Things have been relatively quiet lately over here at Flying Meat, but that doesn't mean we haven't been doing anything. Quite the opposite actually.

For the past couple of months, I've been diving head down into project oak, which is the cleanup of all the little bugs that have built up in Acorn over the years (for those keeping track, I'm 70.4% of the way there). These aren't data loss or crasher bugs, but little things that haven't been super important and I've been putting off to work on more important things. Bugs like "Zoom in shortcut doesn't work with Dvorak - Qwerty ⌘ keyboard layouts", and minor Quick Look things that could be better. Chances are, you probably aren't even aware of what the list contains. Minor things. But they build up and eventually have to be knocked down.

However, some of these bugs are requiring complete rewrites of parts of Acorn, so most of the project oak work has been happening on a non-public branch, and won't see a public release for quite some time. Major rewrites means major time baking.

However, a few of the fixes have been showing up in the 4.5.x series when it makes sense, so that's been good.

I've also been fortunate to get a couple of great bug reports over the past couple of months which helped me track down the few remaining mystery crashers in Acorn. These are crashers that I've seen reports of, but been completely unable to reproduce. Well, thanks to the wonderful individuals who wrote in with reproducible steps, I've gotten these fixed and ready to ship in Acorn 4.5.4. This means that the Acorn 4.5.4 beta is the least crashy version of Acorn ever. At this point, I'm not aware of any known crashers for Acorn.

But if you know of one, please let us know.

Software is our craft, and we take pride in it. Fixing minor bugs isn't super sexy, but it helps us sleep at night.