Steve Lamerton's blog

Some time over the past couple of days Toucan has had its millionth download Although you can't see it from the stats because you can only seem to get them since February (if anyone knows how to see the old ones that would be great!) Toucan has made it to one million in just under three and a half years, thanks to everyone for their feedback and help along the way, and here is to many more successful years!

Just to let you all know I still exist I have been keeping watch over the forums when I can, things are pretty busy here right now as it is end of year exam time at my university and I am taking part in Google's Summer of Code 2010.

Toucan 3 is nearly finished, I plan to try and wrap it up this weekend and hopefully attach it to the end of the release queue.

Thanks all for your patience!

As promised I am going to do a quick summery of the time I had at FOSDEM 2010.

FOSDEM itself

I thought the meet-up itself was very well organised, there were lots of well manned stands, including most of the big Linux distros, all of whom gave away free CDs of which I took full advantage, they will be very helpful as soon as I get some more time to work on Toucan 3 again as the more variations I can test it on the better!

The Help File

The help file is also undergoing, once again, major changes for version 3. Rather than integrating it into Toucan itself I have decided to split it out, into a separate pdf document.

Moving to CMake

Before releasing a version of Toucan on Linux the build system needed cleaning up. Rather than create projects on Windows and writing makefiles on Linux I decided to use a proper build system.

The Command Line

The other main weak point in Toucan is the command line interface, mainly because it breaks, a lot. So whilst reworking the scripting system I also decided to redo the command line interface.

To take advantage of the new scripting system the new command line interface is a front end to the script system itself, for example to enter a script you do the following:

toucan --script="print(2 * 10)"

Introduction

Once again the blog restarts! In the next few posts (hopefully every couple of days for the next few days) I aim to explain a bit more about my vision for Toucan, and what is being done and has been done to get there, hopefully culminating with the first development test of Toucan 3 at the end of the series. Topics will include scripting (in this post), Linux support, the improved command line interface, general improvements and a number of others. You might also want to check out the previous post Toucan 3 Teasers for a couple of quick pictures.

Just a couple of quick pics of some new stuff I am cooking up for Toucan 3:

What you can't see is the fact that Toucan should now run off a read-only device, anyone got a good way of simulating one if you haven't got one to hand?

Some time over the last couple of days Toucan hit 750,000 downloads! Thanks to everyone who has downloaded and used it, especially the beta testers and translators. More exciting news about Toucan and the future coming soon

I am disappointed to say that Toucan will not use the Volume Snapshot Service in a future version. The idea behind VSS is that it allows you to copy files which are in use, for example an Outlook .pst file whilst Outlook is open. As there were a number of requests for this feature, and indeed I too thought it would be useful I have had it on the todo list for a while, and indeed I intended to have it added for version 2.1.3 which is now in pre-release here.