Hi all,

Back to normal posts: I have some news about upcoming new features in all of my programs to share!

UPDATE 11/11/2016: Wine Autostart v2.0.2 is now out! Head to http://www.launchpad.net/wineautostart/2.x/2.0.2 to download it!

DDRescue-GUI v1.6.2/v1.7

New Features/Fixes I will add

I have quite a lot of things coming up for the next release of DDRescue-GUI, even though I haven’t decided what the version number should be yet.

• Pull in the new GetDevInfo module from WxFixBoot v2.0, which fixes some bugs and improves detection of LVM disks.
• Add better unexpected error handling so the GUI never outright crashes.
• Prevent the user accidentally/deliberately starting more than one instance of DDRescue-GUI at once, because things may go wrong in various interesting ways if this happens XD
• Veto system shutdown during recovery
• Some other boring miscellaneous bugs

New Features I might add

Support for domain mapfiles (ddrescue v1.20+)

This new feature in ddrescue allows the user to recover only the used portions of a disk, which is very helpful and can save a lot of time. However, ddrescue won’t generate the domain mapfile, so I’d have to find a way to make one using the GUI for each different kind of filesystem, so at the moment I’m not sure if this is worth it to implement, and how many people would understand how to use it.

Support for specifying custom options to ddrescue

This was (I think!) something that was asked in a question or a bug report at some point, and it would allow users to use features that I don’t currently have support for the in GUI (usually because they aren’t helpful most of the time, or aren’t available in most releases of ddrescue). Obviously, this would be helpful, but it might make it very difficult for me to test the GUI in all circumstances (e.g. if a new features was added to ddrescue after release of DDRescue-GUI). Because of these issues, I’m not sure whether I should implement this either.

What do you think?

I’d be really happy if some of you could let me know in the comments if you want these features. If so I will add them 🙂

WxFixBoot v2.0

New Features

• Detect Windows and MacOS so I can provide them as default boot options to users, and be smarter with a few aspects of EFI file management.
• Allow customising the filesystem checks, so user can specify individual filesystems that they want to check, and which options to use for each one 🙂
• Fix a minor bug when detecting vfat filesystems on Ubuntu 14.04 (doesn’t affect operation of the program in any meaningful way).

Wine Autostart v2.0.2/v2.1

New Features/Fixes I will add

• Small fixes in the autorun.inf parser.
• Don’t mention Wine Autoscan in the GUI because it sounds like a separate product rather than a feature.
• Keep dialog boxes on top of other windows so they are always visible to the user
• Use python’s os.walk() function instead of the find command (faster).
• Fix exporting config on first run
• Ask user for password less
• Pull in new GetDevInfo package from WxFixBoot v2.0 (faster, more reliable)

New Features I might add

Add a way of ejecting media using the indicator

Might not sound like much, but potentially a helpful idea because depending on how you system is set up this can be annoying. I could also set up a feature to auto-eject the disk after software has finished running, come to think of it. I literally just thought of that one while writing this XD.

What do you think?

Again, do you want this feature? Do you think it would be helpful? Please let me know in the comments 🙂

Conclusion

So, as you can see, there are actually a lot of things in my drawing board at the moment! Something else I will definitely do for all of my programs, is write some documentation, but probably not in the form you expect. I’ll save that for the next post.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post, and don’t forget to let me know in the comments if you want those new features.