Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Deklunkified back/forward browser buttons and hotkeys
Dear citizens of CardMeeting Town,
I fixed a bunch of niggly bugs and behaviors in this latest build of CardMeeting.
In case you didn't know, CardMeeting is designed to allow you to navigate in and out of the applet with the back/forward buttons on your browser. Well, design doesn't always match implementation, and it turns out I had some serious resource problems whenever users would navigate away from the CardMeeting applet. Chiefly, you could get a browser that would never close, or you might get 100% CPU utilization on one of your CPU cores, or everything might be fine. Anyhow, I did some pretty rigorous testing of applet shutdown on the JRE versions that matter. So, if you've been seeing system performance problems lately related to CardMeeting, hopefully everything there is now resolved. Sorry 'bout the bugs, my bad.
Anyhow, I didn't see any of these stability/performance problems myself because I've been doing my testing for the past few months with a bleeding edge version of Java. Sun is purporting that Java Applets have been totally revamped with this new version.
I have to attest, they're right. Speed, stability, deklunkification - it's all nifty there. And they give me, the developer, so much more control! I can turn on 3D hardware acceleration for CardMeeting, for example! You want Minority Report? I got your Minority Report right here! I'm holding off on enabling that until I get completion on some of my other features.
Other changes in this build are that I rewrote the hotkey support in the application. So, for example, the zoom hotkeys (Ctrl+Up Arrow and Ctrl+Down Arrow) now scream! It's nice to be able to zoom smoothly while holding down the key. With my old hotkey method, it would stutter and get all hung up. Same with Change Card Color (F12 or F8 on mac), it cruises now too. Check it out!
The remaining changes are minor behavioral glitches that probably didn't make anyone's radar, but they bugged me and I finally did something about 'em.
That's all for now. Happy hunting!
Cheers,
Dave Woldrich
