iClone

Given the turkey has been exhausted and I’ve run out of mince pies, I thought I’d ponder plans for next year. Other than inevitably resolving to never ever eat another turkey sandwich.

Resolutions

Rather than specific features, these are more general things I’m planning to try and stick to:

More responsive release schedule

In the past there has been a tendency to hold off on releases till I’ve run out of reported niggles to fix, and/or an upcoming CCP patch – and accompanying data – has been released. I need to step back from that and get fixes for critical issues out of the door quicker.

Beta testing

There’s some big new features coming soon, and I think it’s about time to share some of the testing pain before unleashing more bugsfeatures into the world. I’m definitely planning on starting this before the next major feature release, but there’s a chance the interim bug fix releases may go this way. More on this when it happens.

New functionality as well as refinements

Other than the little things, there’s been no major new features in iClone for a while (Since the map I think…). Given the recent crop of changes seem to be settling down a bit, I’m planning on getting some, or hopefully all, of the things below into your hands in 2011.

New functionality?

The following ideas may happen, or they may not. Also, this isn’t the sum total of features I’m considering – If you’ve given me any suggestions than they’ll all be in the master list.

Storage rewrite

I’m currently completely rewriting iClone’s API importing and data storage code. If early tests are to be believed, this should yield better performance, both for import speed and general app responsiveness, and let me bolt in new features more easily. Or it may all go horribly wrong.

Selective Updates

This one has been requested particularly often. The general plan is to keep the ‘update’ button as-is, but add:

• Per-character disabling of individual feeds. This will let you not waste time downloading the some of the data for your trade/market checking/spy/forum trolling alts.
• A per-menu item (and per-entity within a top-level menu) ‘update now’ function, exact form TBD but you can probably guess what I’m leaning towards.

This should help keep things leaner and faster for people. The only wrinkle on the horizon for this is the dependency chaining for some APIs – for example, assets require an up-to-date player-built station list. This isn’t hard to code, but I need to have a think over the best way to do it!

Autopilot

People seem to like the Jump Planner (or alternatively be confused as to why it can’t route from Dodixie to Jita), and I’ve had a lot or requests to extend it to include normal gate-to-gate planning. This is on the cards, aiming for a simple A-to-B calculator in the first release, with more bells and whistles to follow.

Filtering

This is heavily dependant on the above storage rewrite, but filtering of Orders/Transactions/Jobs should be coming at some point after that’s done.

More APIs

I’m definitely planning on adding support for the new Account Status API, as well as EVE-Mail reading support. Certificates are a possibility, along with any other APIs iClone is not currently grabbing. These will follow on from the Storage changes and Selective Update functionality – I think doing it before that would involve unfortunate comparisions with straw and camel backs!

iPad

Support for the iPad will be coming – I want it as much as anyone! However, I’m not willing to release a purely scaled-up version of the iPhone version, hence the slow development schedule.

A Hard Choice

Given the way some things are progressing, I’m thinking that support for iOS 3.x will need to be dropped at some point during the year, probably around the time the universal version comes out. The new goodies that iOS 4 brings to both the iPhone and iPad, coupled with not having to maintain as much conditional code (= fewer bugs) seem worth the cost to me. I’m sure you’ll let me know otherwise – compelling arguments will be listened to, if not necessarily agreed with!

That’s enough wittering for now – fly safe in 2011 everyone!