Oh wow, what an exhausting time! But we have managed a lot of work. When I say “we”, I actually mean least of all myself. I was able to – well, not take myself out – but very much take myself back, while Mike, Thomas and Andreas worked through a huge bunch of tasks. And then there’s Ludo, more on that in a moment ? .

A month ago I wrote over on Facebook:

Nothing has happened here for a while now. But just because we do not always present great new tools, it does not mean that we no longer work for your donations (*cough* *cough*: https://blog.gcwizard.net/support-and-contribute/)

The upcoming release 1.5.0 was never meant for big new features, but had primarily 2 tasks for us:

– Internal cleanup: This is mainly about the internal engine room, nothing that can be shown prestigious, but is necessary in software projects from time to time: cleanup, restructuring, rethinking. Especially Mike has put a lot of work into internal restructuring to make our code even better which makes the app more performant and more maintainable.

– Manual: Andreas and Thomas wrote several hundred articles (DE and EN) and put them on a “knowledge base”, an online manual, explaining our many tools. A huge piece of work, but the result is impressive. You can admire the result since today here: https://blog.gcwizard.net/manual/en/.

In the new version, each tool will have a help button that links directly to the appropriate article.

A surprise – Twitter followers have known this for a long time, of course – was a new developer for us. Ludo from France will work with us in the future – and has already delivered a complete translation into French! Hats off and thanks; welcome to the team!

The highlights of 1.5.0

Essentially, most of this has already been said. But because it is so nice, here again in a nutshell:

We have a manual! Andreas and Thomas have written over 1000 (!) articles by now. Each tool now has a small question mark icon in the upper right corner. From there you can call the appropriate online help. In addition, Nina from “Nina’s Schmierblo(g)ck” has provided us with her already legendary guide for mystery beginners, which of course has been directly integrated (and of course translated) into our online manual.

We have a language engine! Ludo suddenly joined our team, brought a complete French translation and added the already often requested language switch to the settings. He also is responsible for opening a Crowdin page, where anyone who wants to, can and may translate GCWizard into its language. Best of all, we somehow can’t seem to get rid of this crazy guy ? He’s currently implementing new features that will hopefully be seen in the (already!) awesome 1.6.0 2.0.0. Very very cool!

Even if for you as the user it is not direct enhancement or feature to use, I must emphasize once again how valuable the work of Mike was, who has done an incredible job internally in the engine room. Especially in the area of the symbol tables, he has not only simply increased the performance (which you can notice besides a higher speed throughsignificant less consumption of memory and RAM), he also ensured with this, that all our development environments finally run smoothly again – they seemed to reach their limits because of the 9000 symbols!

Besides that, there were of course some smaller new features and improvements, which you are welcome to discover for yourself.

I’m really happy about this release, it showed me that a lot is possible when a few people work hand-in-hand and have fun to do so. The tool, or rather its code, has reached much more maturity and professionalism. I finally feel like the project is becoming a community project now, just like I always wanted it to be. I can’t thank everyone involved enough, including the many helpers and testers and donors out there. You were and you are simply great!

Preview

Finally, maybe a little preview of the upcoming version:

• Thomas has a lot of ideas and quirky tools in preparation, so look forward to it!
• The Crowdin project seems to start a bit. The first translations for Dutch, Polish, Slovak, Danish and Turkish are coming in. Thanks for that to all!
• With the support from the user “radioscout” and also your donations, we are completely re-building the actually harmless looking phone keys function and will support individual phone types and their peculiarities. (The donations were used to get old devices for research purposes)
• We are planning a big new section “Images and Data”, where for the first time reading permissions on your devices will be required, but a lot of stuff like an exif reader or image manipulation will come. This will technically pave the way for all kinds of stuff you can do with files and mysteries. I myself am very excited about it.

If you want to see what’s currently happening or planned, you can always check out our ticket list over at GitHub and feel free to add your own suggestions there!

Changelog

[new] Language: French (Thanks, Ludo)
[new] Settings: Language (Thanks, Ludo)
[new] Online Manual & Help Buttons (Thanks, Thomas & Andreas)
[new] Coordinate Parser for all formats (Thanks, Mike)
[new] Open Map: Export Text/JSON (Thanks, Mike)
[new] Coordinate Format: Geo3x3
[new] Ice Codes (Thanks, Thomas)
[new] Atomic Numbers to Text
[new] Straddling Checkerboard (Thanks, Thomas)
[new] Trifid (Thanks, Thomas)
[new] Babylonian Numbers (Thanks, Thomas)
[new] Formula Solver, Export: Save QR Code (Thanks, Mike)
[new] Formula Solver: Modification (Thanks, Mike)
[new] Symbol Tables (Thanks, Andreas & Thomas)
[new] Vanity: Different Phone Models (Thanks, ‘radioscout’)
[new] Multi Decoder: Vanity
[new] Catan
[chg] Internal Upgrade to Flutter 2
[chg] Symbol Tables: Performance (Thanks, Mike)
[fix] Web: Symbol Tables (Thanks, Mike)
[fix] Symbol Tables: Note Names (Thanks, Peter)
[fix] Web: Hash Search (Thanks, ‘Team kesteri’)
[fix] Coordinate Selector (Thanks, Mike & Andy)
[fix] Coordinate Format: Quadtree (Thanks, ‘Cycle73’)
[fix] Coordinate Format: SwissGrid+ (Thanks, Mike)