n-Track Blog

I'll start this blog thing with an historical issue. The next version of the program will remove an ancient limitation of a maximum of 80 tracks, a limit that was there since version 0.something mainly to save memory as earlier versions of the program allocated data for all supported tracks in advance.

n-Track has evolved from a very simple 1 dialog box program created in 1995 to a relatively complex application and the underlying software architecture and design has had only a few radical changes, but has continuously changed over time. That's one of the most interesting aspects of developing the program, how to change and improve the design while keeping existing functionality and without having to rewrite old code that works. Software development and design often used the construction building metaphor (think of the build term used for identifying incremental software versions), but where the metaphor doesn't apply is what I find unique about software, how you can adapt it and keep old things while changing them. As my personal experience lately shows you really can't do that in building actual buildings, 'refactoring' buildings is often more expensive that tearing them down and rebuilding them. Luckily that doesn't happen with software.