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I posted this on www.amigaworld.net in answer to a request for a status update and decided to post it here as well.

The Advanced Visual Development (AVD) project is coming along very strong. A great deal of the foundation work has now been completed and the realtime interprocess communication system which enables each component of AVD to share resources and functionality with each other is up and running with great potential for further use.

The SDK Browser component is now rather advanced as you can tell from the FREEWARE version. The current commercial version (of v1.5.0.0) adds shared menu options and integrated communication with the rest of AVD. More features like STRUCT and #define indexing and others are still scheduled for v2.0.0.0, which will be included with the AVD Suite v1.0.0.0.

My primary focus now is to switch back to the GUI Builder and Text Editor components, as well as the realtime XML to GUI runtime system that will be made available for open distribution (in binary form) as well.

The GUI Builder is currently at version 0.16.0.55 and is already able to build most types of graphical interfaces and generate them as ready-to-build C source, as well as save and reload from XML based project files. Mainly the GUI Builder just needs interfaces built to enable the editing of all tags for each object, the adding of external C code for each gadget's actions (which will be inserted into the project when the rest of the code is generated), a menus editing panel, and more code generation to handle the creation and maintenance of all of the above.

It sounds like a lot, and it is, but the object-oriented system under the hood is already in place to support this. The main thing missing is to provide the interface options to the user so they can get at the underline functionality.

The Text Editor is already roughed out and should have basic "notepad" like functionality pretty soon. The main features to add there are "tabbed" editing, context-sensitive hi-lighting, collapsable code sections, and of course integration with AVD itself. Although the Text Editor will be able to function as a normal general purpose text editing program, it is in fact a XML object editor in the background. This will allow for the live source code editing of a given AVD project using functions are features that have never been seen before in a text editor, crossing the boundaries into object-oriented, drag-n-drop application building.

Other components and features like the Debugger and Project management continue to grow as well, if slowly sometimes, as nearly everything that goes into AVD for one component helps build the basis of the whole.

The inevitable next question is: "How much longer is all this going to take?"

That of course is always hard to say when is comes to new development work on this scale. However, I would hope that a public demo of the GUI Builder and possibly even the Text Editor may be available over the next three months or so. The entire project (for the features I have planned for v1.0.0.0) is likely another year out. However, it is my continuing goal to deliver useful tools whenever possible, so like the SDK Browser, expect that the standalone components will be made available as soon as they can be and need not wait for the entire system to be ready before they ship.

Now that I have addressed some of where the technical state of the project is at, let me say a few words about the "real" question of project development and completion times; namely funding.

The AVD Suite and BITbyBIT Software Group's mission to deliver professional development tools to the AmigaOS4(tm) community is a long term goal for me. I have built up what resources I could toward this goal for over ten years, waiting for the right time to make this project a reality. I stepped away from my corporate career as a successful Sr. Software Engineer after a decade with the same company to pursue that goal, and have now invested nearly everything I gained over my career into this project. My commitment to its completion could not be higher. I can also safely say that the completion of the AVD Suite is NOT based on whether we see new machines or even if there are no further OS updates until said hardware is available. It is my belief that the success of this project (or another one like it) is critical to the long term success of the platform itself, and that is why I am here, doing what I can.

In this world however it takes money to continue to pursue anything, even to just keep "the doors open and the lights on" as they say. The first attempts to help fund the development of the AVD Suite project were quite successful in their own right, and have now all but run their course with final installments finishing up next month when the final two people complete their subscription.

As I have already stated on my website, I would like to publicly thank everyone who had the foresight to invest in this project and could understand its importance. I am confident that you will be happy with the final software you helped make possible. It is only with your help that we have made it this far, 16 or so months later.

The bottom line is that continued FULL TIME development is going to require new funding. Without such funding development will be dramatically slowed as I will be forced to take on other paying projects which will of course cut heavily into the completion schedule for AVD.

Therefore, please do what you can and support this project by pre-purchasing the AVD Suite, buying a copy of the SDK Browser or making a donation. I will shortly post a new payment plan option to make purchasing the entire AVD Suite a bit easier.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Best Regards,

Jamie Krueger
BITbyBIT Software Group LLC