After some discussion with our contractor, he has decided to stop work on Goldenseal Pro. He did a good job on the early parts of the project (opening files, reading resources) but did not have enough Cocoa experience to get anywhere with the GUI (graphic user interface) for Mac.
This is the second contractor who stalled out after a few months. There were two others who gave up after a few weeks. I think it is just too large a project for most programmers to handle.
The good news is that we’ve finished the prep work and programming that we needed to do. So, we will start work on the GUI with our own staff. We are already very familiar with the existing code, so there won’t be any “learning curve” there.
The plan is to get the basic GUI working, and then subcontract a few remaining details (printing, networking, Custom Layouts). Those will easier for folks to bid on and complete, and they can also be done in parallel.
One wrinkle is that the Swift programming language is currently getting a complete rewrite, with a new Swift 3.0 planned for completion in late 2016. It is not backward-compatible, so anything written in Swift 2.0 will need to have some parts rewritten. However, it will not take much Swift code to create the GUI, so that change will not affect us by much.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
Turtlesoft.com
