A bit late for me to pop my head up, but I had not realised that there had been any activity on here.
critch wrote:any news on the steep hops calculation graham?
Not quite sure what you mean. Is this a requested addition to BeerEngine, or do you want a mathematical method of approximating the alpha-acid contribution of steeped hops?
The subject of hops and their utilisation is somewhat of a bugbear to me. I have made no secret of the fact that I have always regarded the Tinseth formula (and the others) to be pure fantasy - I am even more convinced now, after some more recent study that I have done on the subject, that it is over-optimistic pie-in-the-sky. It is the major reason for me not releasing a new version of BeerEngine and was instrumental in me shelving the next book. For me to "dis" the formula completely, not only will I have one hell of a storm to weather, but I have to have something of proven utility to put in its place. I don't have that.
Anyway, let me know what you are after I will see if I have any pointers that might help you.
BeerEngine
For a long time I have intended to withdraw BeerEngine, but every time I go onto the server to take it down I look at the stats and discover that people are still downloading it; 297 downloads last month and 38 so far this month. Not bad, considering that the only place that it is "advertised" as such is in the members only area of JBK. So I keep putting off taking it down. I was hoping that the downloads would drop to a trickle and it could then it could silently disappear without comment.
I have done quite a lot of work on a new version with many of the requested features added, like notes and additional ingredients. It seems a shame to let that work go to waste just because I'm bored with it. So it would not be a bad idea for me to give one final release. But there are issues and still work to be done.
Firstly I have to decide what to do about hop utilisation.
I really should migrate the GUI from Perl/Tk to WxPerl. WxPerl seems to be flavour of the month and the packager that I am using is meant for WxPerl although Perl/Tk does work as well. Unfortunately, WxPerl is object oriented, which frightens the life out of me - seems to require three times as much code to do the same job, and as "OO" is involved it will doubtless be 100 times slower. Wx looks extremely complicated; documentation, tutorials and examples are almost non-existent, and it will be a major job to migrate. The majority of the work involved in BeerEngine was the GUI, not the underlying code, because there is no "pick-and-place" type of front end for Wx or Perl/Tk. Every window, box, button and legend had to be positioned in code by trial and error using pixel co-ordinates. Very time consuming; it takes ages, and if I have to modify the layout of the window for any reason, like adding a new feature, I have to go through all again - and again - and again.
The major advantages to Wx is that it is apparently true cross-platform. It uses the native windowing system on the target machine, rather than drawing its own windows, so accusations of BeerEngine being "clunky" should go away. There are WxWidgets that gives cross-platform access to things like the printer, so that I do not have to cheat and fire up the browser to enable printing.
So:
1). Finish off the latest version of BeerEngine
2). Convert to WxPerl if I have the stomach for it
3). Restore it to native Linux as the base model.
4). Make it universal and use switches to enable it include or exclude platform specific stuff for Windows and Mac, so that there is just one programme which packaged according to platform.
And yes, the packager will package it as a standalone for the MAC, but you need a MAC to do it on, and I haven't got one.