The Immediate Future
If you saw my last post, time for working on System Nucleus has been virtually non-existent over the past few months. I have made a great deal of progress on a number of major changes & additions, but substantial work is still required before any of these is ready. It will likely be several months before a new version of System Nucleus is released with any new features.
However, a maintenance release will be made hopefully in the next week or two. A third party package that provides many of the controls used in System Nucleus has been updated and fixed issues with 64-bit systems. I have been having numerous intermittent issues on my 64-bit machines with previous versions of this package that I had just about given up on tracking down. If you have been running the 64-bit version of System Nucleus, chances are you’ve seen these issues, possibly many times, or maybe only a few times before giving up.
For those running the 32-bit version, there will be a few other changes and improvements that may make it worthwhile to upgrade. As always, a detailed list of changes will be included in the change log, distributed with the software and available on the download page.
Going Forward…
Since releasing System Nucleus about 8 months ago, I’ve gotten a lot of great (and not so great) feedback, requests and suggestions that have significantly shaped its development. It has also burgeoned into a nearly unwieldy beast, and I have been significantly sidetracked from some of my original goals by things like localization and documentation – those are important, but not a lot of fun, especially as I did not account for them from the beginning and so have a lot of work to do before they are realized.
From the beginning, one of my main intentions was for System Nucleus to be able to query & manage remote systems – anyone can manipulate processes & services locally, and while I think there is a great deal of value in some things like batch editing that I haven’t seen before, most of the functionality is nothing new. As I’ve stated in the past, I have no intention of reinventing the wheel – the wheel’s pretty, I use the wheel, and have no complaints about the wheel. As this was an originating idea, most of the code has been written with this in mind and already provides remote functionality, it just needs to be exposed through the interface in an elegant, intuitive and stable manner.
So, after the upcoming maintenance release, I will be focusing on remote functionality. This will likely mean scaling back functionality significantly and then adding it back as it is made compatible & stable working remotely. There will probably be some early releases, possibly under alternate names, with only partial functionality – I imagine the first might be something like a remote process manager, with only the functionality currently available in the Processes view. This will also give me the opportunity to localize & document pieces at a time, and so make those processes more manageable as well.
This will be a major undertaking, and as yet I cannot say how much time & resources I will be able to dedicate. I will occasionally post updates on my progress, especially as I near something releasable.
