njr 3.0

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.

3:20 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.

12:53 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.

4:11 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…

4:00 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.

12:57 AM | Radio
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