I don’t normally like splash screens – but had to reluctantly add one to Sojour as its new disk filing system is now asynchronous.
Without a splash screen you can now see the UI elements populating in real-time as each loading process completes. I think this looks a wee bit unprofessional – hence the splash screen to hide the UI updates.
The older synchronous system – which you folks have – used to hide the UI updates simply because Sojour was blocking the main UI thread whilst performing the loading of the data.
Why the change to Sojour’s loading mechanism?
Cloud Drives.
It’s not just the loading mechanism either, everything file based has been overhauled in Sojour to allow it to play well with Cloud Drives such as One-Drive and Google-Drive.
This has been a huge undertaking, but I am now very pleased with the results.
For those that don’t know, Cloud Drives like to perform random management tasks on your files. Whilst they are doing this, they will lock your files at random. These file locks result in Windows throwing errors if Sojour ever tries to touch them – which can be quite often.
To get around this I have built a new filing system for Sojour which includes a file synchronisation manager to deal with the Cloud Drives various antics.
The code changes are huge:
The new synchronisation system even resulted in me having to redesign Sojour’s graphics engine’s rendering loop – not a trivial task, but more on that when I produce a release video for this functionality.
So where are we with this?
The principal coding is done and the initial testing looks positive. However, these code changes touch and affect everything in Sojour – so there is a lot more testing to do before I can release it.
If we are very lucky we could be looking at a release in two weeks time, maybe earlier. It all depends if the testing discovers anything untoward.
Whilst we wait for this update, I highly recommend that users whose data directories are on a Cloud Drive move them to a local drive using Sojour’s file manager (double click the root node – the Sojour node in the assets browser):
That’s it for this update! Hopefully you will hear from me in the next week or so!
Have Fun!
RobP
Sojour 