Back with something new

From now on tray icon in system tray/notification area is optional. It was not so hard to implement thanks to Jin's/Tonic's API. Creating a plugin with some user interface for preferences is a matter of minutes. I have to thank AlexTheGreat - he put a lot effort to make Jin really open source - well documented, readable and reusable. I hope he will find time to work more on Jin.

Good time, hard time, no time at all

It may seem I have no time for Tonic - there were no new posts on this blog latly, no commits to CVS , not to mention about new releases. Well, I haven't abonded Tonic, believe me. I like coding it even if it gives headache like yesterday. The feature I was working on was displaying available pieces for Bughouse/Crazyhouse players. I've failed this time, I've made wrong decision to display them on the board. I've decided I will make completly new component for it. Keep your fingers crossed - I won't be able to do it while coding - I am using ten fingers to type ;).

Anyway, I just deleted the wrong code and squizzed a bug in consoles. The bug was: when sending command to server there was space added in front of command. This space was added every time you tried to send command from history too, so you could end up with quite a lot spaces in front of your command... Still full command is stored in history and it is bad feature when you use console with prefix supplier - it will repeat prefix over and over again when you issue command taking it from history. I will work on that soon. [Few minutes after publishing this post I've get rid of this bug too, so it really is a good time ;)] And on making tray icon an option, because some of ficser found it to be bad idea to have next tray icon, I can understand that :).

I was too optimistic

I agree I was too optimistic saying you may not even notice slowdown in development in Tonic. Getting to know my job takes a lot of my energy. Well, I have it enough to play America's Army from time to time, but not enough to sit down for late night coding. Although I am still sure Tonic will evolve and will get Bughouse/Crazyhouse support, eventually. I've just decided that then I put it in the list of interfaces at Free Internet Chess Server site. I hope it will give it more attention from ficsers. Anyway, it is good to have a job and I learn a lot doing it so I benefit two way.