After a long, long break, I would like to inform you about return to development. Now, without a fixed release schedule and plans, work will resume in mid-February. I will be focusing on the final, 7th milestone. Following that, there will be two alpha and two beta versions. I cannot promise a specific date for the completion of the final release of version 1.0 or the number of applications that will be included in the software suite.
I have decided to take a short development break. That is the main reason why the new milestone will be delayed by two weeks. Until today, I have been focused on desktop manager improvements, and I hope this milestone will bring improvements to other than browser apps. There is a lot of work to do be done before the first alpha release. That's all for now. See you on the release date, September 7th.
Today I started working on the next and last milestone of FireCat. Currently, I have 67 new tasks on jira and that's not all. The new features will be published by August. In August, the feature list will be softly frozen, and after September I will stop working on features and I will focus on bug fixing.
You can find the release plan this link - I tried to create a realistic release schedule with possible dates.
Time for next update about the project. Important thing: the previous video
from the youtube channel showed milestone 6 in development. The milestone has been finished and here I will describe the changes since February.
New apps
This update brings 2 new apps - image viewer and text editor. Currently they are very poor. A text editor gives us ability to open text files.
File path need to be added as a parameter in the terminal. In the near future, saving and opening files will be possible using FireCat file selector (it's not done).
As you can see in the video, there is poor syntax highlighting - now only generic xml and generic for C-like languages.
Desktop
This update adds better and paginated desktop menu.
Browser
From now speed dial works - currently we can only add new items and we can't update or remove tiles.
As you can see in the video, a new download manager has appeared - it has been implemented for the web browser mode - now the folder icon does not work.
Terminal
The core of the terminal has been a little bit rewritten and the tab view mode has been implemented.
There is no changes on the other apps.
What's next?
I will start working on the next (and last) 7th milestone on May 12th. In addition, I will publish a draft version of the release plan and I want to publish news about the project regularly.