Nonpareil II status and plans

[brouhaha]

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, Nonpareil II reached the point of successfully simulating its first calculator model, the HP-25. It is still using the non-scalable graphics from Nonpareil I, as I haven't yet had time to create scalable graphics for any model other than the 16C (proof-of-concept graphics, no simulation yet). The state save for the 25 is currently manually performed by File/Save as, and I'm just starting on state loading. Eventually it will be automatic like Nonpareil I.

I spent some time a few months ago making sure that I could "easily" build a Nonpareil release for Windows, and had that mostly working. More recently I've worked on getting it to build for macOS, which is still in progress. Today I've discovered that some of the things I did to make it build for the Mac actually broke the ability to build for Windows, and I spent a lot of today figuring out how to fix that. Even though I stick to the C++20 standard, not using any non-standard extensions, and use Qt6 for the user interface, which has good cross-platform support, it is still the case that cross-platform development can be very difficult.

Now that something is actually working, I plan to release a demo for Windows and macOS soon. I expect further progress to be more rapid, but I still want to, as soon as possible, get a minimally functional preview/demo release into the hands of people willing to try it.

Unlike what I've done in the pastI, I plan to put Nonpareil II into the Microsoft and Apple stores as a paid application, to raise funds to support further development. At first, Nonpareil II will NOT be open-source, though I still plan for it to be open source later. I think that if I publish the source right away, people will build releases they sell cheaper or give away, so I want to develop at least some user base before open sourcing it.

The early preview/demo will of course be distributed free-of-charge. I won't switch to the paid stores until it is much closer to the intended level of functionality

I've been agonizing for some time over this decision to not make it open source from day one, and I'm still not thrilled about it. I hope Nonpareil users are not too disappointed.