T Campbell's Blog

Kristofer Straub has asked me to be a little more clear in my statements about Clickwheel, so I'm gonna do that this time. And maybe it'll make up in some small measure for not having what I expected to have.

We've been workin' on a "download all comics" button, and a secondary "download multiple comics" button. I think this'll be a first step toward addressing the concerns raised in Fleen, because what's a lot of trouble to go to for four panels is considerably less trouble to go to for collections of 60 to 2,000 panels.

Meanwhile, Kenny Grant and I looked at it Monday and yesterday, and we came up with a couple of ideas that would make this "download multiple comics/download all comics" feature even better...

...at the expense of blowing the original deadline all to heck.

Really, it's more important that we make Clickwheel as good as possible than that Clickwheel always aligns with my statements about how things are gonna be. But I still feel guilty for that "48 hours" promise, which it now becomes clear I shouldn't have made. I keep trying not to make promises until I know they're gonna be kept, but I guess I have to accept that occasionally, something shows up you didn't expect. Software development is a new field for me, too, and I'm still learning the factors that go into a release.

So, let's revise this:

Kenny Grant is hard at work on "download all" and "download multiple" features for all Clickwheel comics. It now looks like these will be released in a week or so, but no guarantees. :-) Once we're done with that, we're going to turn our attention to the download process itself and how to streamline that. Howard Tayler had some penetrating insights, I thought, which we'll have to address directly.

There's a lot else we're working on. I'll be pulling back the veil of secrecy on much of it, one inch at a time.