The Version 1 Curse - Thu, 1 Dec 2011

Everybody’s leery about buying a Version 1 of anything. I am as well. Obviously, if it is Version 1, then it is a new rookie program that hasn’t been field tested and is full of bugs.

And every programmer who puts out a Version 1 wants it to be perfect. The beta test was supposed to be to get all the bugs out and ensure all the features work prior to the Version 1 release.

Well, it didn’t take long, just 6 days, to find what I consider a major flaw in Version 1. It’s not a crash or big bug or anything like that. It’s a feature that I was sure was in Behold and working, and now I see that it’s not.

In Version 0.99.21 beta, 01 May 2011, I added date and place information into event references. This was a tremendous feature that gave a quick and complete picture of the information available. This was added to all the Details sections: The Place details and Source details were the two that provided the greatest benefit. In Version 0.99.21 beta, it looked like this:

So for every source reference, each event that source reference was usef for is listed, along with the type of event, date, place (with a hyperlink to the place in the Place details), and the person or people (with a hyperlink to the person or people) and their number.

This will, in version 2, be the essential part of the source-based data entry system (if you choose to use it) that Behold will have. You’ll enter your source, and the references within the source, and you’ll create the events that the source reference provides for you, and they’ll get linked semi-automatically to the people and places they pertain to.

Then you’ll add any notes you want that can document your conclusions regarding this event. If it conflicts with other events (and maybe I get Behold to tell you of any conflicts) then you can decide which is most likely and revise your notes and conclusions. This is the start of a real evidence/conclusion model and finally there will be a program (Behold) that will assist you in doing this. I’m so excited just writing this – I really want to get to Version 2 soon.

But in the meantime, the wonderful display of event information with dates and places should have been in last week’s Behold Version 1.0 release. Instead, what you see is:

Blast! No dates or places..Actually, they are sometimes there, but not nearly as often as they should be.

I checked later versions, and it was 0.99.24, 08 Nov 2011 when they vanished.

It was a simple fix. I have four lines that record the first date and place mentioned in each event. This gets reset at the beginning of each new event. But it needs to happen after the links are processed from the previous event. They are not processed until the event is over which is detected by the start of the next event, and if the first date and place get reset too soon … well that’s the problem all right. Moving the four lines after the links are processed fixes the problem. I can’t recall why I might have changed their location in 0.99.24. I might have been doing something with the link processing.

At any rate, the Version 1 curse has befallen me. In a few days, I’ll release Version 1.0.1 which will have this fix, along with a few other improvements that I’m squeezing in as well. Version 1.0.1 adds a tiny bit of separation from the 1.0 stigma. And if I can get Version 1.5 out in 4 months like I’m ambitiously aiming for, then the hurdle will be cleared.