Updates for 2023

As usual there have been multitudes of updates during the course of 2023. There is no hope of listing them all but several are worthy of mention.

December 2023 Starting this month I have been working on updates to the user interface which has been plagued with intermittent startup issues over the last 12 months. There was significant impetus to update the user interface not just with regard to aesthetics but also with regard to the way the DCP was rendering. The old rendering engine was using a bitmap to essentially draw the prompts and then display the bitmap. This resulted in complex threading issues when trying to update drawing on a background thread. Windows UI is single threaded and any cross-threaded drawing instruction leaking beyond the thread boundaries would cause the app to crash or behave unexpectedly. During startup the DCP would often fail to write text to the bitmap leaving a panel of coloured squares with no other information. The new approach does away with bitmaps and drawing during data analysis. It cleanly separates the core logic from the onscreen drawing and efficiently handles background operations by removing them completely. This has resulted in marked improvements in startup time and also with handling high dpi screens and multiple monitor setups. Text is now rendered a little cleaner and there is definitely some increased clarity and thus ease of reading text onscreen.