SolOTility #3 – Beta

by Dave SolOTility, Updates

In the previous post I wrote regarding SolOTility I mentioned that I expected to be able to release a beta-ish-version of this program within a week’s time. Needless to say I misjudged the time estimate, alot of time this week has been spent working on Demox, and on top of that I found some bugs in SolOTility that needed to be fixed before releasing the first version aswell as some new features that were added!

Appending Images to Work Items

I’ve added functionality to append images to work items within the user’s solution. It can be either added manually by writing the filepath to the image within tags ( eg. <img>C:\Program\SomeDir\myImg.png</img> ) or by clicking the “Add Image” button in the Item Editor, which will auto-generate the previous code.

There’s also been alot of fixes for the Item Editor, most in order to make it a little more user-friendly and help the user avoid making wrong decisions by mistake. (Such as closing items without saving changes, etc. )

The new appearance of Solution Catalogs and Items in the Item List

Solution Interim Goals

I added a feature to allow the user to set up their own interim goals, it’ll be useful in cases if the user would like to keep track of progress of the project, a specific build or of a group of work items.

It’s a quite simple system, the interim goals are set up to compare the amount of closed items ( completed, obsolete & deprecated ) against other items ( inactive, active, prioritized ). When all specified items are closed the interim goal is completed.

The user can currently set up interim goals to either track items with a specific build name or items with a specific item tag.

Example of an image appended to a work item’s content.

Work item control’s appearance has been updated to make it easier to identify item type, and the catalogs shown in the Solution Outliner panel are now color-coded aswell. The Dashboard is colored red, Navigator nodes are colored blue and common catalogs use one of four available green colors. ( The green color is shifted depending on at what level within the catalog node tree a catalog is placed. )

Another minor change, Mindmap Editor is opened in Full-screen mode.
The Project Overview screen, displaying all user-created interim goals and solution progress.

Last but not least, another widget was added called “Message Board”. The message board will display the most recent messages or comments that have been left in an item, the idea is to have these messages act as a reminder.

All that remains before I upload a beta release now is to figure out how to create a setup / installer file. I’ve created such files before but all of them have been sort of broken in one way or the other, so this time I was thinking that I probably should do some research and get things right for once .__.’

And before we part ways, don’t forget to follow me on @Twitter for more news, artwork and whatnot!