02 August 2010

The Great Unicode Migration


The last 2 months have been spent migrating program code for a compiler upgrade. It has been tedious work, affecting over 900 source files in Deep-Sky Planner alone. The bulk of the migration changes has been related to supporting Unicode. Unicode accommodates characters in most any language. System testing of the changes is in progress.

While the migration has seemed like non-productive work, it will permit Deep-Sky Planner and SQM Reader Pro to take advantage of new technologies that are supported in the new compiler. These technologies will be used to develop some exciting new features and to satisfy some user-requested ones - more on this later. These features will appear in a free update (v 5.1) to Deep-Sky Planner 5 that is scheduled for release in Q1 2011.

In the meantime, some minor issues surfaced in Deep-Sky Planner v 5.0.1 during the migration. Code reviews have a way of doing that. These issues will be fixed in a minor update (v 5.0.2) to be released soon - in Q3 or early Q4 2010.