Fixing the bleedin' obvious

I have quite a lot of computers in my life, and they all run Linux. In fact, the only time I leave the confines of my beloved Linux is when I'm at work (where my machine at Moviestorm Towers is a Macbook Pro). Most of my machines run a variant of Linux called Ubuntu. Last year, the Ubuntu development team announced a new project which they called 100 Papercuts. The idea was that they would identify 100 little irritations which were reasonably trivial to fix. Most of the issues identified were minor and really not too significant, but as they all pile up they start to become a serious problem. One papercut, after all, is only an irritant, but if you get enough papercuts all at once you just might bleed to death.

I was quite taken with this idea (the papercuts concept, not the bleeding to death), and spent some time talking about it with Dave and Andrew. As a consequence, we recently launched our own "papercuts" project for Moviestorm. Whilst Ubuntu's Papercuts project attracted over 1600 recorded bugs within a few weeks, our initial brainstorm generated a slightly less ambitious 200(ish) issues. We're going to be tackling these "papercuts" a few at a time, aiming to fix between 10 and 20 papercuts each time we have a code release.

Let's take a look at some of the papercuts for the forthcoming 1.3.1 release.

MS-3277 Keep window positions and sizes after the user has adjusted them

Wouldn't it be nice if, when you moved a customisation window over to the left, it appeared in the same place when you next reopened it? Now it does. We haven't implemented this behaviour for every window yet, but it's in place for all of the "adjust something" windows (what we call Activity Customizers).

MS-4887 Improve transitions between major mode views

This one's not so easy to spot, but the load time required to switch Views - to move from Set Workshop View to Director's View, for example - has been much improved. A lot of clever process threading and Clever Engineering Hacking in the background has allowed us to make these transitions faster and smoother.

MS-4826 Can't remove user images

I'm going to be totally honest with you here: this is one of those bugs that represents a lack of functionality not through deliberate choice but just because we forgot to put it in. Once you add a custom image to a set object, there's no way of actually removing that image if you change your mind later. The ring menu for such objects now features a "clear image" option, which removes the image. It also works for held props and bodyparts.

MS-4815 File overwrite message is confusing

This one was ridiculously easy to fix, but had still been sat in our bug database for a long time. Being such a small team, it's easy for small things like this to never actually make it onto anybody's "to do list", simply because there are so many other, bigger things that need to be done. That's exactly what the papercuts project is good for: making sure that issues like this do eventually get addressed. Here's the dialog as it appears in the current released version of Moviestorm:

And here's the new version:

A lot clearer, I think you'll agree.

MS- 4809 Can't find the movie I last worked on

My Moviestorm "movies" directory currently holds about a hundred different movies, in various states of completion. When you spend a lot of your working day testing Moviestorm you tend to accrue a lot of test movies. The load screen will now allow you to sort those movies, either by name or by modification date. That means that the movie you last worked on can be quickly brought to the top of the list.

MS-4806 Typo on first page of Help

Yes, well. The less said about this the better. Let's just move on, shall we?

MS-4786 Warn me if I'm not placing a character at time 0

Ever had a character appear halfway through a scene because the timeline wasn't at the start of the scene when you issued the "place here" command? Yeah, me too. Not any more:

MS-3690 Autosave

Matt has already blogged about this one.

There are about half a dozen other papercut issues in various stages of completion, but this should give you some idea of what we're hoping to achieve for 1.3.1. This is an experiment, so the choice of which of our 200 papercut issues to address first has been almost arbitrary. What about you? What little annoying niggle would you like us to fix? Comment with your papercuts, and I'll add them to our issues database.