Hello future Qyllscapers,
Firstly I appreciate those that have been following Qyllscape for a few months now, and wanted to share a little more about development. I am absolutely still hard at work, and I am hopeful that with a few more weeks of late nights, Qyllscape will be polished up and ready to go.
Here are a couple successes, with more details around improvement development further down...
- Cloud saving is working, so your projects should be available across machines!
- Color templates have been added, so there should be a list of prebuilt customizations for all colors (think light mode, dark mode, gorgeous mode)
- Countless improvements behind the scenes to architecture that will allow me to develop faster, and add more customization options
Foundation Rebuild
When I start building projects, I generally piece it together as I go, and because of that, improvements are usually piled on top of each other. The issue is that as you improve something, over and over again, you learn enough to realize that what you're improving should be rebuilt from scratch.
This is difficult to do because of the Sunk-Cost fallacy, the belief that just because you have put so much effort in one approach, it should not be abandoned.
Qyllscape was pieced together as an experiment, and the foundation of that experiment needed to be replaced. The way that I have been handling the graphical resizing of various elements needed to be dealt with.
So, I basically forced myself to delete all of it, and start from scratch. This gif is crude, but represents a lot of troubleshooting, and encouraging improvements on the basic layout of the Qyllscape "book" editor. I have deleted all records of what it was like before, but it was basically a group of images carefully and manually stacked on each other, with ridiculous pixel-perfect math sprinkled throughout the code to "look" like it was doing what is happening in this gif.
So, the new approach is smoother, promotes better performance, and is much easier to work with throughout other areas in the code.
Wave Bye To Your Darlings
On the topic of rebuilding, I was holding on to too many aspirations for the UI. I liked the idea of having a playful, draggable UI system, but the truth I had to deal with is that it did not serve the final product, and mostly presented issue after issue related to accessibility, platform support, viewport clutter, coding complexity, etc. I adore the old, sketchy feel of the UI, but I am working to make a simple product that will help people finish their books.
The new iteration of the UI is much simpler, and will allow me to iterate even faster as I add support for more customization throughout the application.
Getting Ready For Release
The exciting part of these changes is that the only thing remaining before Qyllscape is available, is for me to continue testing it and polishing it up as much as possible, meaning that it is in a place now where it is usable, and someone could comfortably utilize it to write a book.
I appreciate your patience so much. My focus in the coming weeks will be around polish, and creating some advertisements for getting more people interested. If you'd like to help spread the word, check out my instagram account @ericdavidsonwrites.
I can only say thank you so many times, but I am excited for what is to come. Now, back to work!
Love you all!
Eric Davidson