Happy New Year! Latest progress

Welcome everyone to 2024! I hope everyone had a safe and fun holiday.  I wanted to kick off the year with an update of how things are progressing on some big items we're working on.  I'll work to update as we make progress, but please know that these are going to be big items to fix/update so we may be slow to release much till it's in a stable shape.  If you're on the discord and request to be in betas that's the best way to get early peeks at things as we do updates.  There's three main things we're working on/planning...this is an iterative update from my last post on them.

1) Avalonia Vnext (mostly done)

Avalonia is our framework that we build on to show images/text and such on the screen.  We were quite a bit out of date as updating this is usually work that doesn't show alot for our users, but takes us time to do.  Also it can be risky if we update too early.   The other risk though is being on an older version means we may have bugs/issues that we can't fix ourselves till we move forward.  Well Bdlou did the work to migrate us forward to the latest Avalonia, and we've been testing it throughout December.  Things are mostly in good shape, though we have to do some updates to get things like animated gifs working again.  That being said, it was a ton of work, and the best part is it seems to have greatly helped memory on overlays...I'm no longer seeing crashes when using them that I had seen before.

2) ASP.net web engine (this is the current item)

Our web engine is a hand spun one.  I'm working on migrating us to ASP.net, but honestly the work so far has been ramping up on the tech and planning it out.  I'll send out a video of a tech demo once I have something concreate, but this is a major piece of what will be next.  You can expect a ground up rewrite of the website as we do this (We're going to try to have the old and new work side by side I suspect as we develop it). This will help us greatly in development and making things faster, more responsive, and even more secure (I know many of you have asked for a login page...this is the kind of thing that will enable that).

3) Bookworm progress

Bookworm is the OS that the pi5 supports, and it also is 2 entire OS revisions past where we are. It is a must that we move to it as soon as we can get it working. I've got most of the workitems figured out, but one of the things I need is...well item 2 (the asp.net web engine) to be completed to have everything work in place.   Once that's done we will decide if we release on the current OS again or if we push to the new OS and try to release an Alpha with everything stitched together. From there we'll work on bugfixes and finish the features, call it a Beta, and then move to release as soon as we can.

So, in short, the Avalonia work was done in December which was a light month for us thanks to the holidays. I'm heads down on the web engine update now, and please expect some demos of that through this month as I make progress.  When these three things are done I'm expecting a much more polished looking system that we can iterate on in a much easier way.

Thankyou as always for the support. I wish I could push updates out sooner, but the more we learn about this, the more feedback we get, the more ambitious we get and the better we work to make this whole system.  I want you all to feel like you have a highly polished commercial piece of software, and I know we're not there yet and have alot of work to do. I commit to you that we'll get there, and continue to push the boundaries in 2024.

Thankyou!

Joe and the Dynaframe Team