Matrix Writer 2.0

It has been a long time for version 2.0 of Matrix Writer, I planned it more than a year ago and expected release version 2.0 in 2018. But unexpected thing happened,  the biggest one is I had an accident when I skiing,  I got my right knee broken, this accident delay the development of Matrix Writer a lot, it took me quite a few month to walk again, even today running is still a chanllege to me. 

On the other hand, cost for a free software developer is another chanllege, web site hosted on AWS server, apple developer account, upgrade my developer machine etc. And not many people like to sit down and write a post to his blog, people more like to share contents with twitter, facebook etc., this fast way become more popular. So less people will support Matrix Writer, I hesitate a lot, should I move on with Matrix Writer? Till today, it's still a big question to me. 

Here are the major improvements of Matrix Writer version 2.0

• Architecture refactor

Writer was started quickly to prove my ideas of create a convenience offline blog/post editor, even the architecture was optimized after I proved my ideas were possible to be implemented I did designed the arcitecture carefully, but after more and more features I found there many part can be optimized, especially after I created Matrix UI (A GUI library), I hope more and more can be reused, then I decided to do architecture refactor. 

The new architecture made Matrix Writer more componentized, this helps me provide more features in following release and provide better performance.

• Performance improvements

We all expect an application could execute as fast as possible, I keep trying to improve the performance of Matrix Writer. The new architecture optimized the code execution efficency. In the version, Matrix Writer switch to SQLite database to store posts, instead of store posts in files, this accelerate the bootup speed and easy to tell how many posts you have, how many words you totally wrote. 

• UI optimizations

By componentized the architecture, Matrix Writer utilized Matrix UI KIT which an Angular based UI KIT, this provides more consistence UI and user experience. 

There are many UI tweaks as well, so when I writing this post, I almost forget what are these changes. Here are some of the major changes

• A frameless main window style is used, the can give you more working space
• A new main Menu is used with the frameless window
• A standard status bar is used to display Writer version and Words Count
• Welcome widgets layout tweak
• ......

• Support Paypal

To be honest, I didn't expect to be a millionaire with Matrix Writer, but I do expect Writer users could help me on the infrastructure costs. It wasn't conveniece enough to pay for a subscription to get more advanced features. In version 2.0, in-app purchase with Paypal is supported and the rate is pretty low for one year subscription, I do expect you subscribe Matrix Writer, so that I can provide more features in the future. 

• Support in-app purchase for apple users

For MacOS users, in-app purchase with your apple account is supported as well, your are able to subscribe Matrix Writer as you do for other apple apps. 

Known issues

• Matrix Writer for MacOS will be released a little bit late, the reason is the new version of MacOS has bugs for sign an application, that cause I cannot publish Matrix Writer to app store.
• Google security prompt. If you are a Google Blogger user, when you connect to your Google account, Google may prompt unsafe message, this is caused by a new Google app verify process. I am working on this process.  Matrix Writer uses Google official API to publish posts to your blog or link resources on your Google Drive, As an oAuth2 client, Matrix Writer has no way to store you personal information.