njr 3.0

Spent way too much time last night and this morning working on HostLauncher. But a feature works now.

In late July of last year, I started working on HostLauncher in my free time. Since then I've started, and finished, many other smaller programming projects. HostLauncher has been in a semi-usable state for launching since October, and for editing since January. I've decided to put aside the other two projects I've been working on—debugging ICeCoffEE Terminal support and client-side digest authentication support for Radio/Frontier—and focus on HostLauncher for a few weeks.

Last night I implemented a good first pass at Terminal integration: a big usability benefit. I just triaged bugs into four areas: major, minor, polish, and post-1.0 work. There are two items in the major category, one much more difficult than the other. It's implementing the protocol-specific connection editing, so SSH connections actually behave like you'd expect. I'm still not sure to do here, but more design work is definitely in order.

12:37 PM | Radio
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Chimera 0.2 is also out. It's very nice looking, because it uses ATSUI anti-aliased text rendering, and form fiends work too! To hyatt, pink, and everyone else who worked hard on this, thanks, and keep it up! (Hyatt, enjoy your vacation…)

2:48 AM | Radio
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Mozilla ATSUI rendering test build is available. It's the Mach-O Mozilla, so it's missing such essential features as keyboard shortcuts and forms, but it sure is pretty.

GraphicConverter feature I accidentally stumbled on: You can crop an image by selecting a portion of it, then double-clicking within the marquee.

4:24 PM | Radio
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I was looking at this page on Windows 2000 a few minutes ago, and discovered that IE 6 still doesn't support transparent PNG images! The espresso mug (at left) appeared with a light gray background.

I also downloaded and installed the latest Mozilla nightly build on Windows. Running on a Pentium III/700 with W2K, Mozilla is very usable, compared with my dual Power Mac G4/533 (barely usable). It's the same code running there, folks, for the most part: CFM bridging, Mach-O, and OS X's general slowness certainly take their respective tolls.

11:54 PM | Radio
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The interesting OS X/Classic bug I posted about a few days ago has become more amusing. WindowServer crashed while I was running Classic, but Classic didn't quit. Once the WindowServer restarted, instead of getting the message I got in the past—about two copies of Classic not being able to run simultaneously—Classic dutifully started up again.

Hey, it works! Two copies of Classic are running.

nicholas 13672  17.2  4.7  1125088  43040  ??  R     21:06.41 TruBlueEnvironment 
nicholas 21204   2.1  3.0  1123772  27696  ??  S      0:36.86 TruBlueEnvironment 

I wouldn't have noticed this if I hadn't been listening to RealPlayer at the time of the crash. As WindowServer crashed and restarted, sound continued to play uninterrupted, and RealPlayer continued to draw its status on the screen. I can't interact with the phantom Classic any more, but everything works still—even networking and audio in both copies of Classic simultaneously. Here's a screenshot of the whole mess.

2:41 AM | Radio
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