Altap Salamander Support Forums

Jan Rysavy wrote: ↑22 Mar 2018, 09:34 We are migrating Salamander code base to the Unicode and working on High DPI support right now.

You should focus only on 1 feature at time and release EAP builds.

Raptor wrote: ↑24 Mar 2018, 09:40

Jan Rysavy wrote: ↑22 Mar 2018, 09:34 We are migrating Salamander code base to the Unicode and working on High DPI support right now.

You should focus only on 1 feature at time and release EAP builds.

Since there are two core developers I think they have 1 feature at the time. For the EAP builds, I think they badly need CI like Jenkins which would deliver their new code automatically.

tukanos wrote: ↑27 Mar 2018, 11:16 Since there are two core developers I think they have 1 feature at the time. For the EAP builds, I think they badly need CI like Jenkins which would deliver their new code automatically.

They are working on Unicode since 2006!!! 12 years!!! And as they said, they are working on Unicode AND High DPI support. So it means more then 1 feature at the time. And still nothing is done. It will be never done

We have Unicode version in plans for many years but we started working on it before 9 months not before 12 years.

How is it going? After 9 month of work on a feature you should be able to estimate when it can be finished. So?
Also please do not hesitate to post some screenshots of Unicoded Salamander. It helps to calm down the angry community.
I'm crossing fingers you release an EAP build soon! Keep up the good work!

Jan Rysavy wrote: ↑22 Mar 2018, 09:34We have no idea where it comes from. Please let us know, maybe we forgot to send invoice somewhere

I was thinking of this post from 2012:

Re: Development speed
Post by Jan Rysavy » Thu Aug 02, 2012 8:44 am

Eric, we are selling ~150 licenses per month and you are right that it is not enough for two people here in Czech Republic. This number contains several multi-licenses that are rather cheap, see the price list. 300 licenses per month would be so-so.

It is unfortunate but right now we need another income source. We hope AS 3.0 upgrade will help us with this problem and we will be able return to AS work with 100% of our time and solve the "Unicode" problem and other tasks. Salamander is definitely not a dead project, it has ~10K downloads & installations each month. Do not measure it by this forum, only very small fraction of AS users participate here.

Note: We are still working over 40 hour per person and week on AS. It is really huge project with with several time consuming dependencies (work on language translations, website, server management, bug reporting infrastructure, AS support, sales, our internal users database, accounting, etc.) We are migrating sales from our old e-commerce reseller SWREG to Paypal and rewriting sales database and website to support AS 3.0 upgrade.

Thank you for you support and ideas, we really appreciate it!

I was recalling these parts: "it is not enough for two people here in Czech Republic", and "we will be able return to AS work with 100% of our time". That suggested to me that it wasn't your main job.

(But then in the same message you say, "We are still working over 40 hour per person and week on AS", which seems a bit contradictory.)

Anyway, I'm glad to hear you are working on it full time.

Unicode is more complicated than expected (see troubles with basic support for RTL texts above). Plus everything complicated by support for long paths (32k chars = small stack for recursions, too long text of all error messages with included paths, etc.). Plus GDPR, taxes and other bureaucracy. I do not expect we will have preview version earlier than on late autumn.

Lets pray we can get a new release by the end of this year

@Petr Solin
I see that you are going to implement full Unicode at large and I have a programmer question - do you use an Unicode handling library? If so, which one and why?

Why I am asking - nowadays I am in the middle of Unicode-library selection process for a SW project. Right now I am playing with multiplatform ICU (there is also Microsoft own ICU implementation, but only in newest Win10+), but it is a very heavy tool and I am looking for something as good, rock solid, but much smaller.

We use only MS Uniscribe.

camper wrote: ↑07 Jan 2018, 10:14 tosi: +1 (not the perfect solution, but an intermediate one which should solve a lot of problems for >50% of your users)

+1 for the very similar reason: Releasing an intermdiate unicode implementation that only supports LTR and is limited to basic features as rename or delete would already be helpful for a major share of users, and in a later version full Unicode support including RTL may come. I consider this to be more useful globally across all Salamander users than the state we have since years: Even though I only deal with languages using latin characters, I stuble again and again over files I cannot rename or delete in Salamander.

rollhigh wrote: ↑20 Mar 2018, 21:10 I'd pay again and a higher price for a new version, if it meant speedier development and more useful features were more forthcoming.
...
The main drawback still for me is still no proper unicode support.

I fully agree to the first part, because at work I am not allowed any more to use Salamander but FreeCommander XP. You think this an odd reason? No. Even though FC XP has IMHO some severe disadvantages compared to Salamander (mostly usability & reliably issues), I learned to love several features of that cost free tool missing in my payed Salamander. Many of those features I'm missing are nothing big, so one developer could easily have them implemented in the time since the last Salamander version. And, to my impression, that's only not implemented because of the Unicode task, of which most work is irrelevant for me (especially RTL and all the many associated details) - so quite a contrast to you, rollhigh (second part of the quote). Those diverse user needs make it difficult for the extremely small dev team; in the end, it's e.g. an Unicode XOR other stuff decision. Hence I would pay in order that one more dev can be hired, so other, smaller useful features do at last get the attention they'd need to keep Salamander a top choice and regular updates come instead of few years "nothing", not even tiny simple stuff like fixing the known bugs in ZIP handling. It would also allow the existing devs to really focus on the majors and get them done quicker. Like Unicode. Also think of a UX you really like when using the years old (!) Win10 with HighDPI, touch etc. And afterwards think of a pre-defined alternative hotkey system for those people having to use those ugly keyboards where F5 key is not F5 but some media stuff. Think of tabs. Think of decent metadata support (XMP etc) in PicViewer, search etc.

To be honest, it was a little embarrassing for me when I lately catched myself thinking to donate for FreeCommander XP improvement and to completely switch. But reflect what causes a 15+ years Salamander user to have those thoughts...

Raptor wrote: ↑28 Mar 2018, 08:20

tukanos wrote: ↑27 Mar 2018, 11:16 Since there are two core developers I think they have 1 feature at the time. For the EAP builds, I think they badly need CI like Jenkins which would deliver their new code automatically.

They are working on Unicode since 2006!!! 12 years!!! And as they said, they are working on Unicode AND High DPI support. So it means more then 1 feature at the time. And still nothing is done. It will be never done

In my view, they have approached unicode topic incorrectly. They should have, every time they touched the code, also do a unicode change to that part of the code. The only possible way to go forward in such huge codebase to do small, incremental steps forward. To do it "at once" is hard and takes very long time to complete. From their product I see they are good programmers, but in code management and planning they are lacking, well nobody is perfect, and I hope they will be able to finish it.

EAP please, we're your community, please hear us.

is there a beta release we can test?