[PART2/2] 2019 and 2020. Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Hey again,

I can and want to finally talk a bit about all the upcoming features, the way the filter and filterblade is developed and what is coming this year... and also next days.

First a little bit of background, bear with me: The development of the filter has been quite a learning experience. Back when I published the first version - around 5 years ago - I just became a master of engineering. I've been programming way before I started studying, but any developer will tell you that you learn quite different skills, when you're working in the industry.

Over the coming years, I've gathered quite a bit of experience in different jobs, filter-related work and other hobby projects progressed from writing well working code to well written code and finally to well designed architectures. 

Bad architectures hold you down and limit your ability to implement new things.

So where do we move on from here?

Well: This year will introduce a bunch of completely new features and aspects, improvements to existing workflows, but I also intend to breath some new life into some existing features, that will open up completely new opportunities, both within their own areas and for future opportunities. 

• The tierlist structure in the filter - currently the filter has a lot of "remaining" tiers. There a lot of problems with those. They make editing harder, obfuscate information, filterblade editing is less transparent, make economy sorting tricky and it catches all new/unupdated items as well. This system needs a major rework. 
• The style system - this is currently by far my biggest pain in the ass. The current system is grotesque. It was a valiant effort, 4 years ago, but we can do *so much better* now. Custom styles, auto-generated styles, economy based styles, machine-generated styles with perfect contrasts. Improved customsound concepts. You name it. This is likely the hardest of the goals for this year and a non-trivial challenge.
• Strictnesses - have you ever wished for custom strictnesses or maybe going over the strictness limits currently available? Well, then hold on, because this is something that's on the roadmap this year
• FilterBlade's custom rule system - the current system is functional, but not elegant at all. We've been evaluating concepts for a new and much improved custom rule system. That allows for much more operation excellence. 

On top of that this year will bring many more surprise features, improvements to filter generation and quality of life, but these points are certainly on the roadmap.

So when are the first features coming?

... Well. Next week.

I'll talk about it in the next post/video :)