I took a bit of a PC break, but now I’m back and working on a new application. The application allows the clustering of data (hence its name: Cluster), along with metadata, genres, and so on. Here are the reasons why Cluster is now in development …
Wow, that was unexpected.
For me, the best games I’ve ever played were back in the 16-BIT era from the likes of Sega, on the Megadrive/Genesis. There were so many classic games released like Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Toejam & Earl, Comix Zone, and so on.
What I couldn’t understand was why Sega wasn’t doing updated versions of those games - gamers like myself would have a jizz-fest*. I don’t mean like what Nintendo are doing: constantly re-hashing the same shit over and over again. Just how many damn Zelda games are there, for example?
I really hated the look of the old Software area of the site, so I went ahead and redesigned it. While I was at it, I did a ton of work which resulted in the listed below. This took longer to do as it required some major code changes within the application I use to actually maintain the listings data as well as of course the server side of things.
Here are the bigger changes …
Awards. I’m sure a lot of you have seen software sites that give awards to the programs they feature. These days, awards mean absolutely nothing. They just exist as a means for software archive sites to get more links back to them. They’re crap, and I hate them. So, why did I add support for them? Because I want to release the application and associated PHP files for the software section so others may use them, so it’s up to the individual user if they want to make use of this feature or not.
I mentioned a Support section in the above list; at the moment is just provides a means of contacting me about a particular software title. I want to expand this so it also provides frequently asked questions and general trouble-shooting information.
There is also a facility to purchase the full versions of any shareware, but that isn’t currently used as pretty much all of my stuff is free. Oh, yeah - the page is also fixed-width. This was accidental and will be fixed some time in the future.
Finally, I have integrated a part of this blog system with the Software section backend which results in the latest releases being displayed on the right-hand menu that you can see. Click on link to be taken to its relevant area of the Software section.
Edit: Erm, I think I may have made the link badges on the right a bit too glossy. Oops.
I’m doing a lot of interface work recently after having purchased a pretty awesome icon pack and creating that Vista-style gradient panel I mentioned a couple of posts back. Today we have a new release of Mass Extract, which incorporates these changes.
Speaking of the panel, I’ll be making the BiQubic.Suite .NET libraries available sometime soon. This suite includes class libraries such as (BiQubic.Suite.)Controls, (etc.)Filesystem, Media, Network, and so on, which provides various useful controls and methods for use in application development. This used to come in the form of the BiQubic.dll library that I linked with 98% of my dotNet apps and was a monolithic 280KB.
I couldn’t be doing with such a bloatfest and so I’ve split everything off into their own libraries and removed a lot of the rubbish that I barely used. I’m still organising the methods into their own classes and writing the XML documentation; once done, there will be a first public release. Source code will come at some point.
View: Mass Extract, BiQubic.Suite
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