty huge associations/clubs.
It is of course not limited to one kind of association/club, it has been developped with multi-usage in mind.
On the plateform support side, until the 2.0 version the only supported plateform was Linux (the application is developped in Perl and PerlQt3). The 3.0 release will bring Association Subscribers Manager to all plateforms with a code completly rewritten in C++/Qt4.

So as you can easily figured I have work a lot on this project and, unfortunatly, not really on slack-get ... Mainly because as all humans I have to sleep sometimes
Here are the SVN statistics for the last 7 days:

It has been a busy week

See you later !

Arnaud Dupuis