Archæology

The assorted finds of Artefact Publishing

The more I do, the more there is to do

In working on IPA Zounds I have discovered two things:

1. As soon as I make a release (including just sending a development version off to someone), having done all the things I can think of, I find several overlooked mistakes or new things I should do. This is perhaps the irritating version of the more general rule in number 2.
2. Whenever I think there is nothing more I can do to improve the program, a little external stimulus will spur a mass of possible improvements to present themselves.

So, I was going to release version 2.0 of IPA Zounds last week, or the week before that. It is not likely to happen for several more weeks. Partly that is because I wanted to make a couple of changes to the GUI and found that I could not get wxPython to play. This annoyed me, as did the paucity of documentation. So, I decided to rewrite it using PyGTK (not a day after pledging not to do same). So far it is going well — the documentation has fewer gaps for a start — and has provided me with ideas for many possible improvements.

The worst part of this is that I want to yank the currently available version offline, because it is so deeply inferior to what I have now — indeed I am surprised it works for anyone. For some reason, though, I don’t want to make an interim release, since I know there are immediate things to improve in the trunk version. I suspect it is just me failing to embrace the release early, release often approach.

Posted by jamie on September 24, 2004 17:08+12:00

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