FlashWRITER - Writing History

Writing History Complete.

It took all day but I finally finished the code for reading, writing and recording your writing history while using FlashWRITER.

The frustrating thing is that there is an "undocumented feature" (i.e. bug)  in the XML Serializer method - which is why it took so long. For some reason timespan objects are saved as blank in XML files. The actual logic for the code involved is fairly simple which makes it doubly frustrating.

Word counts and writing times are accumulated by month, year and in total. When you open a file, the program will record the word count loaded and then calculate the additional words that you typed before saving the file. If you don't save the file then the new word count will not be added. Also if you use Save As... the word count won't be added - otherwise the program could double count the numbers of words written (e.g. if you save the same file as an RTF and TXT file).

For the next version I will probably look at extending this feature. It would be handy to have a day by day record of your writing but I'll need to think about the best way of displaying this.

The last major coding task is adding iterative autosave. This should be finished tomorrow. I will then stop adding new features and focus on cleaning up the code and fixing the bugs I know about.

At this stage on track for a Beta release at the end of May...