Unobserved

This Week At Unobserved #7

2024-09-29

Incremental Progress

This week I worked for only ten hours on Furtherance. Hours are slowing because right now I am just testing and making sure the beta release is going smoothly. I've ironed out some bugs and added the last feature to achieve feature-parity with all old versions of Furtherance, which was autosave.

Autosave in Furtherance works by creating a copy of the currently running task once every minute, starting at minute one. When the timer is stopped, the autosave is deleted. However, if Furtherance is closed without the user first stopping the timer (usually an accident), the autosave will be restored (automatically saved to history) on the next launch. Autosave is a necessary feature to keep users from losing their recorded progress when accidentally closing the app.

Furtherance Autosave

Autosave is cool and all, but the thing that got me super excited this week was implementing a GitHub Action that builds a Furtherance release for every platform (except Linux ARM, but that is coming soon) at the click of a button. This will save me several hours that it normally takes to build each release for multiple platforms. It's the first time I've implemented Actions, so I had a lot of learning to do to make it work, but I'm super excited that it is working perfectly now. Next, I want releases to include a Flatpak bundle. I may get to that this week.

Other than that, I made some decent performance improvements and several small bug fixes. This week I'm planning to get Furtherance out of beta and release the first full release of the new iced re-write, 24.10! I'm so excited to finally have this project off of my personal computer and onto the machines of users. It's been quite the journey, but it was a lot of fun and I believe this was a great decision for the future of the project. Thank you so much to everyone who has stuck with me over the last many months of very few updates so I could get this out and Furtherance can continue to progress.

That's all I've got this week. You can download the Furtherance 24.9 beta on GitHub.