Bring Out Your Votes

In September we finally got around to updating the Carbide Bugzilla site to use the latest Bugzilla 3.4.2 release. I won't go into a long rant about how difficult it was, how much code re-factoring was done, nor how Perl updating is badly broken (at least on my installation).

Needless to say we are going to improve our process so as not to wait 2+ years before we perform the next update.

In the mean time you have new improved Bugzilla to submit bugs on, with improved features, more security, and the same database underneath.

With this update we also decide to activate a common Bugzilla feature, namely voting. Everyone now has 10 votes to cast towards the fixing of any bug still open. We will be watching for those bugs that naturally gravitate to the top of the voting list and acting on them as quickly as possible.

You have a total of 10 votes to cast, of which no more than 2 can go to any single bug, so spread them around. Once a bug that you voted for is fixed, the votes cast on it are returned to you for use elsewhere. Get your friends to vote with you, especially if you have something annoying everyone. We'll be sure to look at it.

Image by Gil Elvgren, one of the most important glamour artists of the twentieth century.

Carbide.c++ v2.WOW

In case you have not heard the news, Carbide just got a bit faster. And if you work with very (very) large projects, then Carbide just got a whole lot faster!

Carbide.c++ v2.1 (or 2.WOW) has several improvements and most notable are in the area of performance. We focused on improving performance in a few typical uses and we hope that you will notice the difference.

In the following case, we benchmarked a project that imports EUSER. In earlier version of Carbide it would take several minutes (8.5 minutes in our tests) to import the project. The basic problems are (a) to root directory was calculated too high which resulted in (b) bringing way too many files into Carbide which also needed indexed. Carbide now selects a better root directory – less files to import, and faster importing times. We also make some additional changes under the hood. The result – for EUSER – rather significant results:

Other improvements besides importing.

• Indexing – due to smarter placement of the project root
• Executable View – when debugging, the IDE would get sluggish because EV was refreshing frequently. IDE should be more responsive when debugging.
• Changes to project settings, bld.inf files, re-opening workspace. You should notice a snappier response when changing workspaces or re-opening your workspace. The previous versions were refreshing too frequently.

You can get Carbide.c++ v2.WOW at the following retailers:

Symbian Foundation. Download the ADT (or PDT) v 1 product which contains Carbide v2.0.4. Inside of Carbide, UPDATE your product using the Update Manager (From Carbide, click Help – Software Updates).

Nokia Internal – SymSEE 10.2 (Available Aug 27) or visit the Carbide wiki page at http://s60wiki.nokia.com/S60Wiki/Carbide_Rollout and click on Beta Tester link (This link works only inside Nokia networks)

Warm and Lazy Days of Summer

By warm I really mean hot, hot, hot here in Austin. What's that song line, "... like 7 inches from the midday sun." Yeah, that hot.

And by lazy I mean that we just finished yet another release of Carbide for your enjoyment. Carbide.c++ 2.1 is now ready with some improvements that should make many of you very happy.

The goal of this release was performance. After spending years getting the feature set into place we listened and heard from all of you that performance was your number one issue. We listened and we acted. Our developers spent a lot of time combing through bugs for performance related issues, testing various scenario profiles to determine which tweaks would make a huge difference, and then relentlessly auto-tested them to ensure the changes really did improve usability.

Importing large projects is much faster, swapping launch configurations take a second, indexing MMPs is improved, and several other areas received changes. There's also a score of small feature improvements as well, but the major focus was on performance gains.

You can go here for a list of the various tests and some graphs of the improvements or simply read all about them in the Release Notes inside the Carbide.c++ User Guide.

NOTE: This post was copied from the Carbide News blog to get this one up and running.