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« on: April 25, 2008, 12:10 AM »
Hello everyone,
I am very sorry I haven't released a new version of this software. I used SkyIDE very often and the more I used it, the more bugs I found. In fact, even the ones that were supposed to be fixed, somehow re-emerged. These bugs are especially visible with the object viewer. Believe me, I've tried a lot of different ways of sorting these things and everytime I thought things were sorted out, something else came up. In fact, I got so frustrated, I decided to get my hands of it for a while. I knew what I was doing isn't the right way of implementing things. My intention now is to re-write the whole thing using different methods.
I made a common mistake. Instead of focusing and fixing errors, I kept on adding more features and that created more errors.
I would like to show you some of the inner operation of SkyIDE.
First I would like to get rid of the MDI while maintaining the tabs. This is because opening a new form for each new document slow the whole IDE. Instead of opening a new form with Scintilla in it, I would simply create a new TScintilla object and store its address into an array. So instead of using my own array to manipulate multiple forms, I will be using the same array to manipulate TScintilla objects instead. This will make the IDE much faster when opening 10+ documents. I compared opening about 10 docs with SkyIDE and the same ones with NoteTab Light and NoteTab blew SkyIDE away in speed an I got very disappointed. So this is another thing that triggered me to pull the plug of SkyIDE for now.
Second, you know, when you open a new document, you know how you have the side bar on the left? Well it looked like if the side bar was part of the new child form. In reality, it was only one sidebar that resided on the main MDI form and all I did is set its parent to be the child form. Later on this gave me a lot of problems when closing all forms so I decided to actually, put the side bar on the child form. This made SkyIDE even slower. Because each time a new form got created, a new side bar would have been created as well so this slowed things down and consumed more memory.
Thirdly, the multi view, creating documents on the fly. There is a bug with this and I spent a lot of time searching (while not knowing what to search for) and I found nothing. If you grab the splitter of the new document and try moving it up down a few times, "somehow" intermittently it will join with the second new view and it gets messed up. I could not fix this. So there is another reason I got let down....
Fourth, the class viewer and object viewer on the side bars, are full of bugs, they don't alawys operate correctly. I believe the initial versions worked fine but after I added the classs viewer things messed up
I was continuing development with BCB 6 instead of 2006 -- as a version of TScintilla was not available at the time for BCB 2006. I don't know about now.
So what is the future? I want to re-write the whole thing with BCB 2006. If a version of TScintilla is available for this version of BCB I will go with it otherwise, I will have to look for somethning else even a commercial tool.
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Thanks guys 