SmallTime bug hunt

As was mentioned earlier, SmallTime had undergone a testing process to make note of bugs and inconsistencies, which are a dealbreaker for a full public release. Some of these can be fixed very quickly, some needed a deep dive into the program’s structure to get rid of them. 

But at first, lest mention a feature that will make downloading next version of SmallTime worth it even if you haven’t But first, let’s mention a feature that will make downloading the next version of SmallTime worth it even if you haven’t run into any of the bugs listed below. There will be a confirmation dialogue that will ask you if you really want to delete a task. This will eliminate accidental task deletion that could possibly happen because of the minimalistic design of the application. An image is shown below.

And now back to the bugs…

User input bugs plagued a beta version of SmallTime (currently version 1.8.2 in development) for a long time, but all major issues with user input should be fixed for good now. However, there are still more issues that need solving, and I will try to get everything ready before the end of this release cycle. If I will not be able to fix everything, there will be one more beta release.

Right now, there is a list of already known issues in the current open beta version of SmallTime (1.8.1)

  • crash when inputting year lesser than 1000 (fixed for v1.8.2)
  • crash when you leave a field for a year of a task empty (fixed for v1.8.2)
  • crash when entering zalgo into the task description field (fixed for v1.8.2)
  • the user interface does not update until you move your mouse cursor after launching the application (fixed for v1.8.2)
  • attempting to delete several tasks in a row without moving your mouse cursor causes the task editor to open instead of deleting another task (fixed for v1.8.2)
  • writing characters with the ALT key modifier does not work because the application thinks that CTRL key is pressed when the ALT key is pressed (fixed for v1.8.2)
  • it is not possible to set a task date on the 29th of February, which should be possible to do every fourth year
  • nothing happens after you try to paste a copied text that is too long to fit into the task name and task description fields
  • missing character sets for Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese languages
  • the size of the main window does not scale precisely according to the number of tasks
  • arrow for minimising the application does not point in the right direction when the window is snapped to the right side of the screen (a new icon will be made on full release)
  • inconsistent text size across the application
  • the information icon is too close to the left side of the task description window
  • sound alarm plays more often when you are interacting with the application(for example, when you drag a mouse cursor across the window). Sound system is still in prototype stage
  • sound alarm is playing on timers which did not start yet

Thanks to the technology I use (Rust programming language), the source of crashes was not hard to identify. There are more sources of possible crashes present, but they have a low priority because their occurrence is hypothetical in most cases. They will however get taken care of in the next release to improve the stability and reliability of SmallTime even in edge cases like partial corruption of data on your hard-drive.