Yesterday the cygnets hatched in the nest by the boating pond in the village. I was there to welcome some of them to this world:
An auspicious sign, so Archi 1.7 final was released today. There wasn’t much feedback regarding bugs and any other issues on the forum for the beta versions released over the last two weeks so I went ahead and pushed it out. If any bugs are found now I’ll release a maintenance build, 1.7.1.
But also over the last week or so I’ve been adding new features for version 1.8, due out this summer (probably July). Using Git makes this easy – adding topic branches and then merging (actually cherry-picking) the new features. I added the biggest and main feature this last weekend – allow multiple instances of the same element in a View. This has plagued me since the early versions of Archi. I deliberately chose not to implement this right from the start as I felt that it would complicate things. I came to regret this decision as users found that they needed to reference the same element more than once in a View if the diagram was perhaps large and the element needed to be placed somewhere convenient rather than sprawling connections across to reach it.
And of course this implies circular connections because if you allow element A to be added to a view twice then you can draw a relationship as A <—–> A1, so why not add it once and show the connection as circular? So that was added as well.
It’s a relief to add this now at the beginning of this development cycle and get it out of the way so I can focus on more interesting features, such as transforming a Sketch view to an ArchiMate view. I’ve started work on this…
