I've had a crash
We were stopped on the highway in traffic, and the 21-year-old driving a fully-loaded dump truck behind us decided that his phone was more important than paying attention on the road. He slammed into us and thoroughly destroyed my car, but thankfully we weren't seriously injured. I'm so happy we bought a strong car, but I'm devastated that it's been destroyed. It was my dream car (a Mitsubishi Lancer), and now they don't even make them any more.
As many of you know, we're about three weeks away from closing the deal on our first house. Now we have a totalled car in the mix, and likely thousands of dollars out of pocket because insurance sucks. I will not have time to work on the replacement for CEE for the next few weeks. There is simply too much to do, and I'm probably going to have to do several 60-hour workweeks to make up the extra money, so that we don't default on our first payment for our house.
I'm sorry, guys. Pulling my life together is my top priority, now. It's going to be a rough couple of months.
Stay safe out there.
Posted by Emily on Sunday May 27, 2018.
Slowing Down for a Bit
Hey world.
As you know, I'm still super dedicated to getting the replacement to CEE out there. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to slow down development over the next couple of weeks. There are some very serious family matters I need to attend to, coupled with a business trip to the 'States next week.
I will do my best to continue development when I get a chance, but I wholly expect that these next couple of weeks are going to be exceedingly difficult for me, and I won't be in the right mindset to be coding.
As always, thank you everyone for your support. I'll be sure to drop another entry here soon.
Posted by Emily on Wednesday April 25, 2018.
Coming along!
This is just a small update to let everyone know that work is still going strong on the replacement for CEE! I had some setbacks, had to refactor some things because of interactions I wasn't expecting. You know, all those traps we set for ourselves!
Anyway, you can continue to stay up to date on my work for the initial release here. Basic effects like rainbow, spiral, and solid colour are done, and all peripherals (other than headsets) are now supported. I've also rebuilt the Windows Accent Colour bits so that they listen to Windows messages and update with Windows, instead of checking a registry key every X seconds. My next task is to start building the new Spectro effects. This is probably the biggest hurdle I have to overcome in the initial release, so I might go quiet while I'm working on it.
A great feature that's been implemented in the rework is the ability to view effects live in the software. This makes editing layers a lot easier! CPU usage when effect viewing is off usually sits at 0.1% to 0.4% for me, with a mouse, keyboard, and mousepad. With effect viewing enabled, it sits around 2%. Clearly, I've spent way more time optimizing everything than I expected!
Another fun little snippet for those that wanted themes so much in CEE: I have built a fully integrated Theme Editor in this new software, with the ability to change the colours of everything in the program, and to save and load themes.
That's about it for now! Back to programming. :)
Posted by Emily on Saturday April 07, 2018.
Track my Work!
You can keep track of all the work items I have open for CEE's replacement here.
This page pulls my work items from VSTS and displays them as they are. They don't display in the order I'm working on them, though, unfortunately. It's kinda ugly, but at least it works. It took far more work than it should have to figure out how to make PHP pull down this kind of data and then parse the crazy formats Microsoft seems to think we want.
I'll be creating a bug submission page down the line, so that any issues you encounter can be automatically added to my workload!
Posted by Emily on Saturday February 17, 2018.
Finally Back to Development!
I've been off development for a long time. Truth be told, I've been kind of burned out. I now hold a position in my company that demands a lot of work, and a lot of responsibility to get things done in time. A lot of people ride on my job being done right. The added stress of all this, plus dozens of emails ever week, and a forum thread that's now at about 800,000 views, has lead to me just not having the will to code when I get home. It's what I do all day at work, I don't want to do it when I'm not at work, too.
Anyway, I've got some ideas for how I want to actually develop my newest version of CEE. There's a lot of work to put into it, but I'm going to do my best to get updates out in somewhat regular intervals. I'm probably going to drop ClickOnce, because it's an altogether horrible installer. I'm not entirely sure what I'll use for auto-updates, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. For now, I just want to get the engine working.
I'm sorry I've been away so long. I hope I can make it up to you soon.
Posted by Emily on Saturday February 17, 2018.