Roadmap update

Hi guys, this week I've been focusing back on the main application. I've investigated a few areas that are part of the roadmap including :-

The ability for Pornspective and Pornspective AI to communicate across a network or locally on a PC. This is pretty straightforward and I've worked out how to do this. So this is one research area I've ticked off.

The next was to look at replacing the controls in the main app with WPF controls. WPF is a much faster User Interface tech than the existing WinForms which is slow and fickery in comparison. It also suffers from the DPI issues. I've never been 100% happy with the amount of logic in the front end so I want to refactor this too.

The next was to look at the WPF media players as I'm finding the existing player clunky and a little hard to use. Also as I want to embed more features like infomation, bookmarking with tags and playlists then the existing player is limited. I've found a great replacement which ticks all the boxes however needs .NET 5.0, and currently the app is using .NET 4.7.2. It might not sound a big difference but trust me that the two frameworks are completely changed in all areas.

Finally I've been playing with the Parallel programming to try and get image thumbnailing much more efficient and therefore the indexing of both the main app and the AI app (as both us same library).

All of these are pretty fundamental changes to the application. I've decided that as .NET 4.7.2. will die I do need to make the jump to .NET 5.0 sooner rather than later. The benefit of this is it will be multi platform including Linux and iOS. I'm hoping WPF or some support for it will also follow so therefore Pornspective can become truly cross platform.

I've taken the decision today to branch off the existing 1.10 (meaning I can still work on it whilst I pull the engine apart) and move the product on the main trunk to .NET 5.0. This will become Pornspective 2.0 which I'll release firstly in alpha and beta alongside 1.10+.

This does not mean there will be no updates on the main application, on the contrary the services and code will still be shared and updated between the two versions so fixes and enhancements on a logic level will be added. The front end of Pornspective 1.10 though will not be enhanced much further (other than fixes), the main effort will be version 2.0. I hoping to keep the two products compatible and therefore you'll be able to install both whilst we stablize version 2.0.

Version 2.0 will be WPF so it will be faster and even more visually appealing, however thats just part of it. I want version 2.0 to be a slicker user experience too, so please start letting me know where you feel the application could be more intuative. I'm especially thinking around the tagging where I've had some ideas already given to me.

So as you can see, Pornspective as a project will keep moving at pace even though the existing app has much of what I originally planned to do. Believe it or not Pornspective is actually a second version of a product called HubDrive I wrote two years ago. Pornspective took all the good bits of that project and polished them. Pornspective 2.0 will take all the good bits of Pornspective 1.0 and polish even harder whilst adding stuff that currently the technology choice limits me to.

As always everyone, thanks so much for all the loyal support on this project. I aim to repay that support with the next generation of Pornspective.