Hi All,
This is just by way of a quick update to let you know we are still alive and kicking in development land.
Since Andrew seemed to have left the fold, I made the changes to allow T3 to work on linux. Unfortunately this has NOT included the work around EMF files yet, so although the program is running, it doesn't really do anything useful yet.
WELL ... that's not quite true. The trackpad seems to be working OK, so It IS possible to edit templates, and since we have a mostly-working PDF module it is possible to create a template and save it as PDF, which can then be printed. However, without being able to read and write files, this is really of only academic interest for a little while yet.
The next exciting step was Alistair taking this and making it work on a Raspberry Pi, which for those who don't know is a tiny, cheap computer. It is a remarkable little device, with prices starting around GBP35-ish, though I expect Alistair's model was probably around double this.
This is important, though, as it means we have a single version of the code which will run on a PC on Windows, on a PC on linux, and on a non-PC machine (the Pi) on linux. All very encouraging for our cross-platform ambitions. (Android here we come!)
Even given the still-severe restrictions on what can be achieved with the program, we hope to be adding new features in the not-too-distant future (or rather re-enabling currently disabled features
) so it would be great to have someone to run the occasional test on an Apple machine, as that is the one major platform we do not yet have covered. Any volunteers?
It is still rather early days, but we will also soon be looking for testers on Linux, so if anyone is interested ....
I have also done some analysis on the code that Martin commented out way back when to create the first T3 version, and categorised all the work needed to address the removed functionality into some 40+ issues. Still a LOT to be done.
Alistair, meanwhile, has done great work on breaking out components of Templot along with work around the development environment so that we can have automated tests to verify our future changes.
Anyway, more news as it happens, but in the meantime, keep safe.