Silk 2.0.2 was released on Friday. Funny thing really. I wasn't going to submit it to VersionTracker until the whiny FedEx guy came and dropped off the monitor I cannot use and the speakers I cannot listen to until my G5 arrives (to replace my aging G4/450 AGP desktop). Anyways I updated the project pages of the main site along with Silk's page and the download links. I had updated the news page but removed it about 2 minutes later in case VT picked it up. I came back an hour later and checked VT. Silk was listed! They even had the new release note which I hadn't (and haven't) posted on the main site yet. Which means someone downloaded it and posted the update to VT or maybe it went to MacUpdate (where no-sleeve Thursday is the norm) and VT picked it up from there.
Speaking of VersionTracker, Ian Schray left VersionTracker on Thursday, July 24th to pursue other interests. He tells me it wasn't at all scandalous but my imagination prevents me from believing it. I quite annoyingly made sure to chat with Ian every MacWorld at the TechTracker booth except this last New York one which I couldn't be bothered to go to. I swore I'd never go to another MWNY after my first, and last, visit there. Anyways, I'll miss "sensing" Ian's presence whenever I go to the VersionTracker main page. I guess Kurt will do... for now.
By the way,
- Fixes a random crash that could occur in Cocoa applications (specifically Safari) if font substitutions were enabled and different styles of a font were substituted. Probably emerged from a previous bug fix. The crash looked like Silk_CopyReplacementFontNameForName:CFDictionaryContainsKey.
Well, it's officially here - FruitMenu version 3.1.
Copy-paste:
- This update is free for all registered users, as usual.
- A list of installed Application Enhancer modules is now displayed in the System Preferences submenu for the APE Manager.
- New "Display Folders First In File Listings" option in the Advanced settings to make FruitMenu display folders on top of all other files in the file listings.
- Updated for Application Enhancer 1.3.
- Significant speed optimizations.
- Mounted Volumes are now displayed in all contextual menus and not just when clicked on the Desktop, due to many users requests.
- Fixed a bug with certain contextual menu items not working when Apple menu is not enhanced.
- Fixed a bug with not being able to add Microsoft Office X and some other applications to individual application settings.
- Miscellaneous bug fixes.
Well, as some of us know already, today is Rosyna's birthday!
It's good to have people like Rosyna on the team. Being the most unsane of us all, disobeying orders and company policies, spending endless hours crafting own haxies until they work as they should, Rosyna is a good example of a dedicated person who is eager and not afraid to learn new things on his/her/its own.
Keep it up that way, Rosyna!
Undersigned,
I've been working on a new haxie lately. It's called FontCard (I would have loved to have named in MenuFonts instead). Anyways, it replaces the font menus in different applications with a custom one. All kinds of WYSIWYG goodness.
It's no where near done yet, but it already does everything FontSight does right now. Except it works with Carbon applications. Currently only Carbon applications. There are so many different ways to to make a Font menu in Carbon that I had to rewrite the thing 3-4 times but it was a huge learning experience. Cocoa support is forthcoming and should not be difficult at all to implement.
What would you like to see in a font menu? What would y'all be willing to pay for such a utility? It will cost more than $10 US.
Below is a list of Applications I've tested it with (and it works with) and the issues I had. Of course, holding the shift key down when you open the font menu shows the original menu, unchanged. Also, it will only show fonts in it's menu that are in the application's original font menu.
Adobe InDesign: Insane. I had to make FC work with InDesign from the get-go. I had to do it quickly because Adobe will not provide an Not For Retail (NFR) copy to me and I do not think it is worth the cash to pay for it since I do no design and I have no design talent so I was working off the time limited demo.
InDesign is all kinds of weird because all of it's menu system. It is extremely dynamic. Menus are created when the menu is shown (or for submenus when the parent menu is shown). They are then destroyed when they are closed. This meant I had to rewrite FC to do all its work when the menu is being shown. FC uses a proxy system so all its items are proxies to the real items. For each real item, I have to find my fake item and vice versa. I thought I had it just right but InDesign adds a space to the name of each menu item. I have no idea why. It just seems silly to me so of course I had to remove it when I do the proxy matching.
Also, because of InDesign's dynamic nature, it helped me find a lot of bugs that other applications would show in a seemingly random fashion. But it's also pretty slow in InDesign... 1.5 seconds for the first Font menu showing and about 763 or so milliseconds for each following showing. I must work on that some.
Microsoft Word: they use a standard font menu whereas InDesign rolls it's own. In the first 2 versions, Word was the difficult application to get to work but then I got it to be very easy when I implemented better proxies. Ironically, FC does not work when WYSIWYG menus on in Word so they must be off.
Barebones BBEdit: This was another odd one. BBEdit puts the sizes in the font menu first, then a separator item, then the font menu (AppendResMenu(), old school). Because of this non-standardish behaviour I had to teach FC to look at the first few items and leave them in unless they are not a font size so it doesn't work if something else is first or if a font is named "12". Worse, I patch the methods that set check marks and disable menu items so I can show that in my font menu but BBEdit calls SetitemMark and Enable/DisableMenuItem for every single menu item whenever something is done to the menus. This makes a huge delay after the initial font menu showing. I will either try to make this faster or make syncing marks an option, off by default for Barebone's applications.
ATSUICurveAccessDemo: I choose this as an application to test because it uses a standard font menu and does very standard things. No serious problems, FC works quite well. Too bad no other applications use OS X standard Carbon font menus.
Quark XPress: Description Forthcoming
Did I miss anything? I was born on July 21st, 1981.
Someone tell me what part of the W3C standards says it's ok to open iframes for protocols you do not natively support? Also, why does it keep that app frontmost and Safari unresponsive?
http://www.xvsxp.com/applications/internet/malicious-iframe-script.html
Why is it so hard to understand the word malicious for some people?
So... I am working on APE working with Fast User Switching in Panther, and having lots of fun. It crashes while switching, leaving pretty pictures on my monitor, like this one (it is stalled, and not a motion shot) -
Either way, I've made good progress on the Panther implementation, and will probably post a development build of apesdk for you developer types out there in a few days.
Nifty - another Application Enhancer module has popped up, and this one allows you to use your old(er) USB cam with iChat AV. Pretty handy, if you ask me.
I don't have an USB cam to test it with, but somebody on IRC reported it working for him. So if you do, you may want to give it a try:
http://www.ecamm.com/mac/ichatusbcam/
Oh, the name is iChatUSBCam by Ecamm Network.
So I have decided to go to Japan on October 26th. I just really hope war hasn't started yet. Part of the reason I am going in October instead of when the cherry blossoms do their thing. I've bought a few books on learning Japanese in the meantime. I know nothing... Te o Nabashite & Tonzura Koite...
Thanks to everyone for their suggestions (I am still open) especially to the lovely and haired Michael Simmons.
But it's still all just a matter of time.
So, while I am settling back at home [sweet home], a new APE-based product has popped up. Originating from an already familiar company, Rogue Amoeba, a new tool called Detour is out (already at v1.0.1 while I was gone, woop!), featuring an ability to select sound output device on a per-application basis, and, most importantly, spiffy icon in orange color I adore so much.
In other words, it allows you to listen to music from iTunes on your SoundSticks while keeping these pesky Entourage sounds on the speaker in front of your Mac and individually control the volume of each application. Enough free advertising - I hope these militarized amoebas pay me soon for all my efforts. Heh.
More on my adventures later.
I keep hearing about how you should always use VPN to connect to the internet when away from home. Well, I have a NetGear FVS318 router with VPN support. Now, how the fuzzy am I supposed to configure this to allow my AlBook to connect to it from any location in the world? The setup screens want a list of remote and local IP addresses but they'd likely never be the same. I could set up remote management, but that completely misses the point of a secure connection if the password to set it up goes through the clear.
Dave Hyatt is asking people for comments on things (non-UI related) that Safari still doesn't do correctly and I like complaining.
1. Safari still doesn't render Outlook Web Access correctly. It overlaps the text on smallish messages. I've reported this after ever major release.
2. Copy and paste is all wrong. It will often add extra lines an extra spaces to copied text. *cough*CFStringTrimWhitespace*cough*
3. If you are on the main page of the .org site and see my windows XP screenshot, resize the window to be small. The text overlaps the image. I don't know if this is intenntional, a bug or not.
I might add more to this as I find serious issues ;)
Does anyone know if XP supports bluetooth at all? I have two D-Link Bluetooth Adapters (DBT-120M and DWB-120). I could find no way in the default XP install to configure Bluetooth and XP didn't have drivers for the hardware. Actually, I got mixed dialogs from XP "Hardware not installed or malfunctioned", "Hardware Installed Successfully", "Hardware Not Installed" (in that order on one boot). I even got it once to BSOD on me. First time I've ever "installed" hardware and it BSOD's on me...
All I'm trying to do is get the pictures off my Nokia 3650. OS X refuses to accept the file transfer via Bluetooth. And it errors when I try to browse the device. But at least Mac OS X supports Bluetooth.
By the way, here's a fun dialog. My guess is that the D-Link software installs the MS Bluetooth software.
