Nicotine v0.5.5 is out and with it come a whole host of new features. This new version brings preview windows to Linux and totally overhauls the UI to have feature parity with its windows counterpart.
The Reddit announcement was met with a positive response, and the Nicotine Country Discord Community has been steadily growing. I've received an absolute ton of feature requests and a few bug reports, some of which are genuinely great ideas. I'm stoked that people are getting value out of Nicotine and enjoying my software.
I've got a lot of plans for Nicotine in the near future including a port to MacOS, for which I have a local branch, but this influx of new Windows and Linux users' feature requests have eclipsed my drive to continue that effort for now. I can assure you, it is coming.
One of the biggest challenges I'm facing now is the UI itself. The current release uses egui which has done its job very well. It's super lightweight, and that's one of the most important characteristics of Nicotine to me-- in contrast to a project like Eve-O Preview which requires the .NET runtime. In my opinion, a heavy runtime dependency like this is antithetical to the purpose of a multiboxing tool in that the user is likely running many accounts and need all the performance they can get, so it doesn't make sense to me to waste their resources on the .NET runtime. Nicotine instead is a fully native self-contained binary.
Again, egui has done a great job, but given some of the use cases spelled out by Nicotine's users, I'm going to need to radically improve the UI. I could do this in egui, but I'm currently exploring other UI frameworks and tools such as Slint and Tauri. Tauri is web-native and would be heavier than something like egui, but it would allow me to give Nicotine the highest degree of polish. This is what I'm leaning toward and have a local experiment branch for benchmarking. If it doesn't impact performance too much, I'm going with Tauri and I can make Nicotine really shine.
At any rate, if you're using Nicotine for your Eve journey now, I really appreciate it. Thanks for your feature requests and bug reports, and I'll see you in v0.6.0 :)