Dev update for April

I haven't really posted much here, but the teams been busy toiling away, so thought I'd give a quick update.

The new dev approach we've set is in motion. If you have issues filed at: Geektoolkit/DynaframeProIssues you've probably seen some activity there as we go through and pick what we can fix safely in April.  We also maintain an inernal bug database that we're picking through, and tons of fixes and a new beta are out via discord.  The updated build has layout fixes, quite a bit of smoothing out in the overlays section (better UI, some small features, some layout improvements).  

The main focus of the second half of the month is tied to a terrible bug that has surfaced in overlays which freezes the entire video system.  Once the bug hits, nothing new will render to the screen (the problem here is that the system isn't actually hung...the code and log continue to run and from our software's perspective, everything is fine...the app actually thinks it's showing new images..but they're not working).  We have done a few attempts at fixing it and have found that it's something deper than our software, likely in the raspberry pi video driver. It could still be something we're doing wrong, but the thing that breaks is very very hard for us to detect.  The only fix once you're in that state is a full reboot.

As you can guess, that's something we really need to fix. So I'm spending some late nights on it.   I'll update here once we have it fixed.

One big thing you'll notice is your voice in dynaframeproissues will be heard and much louder now.  While some bugs are still beyond our capabilities at this time (HEIC), we are getting alot more of whats there knocked down or at least time on it. I think as you see us progress over the next few months we'll be able to take on more and more of those.

For those in IT or devs, here's a bit more technical breakdown of how we're maturing and approaching our development.  Before we had a main and a dev branch, and all code that was being done outside of main went direclty into dev, we'd make betas out of dev, and when dev was solid we'd integrate to main, do a release, create a release branch and then go back to dev.  

We now fork/branch the code for very tight fixes, or for features off of dev, and when they're complete we roll them back into dev. This means dev stays shippable and testable, and the PR's for each give us a solid list of features/changes to query against.  It also means that now if a feature ends up being alot bigger than we anticipate (as has happened all too often) then it doesn't affect us shipping at the end of the month...we just take whatever is in dev, snap that moment in time and then create our release branch/integrate to main.  

Thankyou to everyone who's supporting us and making this all possible.  When I get out of this overlay fix I'm going to do a demo of overlays that I think will make things make a ton more sense about why we're so excited about the possibilities.  

Joe and the Dynaframe team (QWK, bdlou)