Introduction
Over the past month the release cadence of Kova has settled. Bi-weekly releases are working well at the moment, now that bugs are minor and most of the expected features have been implemented, and it allows me some breathing room around my own research and teaching. Several roadmapped features have been achieved, and new ideas have started coming to the project, which has been really positive.
Roadmap Items
Visual Studio Code Extension
This has now been achieved, and version 0.0.1 is available on the VS Code Extension Marketplace. The extension brings Kova-specific syntax highlighting to Markdown files, and adds a shortcut to launch the file using Kova's presentation engine. Presenting depends on Kova being installed on the host system.
As a long-term Linux user, the hardest part was getting my head around the submission process and the Azure platform!
SignPath Code Signing
As of version 0.8.1, code signing on Windows is fixed and working. All Windows executables going forward will bear this signing. Shout out to Philip at SignPath for the support in getting signing working correctly.
Pele Diagram Rendering
This is something that wasn't in the previous development updates because, quite simply, it did not exist.
Pele is an alternative renderer for Mermaid diagrams. It is significantly smaller and faster than traditional rendering using Mermaid.js — according to the official website, 6x smaller and up to 500x faster.
I chose to implement this as soon as I found out about it, as I had recently run into an issue with a 54-slide, diagram-heavy deck. On Linux, where Kova uses WebKit to render, it chugged — and I mean near app lock-up chugged. As of 0.8.2, Pele can be chosen as the diagram renderer, but it is not set by default. I am monitoring Pele's development with the intention of making it the default renderer, with Mermaid.js still bundled as a fallback until Pele matures further.
Obsidian Plugin
Work has yet to commence here, mostly from a time perspective. Personally, Obsidian has been a very influential piece of software, and I think that Steph Ango's approach to community interaction is exactly what we should expect of more software teams.
On paper, implementing this should be straightforward. Submitting to Obsidian's community plugins does have an approval process, but it shouldn't be too much trouble.
Next Steps
My focus over the next few weeks is to start tackling the Obsidian plugin — something I do not anticipate being too much of a challenge after dealing with the VS Code extension submission process.
Minor improvements and fixes will continue to land in the core Kova application alongside this. I welcome users opening issues when they do run into problems, and suggestions are always welcome.
For platform releases, I am currently working on an ebuild for Gentoo Linux. I intend to host this on a dedicated overlay initially, before submitting it for review to be added to the main GURU repository.
Thanks
As always, and as cliché as it may sound, thank you all for your continued use of Kova. Even though download stats are limited to direct downloads from GitHub only (there are no VPS stats for Linux), I estimate that we are at around 200 installations at least — and I believe the actual number to be higher. That is amazing to me.
Keep submitting issues and feature requests to the issue tracker. If you want to submit an issue or suggestion but don't have or want a GitHub account, you can email me directly at ross@kova.md.
Ross
ross@kova.md