It’s been a few months since my last update, so I wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know what’s going on.

Work on the assistive technologies (Task Views & Shion + Pennyworth) has been steady and I’m hoping to release some updates to Pennyworth client applications soon.

Not too much has changed with Pennyworth proper. After some consideration and given some future projects coming down the pipeline, I’ve begun planning out Pennyworth 2.

In short, PW2 will be a re-implementation of the Pennyworth architecture designed to work on multiple platforms and devices. The plan is to implement the core of the system in cross-platform C and use native languages and tools to wrap the core in a user interface that “fits” on the platform.

I’m taking this approach (as opposed to the older approach of rewriting the system by scratch for each platform) for a couple of reasons:

1. As a solo developer, I don’t have the time or energy to manage and support full ports to each platform in each respective language. Assuming that the average size of a Pennyworth port is N lines of code, and I port it to P platforms, I need to manage N * P lines of code. This is too much code to maintain and continuously debug.

2. While some code will necessarily be unique to each port, I believe that the bulk will be portable across platforms. If 25% of the Pennyworth code is generic in this sense, the amount of code to manage becomes 0.25N + 0.75P By keeping N somewhat constant and only growing the P, the software development side of things will scale better as I add support for each platform.

The current Pennyworth implementation has approximately 10000 lines of code. Of that code, about a third (0.33) is a good candidate for the platform-neutral core. Using the assumption that other implementations will have a similar amount of code in the same proportion, the project will scale in the following way:

1 port: 10000 LOC (both old approach & new approach)

2 ports: 20000 LOC (old) vs. 16700 LOC (new)

3 ports: 30000 LOC (old) vs. 23400 LOC (new)

4 ports: 40000 LOC (old) vs. 30100 LOC (new)
(The 4th port is almost free when compared to the older system.)

5 ports: 50000 LOC (old) vs. 36800 LOC (new)

Since I have more 3 ports that I would like to implement, this change makes sense.

3. I also believe that sharing the core code will allow me to implement a more robust and efficient system across platforms. By including resource-constrained devices (such as mobile phones) to the mix, it easier to notice inefficient and unstable code.

To be honest, this effort is in its early phases and I probably won’t have anything ready for testing until later this year. However, I do think that the short-term pain will result in long term gain as I develop a framework and approach for getting Pennyworth on more devices.

Thank you for your patience.