Dev update 2 for November

So this is the current status for end of November, and a bit about what to expect in December and January.

This month the performance work continues, and we're hearing successful runs on Pi Zero W2, Pi 2s, and much smoother Pi3b runs.  That's where we want to be so we have headroom for the next set of features.

Speaking of, the playlist editor, as a new feature, needed serious performance tuning.  We've made great progress there to the point where we can now generate thumbnails 'on the fly' vs. caching them.  This prevents us from having to store gigs of thumbnails to cache them, or wait hours for that to happen.  Now it just flows in as they're loaded.  We're on fit and finish work there to clean up the icons, add a fade, and then that'll be complete.

We have more bug fixes coming as well for November, but we're working hard to not add features at this point and clean it up so we can ship it by end of the month.

So that brings us to December, and the next alpha, which will likely launch then.  That Alpha (and beta) will have the overlay engine. We have a design and while I'm dying to work on it, I have to focus on the November release first. :)  December will be all about overlays however with a goal of having a release then for those that want to do overlays on movie posters and such, and to wrap up the Exif requests.

Frame Sync has been moved to December, I am rethinking how I did that due to the performance improvements, and may have a simpler, more elegant solution.

We are investigating adding the folder/playlist into the database as 'exif data' so that you can filter on folders/subfolders. That's a stretch goal based on requests and feedback.

The other work that will be happening is providing the ability to use a connected keyboard / mouse for entering info such as wifi, hostname, password.  We did a design overview last night and the work is beginning on that.

Based on the chatter in Discord and a plan we've wanted to get to for a while, January is going to be 'automation' month.  We're going to work to focus on four main areas:
1) Provide samples for doing automations with sensors such as PIR (so montion turns it on/off). This is local automation that wouldn't require 3rd party items.

2) Provide APIs to customize gestures and other inputs into the system (remote controls for instance)

3) Work to have a 'turn on at 8am, off at 6pm' type setting for those that want them to shut off at night.

4) Samples of how to utilize home assistant, curl, windows task scheduler and other external systems to show how to control the frames.

There's other stuff in the background such as saving playlists off by name, better logging to help those making automations, MQTT added back in and such, but we're going to take them 'as appropriate' when we're in the code and see what we can bring in without sacrificing performance or stability.  2023 is going to be a big year for this project as we're pivoting from the current engine to bringing in the community so they can provide plugins, scripts, automations, and more.

Stay tuned in the next week for the November release mail, thank you for the support, and we're so looking forward to the next stages of this!