Development of Menu Inventor 1.2 is now officially under way! Though it has been referred to as version 2.0 in some of my posts and pages, I decided to revert to a more "modest" number. However, in the same way as 1.1 was a great improvement compared to 1.0, 1.2 will bring the same advancement in technology and feature set.. Most notably, 1.2 is being rewritten completely from scratch, with more robust and flexible code.
The development started on 27th September 2008 and will be going on for a couple of weeks. The official release date of 1.2 I don't dare to guess, but hopefully it won't take a whole year to complete. I'm carefully planning out every module and piece of code I write to avoid having to rewrite them again, hopefully cutting down the development time to a required minimum. This does not mean I am rushing it through, Menu Inventor will continue to be developed under it's philosophy: Quick, Reliable and Small.
Here's a list of already implemented features in the new version:
- new stable and efficient tree structure
- unlimited nodes and entries (yes, no hard-coded limits)
- upgraded trigger
- improved graphics management
And here's what's coming up (the list will grow 
)
- Real drag'n'drop - drag between panes! Anything - anywhere!
- better skinning - using cascading styles (not CSS!)
- entries browsing
- entry pool - edit lots of entries at once
- simplified modifier - for even faster editing
- Universal drag'n'drop - add files directly to Menu Inventor by dragging them from the desktop/folder/etc...
- improved keyboard navigation
- alphabetical sorting
- more extras
Comments
1.2 has now slightly over 1000 lines of code, from which less than 50 were copied from the codebase of version 1.1. The architecture has also been upgraded, with most aspects being re-designed (Panes, UI, Node Tree, Entries List, Management, Modifier, Icons system), and others updated (Graphics, Trigger, Event Handling).
Currently, Menu Inventor doesn't do anything (all parts are tested separately before assembling them together), I'm halfway through "inventing" a better Graphics and Icons system, which is required before anything can actually be displayed.
There is roughly 3000 more lines of code or so to go through. Otherwise, I'm leaving for university this Friday, which means a lot of less free time now, but hopefully, I'll be able to pull off a test build soon, and a Release Candidate before end of year.
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