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Vineyard: What's going on?

After the hinting I did in my last post and the lack of any new features being released for Vineyard, I though I'd let you people know what's actually going on with the development.

As some may have noticed, the last release had the Programs-page split into a separate file loaded as a plugin/module. This was done since the code for it is the largest piece of related code in Vineyard and it made sense to separate it, but also because I've been wanting to make Vineyard more modular. The result of starting to split out the different pages into modules (and stumbling on to Jono Bacon's recent post) however left me wishing that I had structured Vineyard differently from the start, so I sat down, did some thinking and decided to reprogram vinyard-preferences from scratch. Yup, that's right, from scratch.

I know this means that you'll have to wait somewhat longer for the next version, but fear not, I will still release bug fixes when necessary for the 1.4 series. What this also means is that the next version (the one brewing on my harddrive) loads completely asynchronously (in less than a second on my computer right now), has every page split into modules/plugins that load on demand, supports loading parts of the interface into other programs as widgets (!), supports theming Wine (including installing themes from archive files), has rudimentary support for colour-settings, and.... you guessed it Luke... basic AppDB integration. It also means that maintaining and extending Vineyard should be a lot easier in the future, good news for me.

So, sorry to keep you waiting, but I promise I'm cooking up something good ;) Oh, and feel free to keep requesting functionality!

Before I sign out I'll leave you with a quick screenshot of the new (possible) layout of some of the options:

Preview screenshot of the rewrite of vineyard-preferences