May End of month updates - Beta approaching (Patreon)
Content
I wanted to give an update of where we are with the next update. The beta is something we're working day by day to get out, but we have a few bugs that we want to finish up so that when we go to testing we can release...at this point the release would be early June. I'll do a feature walk through in a few days so you know what all is expected. I'm excited for features like HEIC support, and we've done a ton of work around EXIF data. We have some cool overlay work that's going in, and extension filtering as well.
I'm working on a padding feature for overlays that will make them much more useful. We also have some work that went in that wont light up for another month or so as it's groundwork for some bigger features that we want to ship, but they're taking time.
The biggest thing we have on our plate right now is a regression around video playback. It's most egregious if you have a video playlist and have a quick (5-10 second) transition time, or if you're on a pi2 or a pi with less memory (Pi3 a+ for instance). The error looks like a black screen for a bit, and then Dynaframe is crashing and you'll see the "Dynaframe" logo in the background. A restart of the device is required to get back into a good state. This is our hottest issue right now, and we have to fix it before doing much else. Unfortunately the investigation is taking time into what's causing it, so we may not have it fixed till June. I'll keep everyone updated on that feature.
I'm also working on the store, because we have 1,000 images including classic art pieces that I want to get distributed. That's a bigger change as we're working to make a proper store backend that we can upload image packs to and have them populate (Right now we hand edit an HTML file and create the image packs from scratch...it's not great, and definitely not something that will scale to the 1,000 images I want to get sorted and publish.
Please stay tuned, you'll see more chatter (as usual) as we end the month and get this release out.