DrumBurp may have seemed pretty quiet to you lately, but rest assured DB development is just like a duck – all seems quiet and serene on the surface, but underneath there is frantic activity.
I’ve been working on tidying up a few things which have needed doing for a while now. They may not give users the most obvious benefits, but they needed doing in order to allow DrumBurp to keep progressing and adding new features. Since I’m a one-man team doing this in my spare time, they’ve tended to mount up a bit until I had a blitz over the last month.
Firstly, I’ve written a lot of unit testing code for the backend, the stuff that handles the data associated with your score. This will allow me to add new functionality while retaining assurance that I haven’t broken anything important. It also had the added benefit of making me work through all this old code line by line: I’ve improved the efficiency of quite a lot of it, so DrumBurp will be a little quicker, and I also found and fixed a few minor bugs – nothing huge, but enough to potentially cause problems in future.
Secondly, I finally wrote the manual pages for the drum kit! I’ve been putting this off for ages – it was a big piece of writing and I always seemed to find something more interesting to do. Hopefully you’ve all managed to work out what’s going on anyway, but if not there’s a little bit of explanation there for you now.
And last but not least I tracked down a bug in the GUI that’s been driving me nuts for a few months. Very rarely, the GUI would become unresponsive and you’d need to restart DB to get back to work. Since this was so rare, I couldn’t pin down the precise circumstances which made it happen. Anyway, it happened to me the other night while writing out a new song for my band and this time I managed to remember the exact sequence of actions leading up to it. It turned out to be a really silly thing with the behaviour of the multi-measure selection highlights when a measure is deleted in a staff ending a section. If that makes no sense to you, then don’t worry, it doesn’t need to – just know that I’ve fixed it 🙂
So with all that, I guess it may be time to think about releasing a new version. I’d like to actually add some new functionality though, so I’m going to have a think about what I can add. Expect to see a new version sometime in January.