511 days. That is how long it has been between Code Collector Pro 1.3's release and the release of 1.4 (the geek inside of me now makes me wish I'd waited until tomorrow for a nice round 512 days). Yet despite this large amount of time, CCP 1.4 is admittedly lacking in new features. It has a lot of user interface re-design and bug fixes but in terms of new features, the most significant is probably being able to see the dates a snippet was added and last modified.

So why has it been so long between the two releases, and why has there seemingly been so little changed? This blog post is to answer those two questions.

Why so long?

Put simply, finishing my Computer Science degree got in the way. I release CCP 1.3 in November 2008. At this point my first dissertation deadline was approaching fast and so after I released 1.3 I had to focus on that (my dissertation contributing to over a third of the marks for my entire degree). My final deadline for my dissertation was late-April 2009 and from then until the end of May I had exams to revise for and take. Finally, come the 28th of May 2009, I was free and able to go full time with M Cubed.

But wait? That was 9 months ago, what have I been doing in the intervening time? Well first off I joined up with Fabio to start the design side of M Cubed which required management. And also I had to work on Minim 2.0 which was a complete re-write. Both of these required more time than I was expecting at first and so it was January before I could start work on CCP 1.4, which then took longer than I was expecting itself.

Why so little?

So why is there so little new feature wise in CCP 1.4? Well, put bluntly the code in 1.3 sucked. I have talked about why in a previous post, but in a nutshell it had a lot of 10.4 era code and was designed by someone much less experienced in software than me: me circa 2 years ago.

After hardly touching the code for over a year, when I came back to it I found I needed to re-write lots of it. In fact about 60% of the code in CCP has either been re-written or moved around between 1.3.6 and 1.4. A lot of old code was deleted with more modern alternatives put in its place. Essentially this re-write will make it easier to add newer features in 1.5 and 2.0. So while it doesn't add much now, it will allow me to add better features in the future at a faster pace with hopefully fewer bugs.

So make sure you checkout Code Collector Pro 1.4. While there isn't much new, there is a lot of stuff that has been massively improved. There's also a screencast showing some features that have been around for quite a while, but many people don't seem to know about.

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