Well I'm off to Japan tomorrow (for my "Day Job"), it was an odd week for me. I spent a few days updating Rapidflickr to include sets and fix some rendering issues and although it ended up taking more time than I expected I really enjoyed getting back into Rapidflickr for a few days (although at one point i got a little depressed since it reminded me how far it still is from my vision). I have decided that the next 'big thing' for Rapidflickr is live updates and that will co-incide with release 1.0 (sometime after the first Rapidblog public beta)

I also spent a lot of time this week preparing for next week which kept me pretty busy so progress on Rapidblog wasn't very much. I've gotten the syncing to RW working fairly well although right now I've got some odd date problems (I can't get my app to agree on timezones with Blogger.. In fact it's not even time zones, I get weird 5'ish minute errors after a blog entry is posted from RW -> Blogger -> RW. I'm guess it's my date formatting.

A while back I started telling people that Rapidblog beta would start mid-March.. That still feels possible and it's still my goal. I return on Friday morning (California Time) so look for the next update sometime after that (although if you are astute you might catch an update before then)


Sayanora

Thanks to some great help testing 0.9.2b1 a few issues were discovered and resolved. See the Change Log for the details

0.9.2b2 is now ready for download. Set support should work better now and I've further improved the HTML output (it now centers)

Enjoy

I pushed 0.9.2 of rapidflickr out tonight as a 'b1' version (beta 1). If all goes smoothly I'll release it more broadly friday night or saturday.

Not a huge update but a few nice changes including set support and the ability to turn off the titles when using the "Lightbox" effect. For the entire change log go here, you can grab it the newest version here

I'm looking for a few brave testers to give it a spin before I announce something broadly on the Realmac forums. If you try it let me know if it works ok for you or if you notice any problems.

Since I'm going to be gone next week in Japan and I knew I wouldn't be able to get the Rapidblog beta out before (and even if I could I wouldn't do it since I have no way of working on problems or fixing it when traveling) I decided to take a quick break from Rapidblog and add some much requested features to rapidflickr.

This will be a fairly small update with a few cosmetic changes, some fixes to HTML rendering and photoset support. You can now be able to select pictures by either 'Tags' (current method) or 'Photosets'..

If you have any other 'hot' features or annoying bugs this is a good time to let me know... No promises but i'll try, expect 0.9.2 out by saturday.

I've gone back and forth in my mind on the value of blogging my progress on rapidblog. On the one hand I know a lot of folks are interested, on the other you see all the development process...

Do you know the adage about making Sausage? Basically it ain't pretty.


Having said that I don't think anyone reads this little blog anyway so I'm pretty safe

For the latest rapidblog results I humbly point you to here

Since I'm in pretty active development this 'test' blog may change pretty fast... here are a few screen shots of the GUI (note the GUI is totally barebones right now... just something to test the underlying code)



Here is the resulting web page...



With this I've done both directions... I've remotely blogged from the blogger web interface and I've blogged from within Rapidweaver.. Furthermore I'm able to edit Rapidweaver posts in blogger and blogger posts in Rapidweaver.

Still TONS of work to do but steady progress continues to be made... Note that I have to go to Japan next week so my estimates for end of this month beta are probably not going to happen... New estimate is no later than mid march.

I was looking at who ordered my plugins (especially Lockdown) and I noticed that a large percentage of sales came from two non-english speaking countries. France & Germany.

In order to help our friends in those countries I'm considering Localizing Lockdown to those two languages for version 1.1, only 3 things keep me from doing it

1. 
   
2. I've never localized a Mac app before (ok, I can probably figure this out easily enough)
3. 
   
4. I don't speak French
5. 
   
6. I don't speak German
7. 
   

So I might be looking for a little help from a certain sort of person. Specifically I'm looking for someone who:

1. 
   
2. Speaks French and English or German and English. I'd prefer that your native tongue is French/German to make sure the Localized version makes sense
3. 
   
4. Is interested in helping make Lockdown better by providing it in those languages
5. 
   
6. Is willing to help update the localization as I add new features
7. 
   
8. Is willing to help for basically not much. I'll give you credit on the web page and I'll give you a free registration code (a USD $7.95 value! If you have already purchased Lockdown I'll credit you back your purchase price) plus you get the thanks of your countrymen and the satisfaction of helping make RW more friendly to non english speakers
9. 
   

I'll probably have 1.1 out in the next 4-6, If you are interested in helping contact me to let me know

I had never touched a mac in my life until April of 2005. This is an example of why I love this platform so much

We're in Monterey this weekend (well technically Pacific Grove) and it's kind of Rainy & Cold. I had a few moments to myself and decided to dig into Quartz Composer to see what all the fuss was about.

Within 30 minutes I had taken a picture from our Aquarium visit this morning and converted it into this 68kb movie



It's not that I think the movie is so great, it's the ease at which I created the effect and the size (68kb!)-- OSX is really a tremendous operating system that has so much power integrated into it's core that Apple makes easy to use (Again, 30 minutes to generate from a dead start... I could do a new one in about 20 seconds now that I 'get it')

It got me wondering... Is there any value in integrating something like this in some fashion with RW? A few obvious ideas are perhaps an easy way to generate animated graphics or buttons but I could also see Quartz Compositions as a way to do picture or text effects easily.

Best of all? If done properly once the base framework was in place, it could be 'open' in that anyone could create new effects to add and share in an open community way (imagine this.. the current image inspector allows you to scale the image, flip it and rotate it... Imagine if you could transform it in dozens of ways including shadows, borders, etc. and imagine if you could create custom effects to add to the library built into RW using Quartz Composer)

In reality this kind of functionality needs to reside in the core RW product not a plugin so I doubt I'll ever do anything with it but it's so intriguing it really makes me think of all the possibilities.

Llike I said in my last post, steady progress is now possible on RapidBlog.

Here is a screenshot of rapidblog proof of concept within RW. You can see the blog posts that were entered via the web as well as a new entry at the bottom that I'm adding from within RW.

This is really barely functional and I'm still just putting together proof points of the various pieces but the progress is happening much faster now. Right now I'm in that nice place where I'm not scratching my head trying to figure out how to move forward, instead I'm adding bits and pieces at a pretty fast rate and every day it get's more functional -- It's kind of a fun spot to be in.

As many of you know I have the mysterious 'rapidblog' entry on my web site promising fine remote blogging... I had the skeleton of a program that did this (not at all complete but let's call it proof of concept) working in a stand alone app but for the life of me I could not get it to work within RW... I've spent probably 3 weeks fighting it almost every evening.

Tonight i gave up and re-implemented my skeleton using a different technique and It works!.... This is a huge breakthrough, assuming my kids stay healthy and I'm able to focus a bit I'll probably do a private beta with the next few weeks and if that goes smoothly a public beta shortly after that... i know I've been promising for a while but tonight was a huge night


Stay tuned

I released Lockdown 1.0b3 last night. The biggest change is that this release has an 'alternate' configuration method that you can use if the automatic one doesn't work (basically it involves copying a directory into the plugin and then dragging the resulting file back to your site...) It should make it fairly easy to configure for the folks where the automatic configuration doesn't work.

Tom Beardmore gave me a subdomain on his account to try to figure out what was going on with some accounts (thanks Tom!), it turns out that (in at least that case) PHP runs as 'Nobody' which means it can't create files in your directory unless you open your permissions wide open. I presume they run with these permissions for security reasons (although I don't instantly see how it's that much more secure). It really makes me appreciate my own hosting company, they have super generous disk & BW allocations and have very liberal policies of what you can do with your account (and PHP runs as yourself!)

Anyway assuming no major bugs are found in the next few days I'll probably call 1.0b3 the '1.0final' release. I have some more ideas for enhancements to Lockdown but they will have to wait for 1.1 release.

-jm

You may not know this but the busy gnomes at Loghound software have about 5 different plug-in's in various states. The next one I really wanted to get 'out there' is rapidblog but i've recently run into some integration issues (nothing that can't be fixed, it just slowed down my work quite a bit) and to be honest with you working on web services enabled plugin's is a LOT of work...

To that end when I came across my most recent snag with rapidblogger instead of digging in I decided to take a break and actually finish one of my non-web services enabled plugin that I wanted for my own use.

I'm happy to release my next Rapidweaver plugin called Lockdown. It's a simple plugin to solve the vexxing problem of password protecting a page or a series of pages (get it, it will password 'lock' every page underneath it in RW). This plugin won't be for everyone.. It doesn't work on .mac for instance but I think it should work for most other people

So go ahead and give it a spin, you can download it here

As always, your thoughts or comments appreciated

loghound at gmail dot com