Typica 1.9.1rc1

Typica 1.9.1rc1 is now available on the downloads page. Currently that's just as a Windows build and a link to the source code for this release that can be used to build on Mac, Linux, and likely other platforms. When 1.9.1 proper is released, there will, of course, be a Mac build as usual.

The feature that I'm most excited about is a change to the counting button. When I roast for product development, it's common that I'll pull several samples to try the coffee at different roast levels. It's also common that I'll want to do this with multiple coffees or try different roast levels of the same coffee roasted to different roasting plans. Previously, this meant that I'd have to adjust and reset the sample parameters between each batch. Now, if the counting button's annotation is set to something like "%A-%1", the %A will be replaced with a letter that increments between batches. The %1 will increment each time the button is activated, but will now reset in between batches so each sample that I pull in this sort of progressive roasting exercise will have a unique and sane identifier without my having to do anything extra between batches to keep it that way.

Some features requested by other people who use Typica have also made it into this release. The New Batch window will now display selected green coffees in red if the remaining quantity goes negative. Allowing negative inventory is considered a useful feature as sometimes you do get slightly more green coffee than you were invoiced for, poor storage conditions might cause the mass of a green coffee to increase, or precision limitations on scales might introduce cumulative errors, but when green coffee inventory goes negative it's always a good idea to take a closer look at that. Hopefully this additional styling helps people notice this so appropriate actions can be taken.

The Current Inventory and Availability Projection report now displays green coffee item numbers in addition to the item name.

When using the "No Profile" button before roasting a new batch of coffee, anything that currently exists in the logging view such as records from the previous batch are now automatically cleared. This no longer needs to be done manually.

The control for entering green coffee certifications now displays and suggests previously used certifications. This should help people enter certification data more consistently.

Under "View Target Roast Profiles", the speed of profile loading has been substantially improved.

When changing line item details of an invoice, the window showing the invoice lines is now updated. This should reduce confusion.

It is no longer possible to enter negative quantities for the amount of green coffee roasted in a batch. I don't know why anybody was trying this, but it was always a bad idea. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Various other bug fixes.

The Entypo font is no longer used in the About Typica window and has been removed.

Changes Around Typica

I've also been making some changes in the stuff surrounding Typica. I'm now self-hosting code and issue tracking on code.typica.us. The Github page still exists, but it's already out of date. People building Typica from source will want to update their remotes or do a fresh clone from the new server.

I'm also migrating videos on the site over to video.typica.us. Once that migration is complete I can stop caring about the idiotic mess of creator hostile policies YouTube keeps inflicting on people.

social.typica.us is also still up and running and I'm finding this to be a far more enjoyable experience than sites like Twitter or Facebook. I'm pretty much never on those sites anymore so if you want to contact me over a web site instead of just sending an email, sending that to my Mastodon account is the way to go. The accounts on other sites still exist, but if you're not lucky it could be a while before I notice any messages sent through those.

These changes do mean that server costs are now a little higher. I'm currently looking at adding support for recurring payments for people who want to help support ongoing development of Typica in a more predictable fashion. I'm hoping to have that ready along with a lot of new, updated, and cleaned up documentation, but I don't have that ready yet (setting up the recurring payments is done, but it's important to me that I'm also making it easy for people to cancel those if they decide they no longer want to support this work). So far this year, two people have contributed a combined total of $125 in support of this work. The lack of a stable budget for this project means that I'm unable to repair, replace, or expand the number of machines used to build and test new Typica releases. It also means that I can't devote as much time to the project as I'd like, which makes it difficult to work on larger or more challenging features that I think everybody using Typica would benefit from. If you're benefiting from Typica, not supporting the project, but would be willing to if not for something I can do something about without harming the integrity of the project I'd love to have that conversation.