ImageSizer updated! (again)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything substantial, and in a sense this post isn’t going to buck that trend!

ImageSizer version 0.4.12.4 is available on the AIR Marketplace and via the automatic update framework. Much to my dismay ImageSizer version 0.4.12 went out into the wild with some showstopping bugs, and it’s taken a long time for me to devote enough time to hunting them down and fixing them. Version 0.4.12.4 should finally kill off that bug – namely because I’ve managed to work out what it was. (I’ll get to that in a moment.)

If you’ve tried to use ImageSizer and found that it didn’t work then I apologise, and encourage you to download the latest version of ImageSizer from the AIR Marketplace and give it another shot! I’ve improved my pre-release testing process and am in the process of refactoring the internal code – which should both stop bugs like this from occuring again and also improve the extensibility of ImageSizer and make everything faster and a little more robust!

So, what happened?

• Version 0.4.12 changed the installation directory – which meant people who used the Automatic Update framework to upgrade had problems – source files for the application were pointing to invalid directories.  To be honest, this was flawed code that caused this issue as much as anything else.

  Why it was so bad: The errors occured in the startup process of ImageSizer, and threw an Error. The Flash Player (and Adobe AIR) just stops if it encounters an error. End result – the application crashed before it loaded, and therefore did *sweet-f-a*.

• In my haste to fix this issue, I added some code to catch these loading errors.  Which unfortunately means that the Automatic Updates won’t work for minor versions 0.4.12 – 0.4.12.2 (which unfortunately covers quite a few people).
• Version 0.4.12 – 0.4.12.3 have some issues with the configuration files – typos in the source code meant that they would never successfully create an application configuration file to remember users’ settings, and would enter an infinate loop. (Uh oh).

  Why it was so bad: Again, it was another showstopper – at least for the first run process.  The first time the application ran, it tried and failed to load a configuration file.  Unfortunately the rest of the startup process was tied to the configuration file, so again ImageSizer was never able to startup.