next week
I'll take Christmas week off, so I only have two more proper weeks in the year. I would like to have basic pixel duplicate search working before then. Just a dropdown on the duplicates page for 'pair must/must not be pixel dupes' or similar. So, I will work on that and see if we can aim for a 'clean' release for end of year.
birthday
My todo list reminded me yesterday that I put out the first non-experimental beta of hydrus on December 14th, 2011. This is the rough 'start date' of the project and its birthday now. It will be ten years this week, which is pretty crazy.
Like a lot of people, 2021 was an odd year for me. I changed some lifestyle stuff, dropping some unhealthy habits, and also had some unexpected stress. After looking back though, I am overall happy with my work. Although I completed fewer big new projects than I hoped, and at times I felt bogged down in rewrites and fixes, the general performance of the client grew significantly this year. As well as a variety of new tag search and display options, the sibling and parent system was completely overhauled on several fronts, with the improved virtualised storage in the database and asynchronous real-time application calculation, and with that the autocomplete search finally supported 'perfect' sibling+parent adjusted tag counts in very fast time. Years-old sibling and parent application bugs were finally drilled down to and fixed. The tag lists across the program gained better sibling and parent display and commands. Wildcard searches became much faster too, and all sorts of tag and file search improved on smaller domains, sometimes by a factor of a thousand, even when a client had the whole PTR lurking in the background. We also moved to automatic repository account creation and improved serverside privacy, tags became easier to sort, file and database maintenance gained multiple new commands that saved a ton of time and inconvenience, the database learned to repair much of itself, system predicates became parseable in the Client API and editable in main UI, we moved from my duct-taped dev machines to github-built releases, the image renderer moved to a tiled system that allowed very fast zoom, sessions could grow much larger without CPU death and could save to disk with a fraction of their old write I/O, and a whole ton of other little fixes and quality of life improvements to every system.
I get a lot out of working on hydrus, and I hope to continue just like this. I appreciate everyone's feedback and support over the years. Thank you!
If you would like to further support my work and are in a position to do so, my simple no-reward Patreon is here: https://www.patreon.com/hydrus_dev