Section 5 - Additional details for developers
The development version of fsTimer is on github at:
http://github.com/bletham/fstimer.
Contributions of code are always welcome!
Features for the future
The next version of fsTimer will be 0.6, and will probably be released around March 2015. There are several items that are on the "to-do" list for a future version, possibly 0.6.
- Figure out what's the deal with this Mac OS issue where the area around the "Edit" and "New" buttons is selected instead of clicking on the button. I don't have a Mac so it might take some more time.
- Make it possible to edit project settings, for instance, to change divisionals. This can currently be done only by manually editing the .reg file. In v0.5 the project creation windows were changed to load their defaults from a .reg file, so it will be an easy addition to use those same windows to edit an existing .reg file. We just need to handle what to do if we make edits to the list of fields, and then try to load an existing registration json that was built using the old fields list.
- Add relay races as a race type. This would be like a lap race but racers would be on teams and (potentially) individuals would run each lap but we would want to rank by team time.
- There is an outstanding issue in Windows when using a network drive. Apparently the python terminal in windows doesn't work if the file is stored on a network drive. It errors very ungracefully, so it'd be nice to somehow make this more graceful. This might not be possible and is a limitation I am perfectly happy to live with.
Changelog for fsTimer 0.5
fsTimer 0.5 was released on Nov. 6, 2014 and is the fourth major release. Version 0.5 came with major improvements, thanks in large part to the development efforts of Sebastien. The major changes since version 0.4 are:
- A complete refactoring of the code to separate many of the data and gui elements and to cut down on duplicated code.
- Addition of handicap races as a race type.
- Pulled some race settings out of the timing settings window and moved them to a new window in project creation.
- A substantially improved CSV import function that allows the user to choose which CSV column to match to which registration field, or even use a python function over the CSV columns.
- A stopwatch on the timing window.
- Addition of "Corrected time" and "Laps completed" columns to the timing window for handicap and lap races respectively.
- A new feature whereby a list of IDs can be merged into a list of times, or vice-versa. This allows marking times and entering bib IDs to be done on two separate computers, and then merge the stacks when the race is complete.
- Some buttons on the timing window were moved into an "Options" menu, since it was getting a little crowded.
Changelog for fsTimer 0.4
fsTimer 0.4 was released on Mar. 24, 2014 and is the third major release. Version 0.4 came with several large improvements. The major changes since version 0.3 are:
- Entirely customizable divisional results: Any combination of age and "combobox" registration fields can be used to create a division.
- We now support lap timing: Simply mark the time at the end of each lap and lap times and total times will be computed.
- IDs have a buffer as well. In previous versions, if an ID was entered and there was no available time in the stack, the current time was used. This was under the assumption that someone's ID will always be entered after their time was marked, however it is conceivable when lap timing (bib tag will not be removed) that one may want to enter an ID as a racer is approaching the finish line. IDs now form a stack in the same way that times always have.
- Added headers to the CSV saving.
- The results saved to CSV include as columns all of the fields used to define divisional results. These columns are also included in the HTML version, if there is space on the page.
- "Drop ID" and "Drop time" buttons in the timing window make it easier to correct for erroneously added times or IDs that get the stacks out of sync.
Changelog for fsTimer 0.3
fsTimer 0.3 was released on Nov. 17, 2013 and is the second major release. Below are listed the major changes since version 0.2 (which was the first major release):
- It now ships with the completed documentation.
- The process for removing duplicates from the compiled registration was corrected (previously not all duplicates were removed) and made more efficient.
- New option to strip leading zeros from IDs as they are entered in the timing window.
- The timing window now allows for selecting multiple entries at the same time, and a "block editing" feature was added whereby increments of time can be added or subtracted to all selected entries.
- The maximum entry size of the timing window entry box was increased to 40.
- The timing screen now contains a new option to save the results to a csv file, in a similar way that the results can already be saved to html.
- Previously the feature tracking the number of racers checked in did not work when timing was resumed. This has been corrected.
- Printing of results was improved to use a more efficient data structure for tracking which IDs have already been added.