njr 3.0

Apple always seems to “accidentally” leave a code name unfixed
somewhere in their CPU dev notes (in a few cases, such as the 101
PowerBooks, it was even left behind in the filenames on the Web site).
Regarding the eMac: “The Uni-N 1.5 IC used in the Northen Lights G4
computer [sic]…” In the PowerBook G4 DVI note: “With the Hydra
adapter, available separately, the PowerBook G4 computer can be used
with any digital Apple monitor that has an ADC connector.”

8:31 PM | Radio
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Thanks to a reader who sent me a screenshot of toDo.root's (lack of) checkboxes on Windows, I finally fixed the icons and released “To Do for Radio” 1.0.1. In addition to the re-converted icons which should hopefully show up on Windows, my work so far on rendering scripts (which I discussed in yesterday's posts, and the results of which you can see here) are in there too. They won't do anything until you add rendering info to your OPML file, and since rendering is broken right now, don't do that.

8:20 AM | Radio
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Installed the Dreamweaver MX preview, but both the setup app (”VSetupT”, what a wonderfully nice name) and Dreamweaver itself just crash on startup. So much for that.

Turns out VSetupT is incompatible with OS X (it has to do with copy protection, judging by looking at the version info). Choose “Open in the Classic Environment”, double-click it, then double-click Dreamweaver and it should work.
First impressions: Macromedia still hasn't cleaned up their act on GUI polish. I always found FreeHand and Dreamweaver much more annoying to use than their often feature-poorer Adobe counterparts for this reason.

The “License Manager” app blocks access the first time you run it, but it's unclear what's happening if you click on Dreamweaver; you have to discover that the License Manager app is waiting for you to answer a question. Clicking tabs on the toolbar causes it to flash annoyingly, and double-clicking the “Insert” triangle causes the toolbar to expand to the height of the screen (what's the point?) The windows dock together, but in a way that doesn't respect the shadows OS X includes, so the document window overlaps the shadow of the palette above it. “Preferences - Validator” shows Windows style checkboxes. Drag and drop in the source view shows inadequate feedback. Switching a palette from horizontal to vertical takes 3 seconds on my G4/533. Toolbar buttons stay highlighted when you move off them, even though they shouldn't.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on Macromedia for these issues, but they don't exactly inspire confidence for the core of the program being solid. I'll take a longer look at some point in the future, when I can give it (and GoLive 7) more than a cursory look.

5:53 AM | Radio
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Megan Seling and Min Liao (I think Nicholas is the only person who can see these subjects). I learned yesterday that Brian Goedde, The Stranger's calendar editor and token hiphop writer, has moved on. His replacement first… [bumppo.net]

Yes, I see it. “qbullet.sidesmiley”

9:11 AM | Radio
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If you're not familiar with Frontier or Radio, just ignore the rest of this post… it probably won't make much sense!

Almost there, but I'm stuck. I figured out a way to embed #directives in an OPML file so they aren't visible, but ran into problems calling Radio's rendering scripts from the saveWindow callback.

radio.webServer.setTemplate refers to pta^.path, but radio.html.publishStaticPage doesn't set the 'path' attribute of the pagetable, and it circumvents any attempt I make to set a pagetable. I should have checked this before carefully constructing a fake pagetable to pass it… as is, the only way to insert directives is by modifying radio.data.website.[”#prefs”], which is horribly ugly. radio.data.website is the fake website framework root in which Radio pages get rendered (always in the same place, radio.data.website.default) before being upstreamed.

It turns out publishStaticPage is only called from a try within a webserver request. This may indeed be a dead codepath, and any exceptions caused thereby are simply ignored.

More digging to commence next weekend. I should probably start with radio.upstream.getUpstreamText, which is definitely called, and write the file into the www directory myself, letting the standard upstream mechanism deal with it. However, writing rendered files into the www directory is against the philosophy of Radio as I see it, so it's an ugly hack at best.

Or, perhaps, I could do the opposite: upstream the OPML file by somehow turning off #flRender, and letting regular upstreaming handle everything else.

Thanks to my sustained hacking effort, I didn't get a chance to convert the icons. That I can do tomorrow, though…

9:00 AM | Radio
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I love the humanity of code, especially when I find a particularly colorful statement in it. For example, in Frontier.tools.windowTypes.callbacks.openWindow, there's a bundle of commented-out code with an interesting comment.

5:57 AM | Radio
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Jim has a new design! Very nice looking! (Keep it!)

5:35 AM | Radio
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Weird, Radio seems not to be receiving receiving updates from Bill Bumgarner's weblog. He's posted a lot in the last few days and I hadn't seen a word of it. In particular, there's a very thorough developer's introduction to Mac OS X, full of lots of useful information. It's not often I read such a large amount of advice which I completely agree with, but in this case, I couldn't find a single point of argument.

Well, perhaps one. He doesn't mention Mozilla as a viable OS X browser. See below.

3:43 AM | Radio
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Mozilla weblogs: a nice index. Among those I hadn't seen before, Matt Judy wrote a concise statement on Chimera. I agree with everything he says. I don't want to see Mozilla on Mac OS X take a back seat to Chimera either, because currently Mozilla is ready for me to use as my primary browser, and Chimera isn't. I have used Mozilla as such for a month now. The number of annoying bugs I encounter on a daily basis in Mozilla is now very small (counting 'lack of speed in new window opening and general interface performance' as one bug), and otherwise are:

• keyboard shortcuts, especially the Return key, don't function in OS dialogs (save, print)

• naming of saved files is erratic, sometimes adding file extensions where inappropriate
• menus in the Personal Toolbar activate when dragging over them, even when Mozilla is not the active application
• history is poorly implemented (see Windows IE for a very nice implementation, and Mac IE/OmniWeb for tolerable ones).
• bookmarks are poorly implemented (same as above, but Mac IE far surpasses other browsers I've seen here)
• you can't Command-click on a bookmark to open it in a new tab
• if Mozilla can't load a page in a tab or window, it doesn't display the URL, making it impossible to know which page you wanted if you try to reload

On the other hand, I'm starting to miss many Mozilla features when I use other browsers, especially Mac IE. These include tabbed browsing, intelligent forms auto-fill, decently functional form fields, and rendering speed. Mozilla has also largely stopped crashing for me; CrashReporter's logs indicate that it hasn't crashed since Sunday the 21st, and I've been using it several hours a day since.

I've discovered the bottleneck I was looking for in instant outline rendering, and I should be able to fix all the problems I documented yesterday in one fell swoop.

Still need to convert the toDo icons with GraphicConverter… will do when I get frustrated when my code doesn't work. “qbullet.sidesmiley”

2:36 AM | Radio
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My instant outline rendering works! The link in the sidebar at left is broken, but you can see the result here. The scripts are based on opmlRender, although my stuff many times faster because it doesn't modify the outline in place. It includes to-do items. For once, CSS mostly cooperated.

Stuff to do with this later:

• release the new toDo.root including rendering scripts

• it seems setting #flRender to true stops my Instant Outline from updating in its OPML version… is there a workaround?
• fix the sidebar link in the rendered site; it's fine in the desktop website.

Several people emailed me regarding the icons not working on Windows. It seems Iconographer is not converting them properly, since GraphicConverter doesn't like the ICO files it produces either. I'll convert the icons with GraphicConverter tomorrow, and hopefully it'll work.

9:05 AM | Radio
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