Greetings community,

Jeroen has done amazing work, as well as the rest of the team. The new projects have gained some traction as well. Let's go in-depth as to what's been happening.


    Site Improvements & Future Plans


  • New features

  • - Post Previews

    - Context posts, showing you the forum or blog post you're replying to and up to 4 other older and newer posts

    - Read/Unread status

  • Improvements

  • - Blogs' new post button and pagination are now more conveniently located.

    - Blog posts can now be quoted.

    - Aesthetic improvement on quote tags.

    - Sort posts on HMN landing page by date only.

  • Bug fixes

  • - Registration verification mistakenly disallowed some characters in a name that were accepted when signing up.

    - Nested quote tags didn't work.

    - A regression that stripped certain characters from post titles.

    - BBcode parser was overhauled.

    - If you edit a post and remove its title, the site will now restore the old title.

    - Formatting oversight on the cover page was fixed.

    - On a forum's thread list, an empty Full Name mistakenly showed a blank instead of the member name.

    - Long titles on breadcrumbs no longer vanish.

  • Planed September Features

  • - Improved registration workflow

    - Addition of password reset (no need to contact webmaster anymore)

    - Ability to report spam or other abuse

    - Moderation tools

    - RSS feeds

    - Email notifications (individual and digests)

    - New Project Application Page

    - Stealth projects (a formalization of the hidden project feature, so approved projects can work on their project's profile page that only they and the staff can see until they flip the switch)

  • Small fixes

  • - Preview currently doesn't seem to include a certain css file, which left the [size] tag looking like it has no effect even though it adds the correct html class.

    - Update Mozilla's Bleach so the new TLDs, including .network, are recognized in URLs.




    - MotionBox (featured): "MotionBox accesses videos directly via DuckDuckGo. It streams video files, Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. All of this inside multiple tabs and without ever showing an ad."


    - ES Visual Debugger: "For the time being i'll target projects that were compiled to windows 64 bit with MSVC as it's what i use. supporting 32 bit means also supporting different calling styles, which should be done, but not on the prototyping step of the project."


    - CDbg: "CDbg is a debugger for executables that are produced by Microsoft C/C++ compiler. This debugger focuses on speed, flexibility, and providing to programmer as much useful information as it is possible."




      Handmade Dev Team uses Linux

    We've been asked a few times what kind of OS the team uses for developing. I've switched from Windows 10 Anniversary back to the Arch-based Manjaro Linux. Andrew has chosen Manjaro as well. Jeroen uses many variants, but Arch Linux is becoming his main OS. Miblo is probably one of the most competent Arch users in the community. Martin Cohen does design work on his Mac, but also uses some Linux distros on the side.

    It's counterproductive to deride Windows or any other operating system. Each developer tends to have interesting personal reasons for choosing one system over another, and we have our own. Handmade Network is more keen on developing quality software for our target platforms than discussing which OS is best. You'll find very talented Windows developers here, as well as for OS X, Linux, or some of the more esoteric systems.




    The Planned September Features mentioned above are the last set before the site is in stable 1.0 release. Kill Screen will be doing a piece on Handmade Network and we are on our way to showing the software development community we mean business when it comes to caring and technical excellence.

    We cannot do this without your support, as we rely 100% on Patreon Funds to exist. A dollar makes the difference. If you get any value out of the community, your contribution will help pay for all the services requires to run this site, and for me to provide the leftovers to the site developers for their hard work (we all have access to the Patreon for transparency).

    Whew! Can't wait to see what the October news will bring.

    Yours,
    Abner