Loghound Development Blog

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loghound@gmail.com — 2007-02-09T22:35:43-08:00

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New Blog Post

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-12-30T22:59:03-08:00

Hi All, Just a reminder that if all goes well I'll be posting almost exclusively here for a while. There is a RSS feed for this page that you may want to subscribe to (you can see it in the sidebar at the bottom)

A new blog

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-12-29T21:15:03-08:00

Hi All, I've put up a new blog that I will be posting on more frequently going forward...I hope I can say more about the technology behind it by Macworld. In the meantime you can check it out here. You might also notice I've updated my Rapidblog Page.

Christmas comes early!

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-12-20T00:09:29-08:00

Christmas comes early this year. I've decided to join 'MacSanta'. A bunch of Mac developers have come together to all offer 20% off using Coupon code 'MACSANTA' and all Loghound.com items are included... Just use "MACSANTA" at checkout to get 20% off your entire order. You may want to check out what else is at the MacSanta site.. Some pretty nice apps, come on, treat yourself. You know you've been nice!

Pluskit 0.991U

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-11-29T23:24:08-08:00

Here is the latest version of Pluskit. It should work with every page style including blogs, blog archives, blocks, etc. EXCEPT the newest plugin Carousel (there seem to be java conflicts so I don't think any lightbox picture will work with this)

Plustkit 0.985U

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-11-29T00:09:12-08:00

Go here to download pluskit 0.985U The lightbox feature should now work under most circumstances. I just realized that 'blocks' is not working (I'll fix that next) and there may be other page types with a problem but all-in-all it should be pretty safe to play with. Of course testing is still limited so be a little cautious before you use it on your clients big site.

More Secret Menu items

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-11-27T23:45:11-08:00

Hot off the heels of my seminal 'secret menu items' blog (har) comes another one. This one requires that you download a new build of Pluskit but it turns on some pretty interesting features. Below is a screenshot of the new feature. It may appear a bit small so you might want to click on it to get a full size picture. First let me say that this one is really rough right now... I may not even ever release it but I'm curious to get some feedback if it's useful or not. You can now automatically 'lighbox' images that you drag & drop into styled text. This is great for putting small thumbnails in but still allowing for 'full res' pictures. There are a number of ways you can specify how to do it. In the example above I only auto-lightbox if it's a blog type and the picture is < 75% scaled (so the above picture will automatically create a lightbox while the one below will not since it's at 100% Again, this is still pretty rough.. I wouldn't use it on any serious sight but it's ok to play around with if you would like. There is one big problem right now in that if you have a link assigned to a graphic but the rules also allow you lightbox it then the lightbox will win (e.g. it doesn't play nicely with links). Anyway let me know what you think -- I'm really interested in feedback on this one. You can download it here

Secret Menu Items

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-11-26T14:44:11-08:00

Here in the US we have a food chain called 'in and out burger'. It's menu consists of hamburgers, french fries & drinks and for the majority of people they just order that (it's insanely popular and I've never figured out why). One of the things 'the kids' enjoy about it is it's secret menu. You see while the actual menu is pretty simple they also have a secret menu (ok, it's not so secret since it's on the web page) -- It's my understanding that there is a even MORE secret menu that they don't even post on the web (you can imagine the fun). Anyway I mention all of this because pluskit has secret options, let me tell you about one. Have you ever wanted to put together a simple table in a RW page? table{border:1px solid black}. |_. This |_. is |_. a |_. header| |This|is|the|first row| |This|is|the|second row.. It can be wide if needed| |or|say|you| |just|want|to| |put|things|in|nice| |columns||| It's pretty easy to do within textile. As a rule I prefer markdown for most of my ascii based stylings but markdown doesn't talk tables. It's super easy with textile. For instance try this |colum 1| column2| |this is an item | this is a second item| That's right.. You just put vertical bars between the columns and it will automagically create a table out of it. Much nice than inputting raw HTML! The great thing about pluskit is you can mix & match markdown & textile within a single page. To read more about textile go here Also, I've put together a new screencast for sitemap. You can read about it in the FAQ at the bottom of the page. It shows different ways to move your sitemap.xml file to the correct location.

First screencast

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-11-20T23:30:54-08:00

Now before you get all excited let me warn you.. This is reallly pretty mundane stuff but I put together my first screen cast. One of the questions I get a suprising amount of time is 'how do I drag the htaccess box in Lockdown over to transmit?'. It's difficult to describe it in email so I created a small movie (screencast) here that shows it. Having done it I have a few observations. 1. It's pretty easy to do.. I didn't do any post production, speaking, etc. Just did my stuff and posted it. I used ishowu which is a fantastic app and well worth $20 (especially compared to snapz pro which AFIK is not universal and way more expensive) 2. Having done it I can now point people to it again and again... Again saving my poor overtyped fingers 3. It makes me want to do more. There are a lot of features in the plugins that I don't think get used at all since there is no good guides. This approach may well fix it. 4. You don't have to make them overly complex. This one was pretty easy but solves the problem of describing it nicely (plus it's not that horribly big of a download)

New Lockdown features & Pricing.

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-11-19T21:37:39-08:00

I've put up a new version of lockdown with a much requested feature -- You can now select a 'per user' redirect page. This means if you want one central log in but you want to redirect people to their specific page you can now do that within lockdown. Please keep in mind that page redirection is different than security. If everyone has an account under one Lockdown page then they can access all of the content (even if you redirect them to their specific page). If you care about this you have a few options. 1) You can hide the menus in RW and use non obvious URL's... This is sort of security by obscurity but if it may be enough for most folks. 2) If you absolutely need the redirected pages to have protection you can send them to a second Lockdown page that only they have an account on. On a different, but related note, you may have noticed a small ($2) increase in Lockdown -- Lockdown has the highest support load of any of my plugins and so I made a small price increase in concert with the newest version to more accurately reflect the amount of work it is. If you were thinking of buying Lockdown but are now 'drats... too late', don't worry. I've set up a coupon code OLDLKDOWNPRICE that is 20% off which gets you back to the old price -- This coupon is good until Dec 1, 2006. -John

New Look

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-11-17T22:50:09-08:00

If you are reading this then on the web then you are seeing the new look. I've been trying to migrate over for a while and although I haven't got my final site tweaked up yet I've decided to go live (otherwise I may never change it). Overall I'm happy with the direction so far. it feels much cleaner than my old "everything at the top level" design -- One thing that tough about running a small business like Loghound.com, especially if your work gets done in the evenings after your 'day job' is that every night you have to decide "Do I work on plugins, customer defects, clean up documentation or fix up my web site" I usually put customer problems first and web site clean up last! The biggest thing that strikes me as I redo my site is how amazing Rapidweaver is. I'm able to take my entire site and with relatively small amounts of effort completely change the look and organization. Amazing. The theme is badNas from SeyDoggy and Adam has also been great in getting me new graphics -- The Lockdown icon was designed by him and look for other applications icons to come out in the coming weeks.

Slow Updates

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-11-13T22:28:39-08:00

Hi All, You may have noticed the site not updating recently. I've been away on some family issues but I'm back now so expect more frequent updates (both blog & plugins). Also, I'm slowly working on a new site design that I hope to bring live in the next 1-3 weeks. Stay Tuned.

I'm So Excited

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-10-05T22:34:41-07:00

It's been a while since I dusted off the old 'blog and gave you some loghound goodness so tonights a two fer. First I wanted to talk about a little project I'm in the middle of. It's got me pretty excited and no, it's not some fancy new plugin or application. In fact most of you will see it and shrug or say "Well, it's about time" Let's just say that I'm getting a help from a fellow [dog][1]... Finally I wanted to talk about the creativity of constraints. It occurs to me that most of what I've ever produced (and decided to share) is a form of plugin. Not just Rapidweaver but I've also done plugins for Address Book, iMediaBrowser Sandvox. It would frighten you to know what other apps I've done plugins for but choose to not every let see the light of day. More than once I've told someone NEVER AGAIN... Never again would I do a plugin. There are moments where I want to scream -- I want to do something simple and I can't because of the way the plugin interface works . Or I do what I think is correct but something in the main app kills me or ... well you get the idea. I dream of my own app that I control soup to nuts. I imagine working in an environment where I control all of the source code and believe me, it's attractive but I keep on coming back to plugins. Why? Why do I beat my head against the wall like this? I finally figured it out today. *Constraints free your creative mind* The fact that I have so many constraints forces me to think, and I mean think hard. More than once I've gone to bed thinking "It's helpless.. there is no way" and the next morning something clicks (Lockdown is a great example of that) it actually makes the problems more interesting and when I get it working it's that much more satisfying. I've seen the same reaction from the guys who can take a 16x16 icon and make it look great. Would it be nice to have 1024x1024 for icon design? Sure but there is something deeply satisfying by making the icon look great with 16 pixels on a side. [1]: http://seydoggy.com

Pluskit update (not)

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-09-18T00:08:29-07:00

I really intended to get a pluskit update out this weekend but a combination of a cold/flu kept me from making much progress (I'm feeling much better now) Look for a new release in the next two or three days with (hopefully) a bunch of defect fixes. In the mean time I've begun a table showing what is compatible with @import(())

Sep 12 predictions

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-09-10T23:42:14-07:00

Well as has become customary around the ol' blogosphere (why does everything become a 'sphere'?) people are throwing out predictions for what Steve-o will be saying this Tuesday. I did pretty well on my WWDC predictions so here goes again: * Sure Bets * Increased Nanos * Movie Downloads * Increased capacity ipods (40GB & 80GB) * Possible but less than 50% * New widescreen ipod * Some wireless video extender (Airport express for Video?) * New airport base-station (802.11n based) * Announce a deal for e-book reading on ipods (with widescreen ipod?) * No Way * Iphone * Wireless Ipod * xmac (something less than MacPro based on desktop proc but upgradable video card, hard drive, etc.) Personally I'd LOVE to see a widescreen 40&80GB ipod that can read e-books... I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Oh, I'm also this (holds fingers really close together) close to releasing PlusKit for general availability but based on the amount of negative stuff going on in the RW forums I decided to hold back a bit (I know, old fashioned of me to actually have a product ready to go before I announce it... what can I say?) I know a few of you have played with my "StyledPlus" or "Markdown" plugin, you may be wondering why it's called PlusKit? Well let's say I've juiced it up with a few more features including one I call the "MrTonk" memorial feature. Assuming my testing doesn't find any show stoppers look for it in the next 48 hours.

Starting some StylePlus docs

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-31T23:46:34-07:00

I've begun putting together docs for StylePlus... It is by no means complete yet but you can see them here and they should give you an example of what's possible.

StylePlus 0.4

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-30T23:38:20-07:00

So a few of you noticed that the beta of StylePlus "retired" today... Not to worry here is new version that should last another 30 days. Biggest differences is (hopefully) general improvements in stability as well as performance. As always, for the truely brave you can get the newest copy [here][1]

Sitemap 1.12

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-28T00:08:29-07:00

If you have been following the RapidWeaver forums you will have noticed that I released a new version of Sitemap that includes Blog support. It's currently at 1.12u and is pretty close to finished except for one niggling little detail. For some reason, at (apparently?) random times RW will decide to emit an archive category that doesn't exist. I'm still trying to figure this one out -- it's not too damaging (you get a dead link in one of the archives) but it's annoying! You can get the most recent build here. Let me know if you have any problems.

loads o' options

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-15T23:41:20-07:00

Well, if you ever read the RW forums you know that there are least *three* options for Markdown now. I've kind of debated internally about what to do but at this point I'm in 'a groove' with my version so I've continued development So what, you may ask, is in this most recent build? Well beyond fixing some HORRIBLE bugs that caused the system to core dump I've not implemented a caching subsystem. It's pretty slick and should really speed up renders. By default it's in 'smart' mode which means it caches unless the page changes but you can select no caching by saying 'cache=none' or you can force it to desperley cache by saying 'cache=always' (the difference between the default and 'always' is for always it keeps the cache even if the RW page changes. It only looses the cache if you change the actual command signature). Right now the cache only lives as long as you are running RW. Once you quit the cache is gone (to be fixed in a future release) --------------- So let's summarize: There 5 StylePlus tags and each one has 4 arguments you can pass: --------- The tags are: * markdown * textile * bash * applescript * python The arguments you can pass are (default in **bold**) * cache=**default** \| none \| always * warning=**true** \| false * timeout = **5** \| (some number of seconds) * files=**__FILES__** | (something else that you want to refer to remove files with) * outputdir= (some local directory you want copied to the server) Of course, there is also the @import ((some other page)) command. I've not worked on this much and it still doesn't cache Don't worry I'll get some better docs and examples up soon but for the truely brave you can get the newest copy [here][1]

Getting Closer

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-13T00:38:34-07:00

Getting Closer --- I'm writing this post *completely* in markdown. It's sort of an interesting way to post, even though RW has some nice graphical tools there is a certain freedom in using a strait ascii input. I'm sure many folks won't agree and will only dip into markdown when they want easy bulleted lists but I think I may do all of my text entry this way. So while I'm not ready to announce it publically (e.g. RW forums) I'm getting closer. This build improves error handling and adds several new features. 1. You now have 3 elements you can put inside of the tags to control things 1. warning. Defaults to yes but you can set it to 'no' or 'false' to turn off warnings for that block 2. outputdir. This is the name of a directory on your filesystem that get's copied with the page (e.g. if you run a bash script and want to include some files as a result use outputdir) 3. files. This is the name of the files to reference from the page 2. I now include some docs written by Greg Schueler, I'll probably generate some focused ones for RW folks but he did a nice job (and provided a liberal license so I can include them). To get them go to the StylePlus window (cmd-l or format->StylePlus) and copy to clipboard (as Markdown text no less!). Then past into a styled text window and preview them (this is also a nice way to see a before and after document) 3. General cleanups As an example of how to use the new formating here is how you might create a local file in a bash shell and then have it uploaded and referenced in your web page < bash outputdir=/tmp/myOut> echo "some file" > /tmp/myOut/file.txt < /bash> click here to get my bash output You can download the newest version [here][1] [1]: http://loghound.com/download/StylePlus.rwplugin-0_2.zip "Version 0.2 of my StylePlus plugin"

For the brave

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-12T00:04:14-07:00

If you are brave there is a new toy to play with. It still needs a fair bit of work but I'm willing to let it out of my clutches if you are brave. What does it do you may ask? Well it adds a bunch of new features to styled text. Here a few. 1. It allows markdown syntax. Use the tags and and put markdown text in between. 2. It allows you to execute arbitrary commands and have the contents replace it. For instance date gives you the following: date 3. It allows importing of another page. Use the @import\((other page)) syntax (where other page is the title of another page to import) 4. It uses Growl for notifications (turn that off with cmd-l or format->Style Plus) To use it simply install it... No need to add a special page. What's neat is it works in blogs, sidebars, blocks, etc. Everywhere you have styled text. While the basic bits & pieces are in place it's still not tested very much so I can guarantee there are bugs. You can download it here. I'll probably but a broader announcement up in the rapidweaver forums but I thought I'd push it out here a few days early for anyone who happens to read this.

Been Thinking

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-10T00:04:06-07:00

This page was published on date I've been thinking about Rapidweaver... ---- * It's a greate app * It's got a great plugin community * It's got great themes & theme designers But you are always sort of stuck to one plugin per page. Blocks did a nice job of breaking this mold since you can include other content in blocks but what if you are working on your blog? Or the sidebar? @import((accordiantease)) Or say you want to easily pop in a few flickr photos @import((rapidflickrtease)) Or say you wanted to throw in a few of those ever so cool flash slideshows? Anyway I wish there was an easy way to do this... I think it would be nice if you could push this stuff everywhere... including sidebar's, blogs, etc.

Xcode 3.0 goofiness

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-07T20:56:35-07:00

Like many people I frantically crawled the web looking for more details after the WWDC keynote. As a develooper I'm always interested in development tools improvements and so I gleefully started reading about Xcode 3.0. Slowly though my excitement turned to, well, puzzlement. You see there were some very odd things posted to the Xcode 3.0 site right after the keynote, I guess apple agreed because it's now slightly less goofy. For your pleasure I present 'Xcode 3.0 -- Morning and Night'. I'm sorry for the 'wide' format but I wanted to show a few of these side by side. You can download the web archive from this morning here and compare it to this one that's live.

Xcode 3.0 page August 7 @ 8:00PM	Xcode 3.0 page August 7 @ ~11:30 AM
Notice the smooth transition from interface builder to debugging.	Notice the bizarre references to stepping. "If stepping wears you down?"
note odd reference to Civ 4, but overall somewhat coherent	Note bizarre reference to reality & Pentagon

There are a few odd thing that appear in both versions of the web page "Because it's 2006" Is that even a sentence? "You'll make mistakes just to see it in action"? Seriously? "So Compelling," What does that even mean? Who's writing this copy? Ok, enough grousing..... I do like the cut of it's jib, just wished they had not let the 14 year old high school girl down the street write the web page for it.

So how did I do?

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-07T20:52:38-07:00

A few days back I put up some predictions for WWDC.. how did I do? Hits New Mac Pros, no ipod update, intel our best upgade ever, upgrade to core apps. Timeframe jan/feb ('spring'), garbage collection, API updates, virtualization, XCode 3.0 & Dashcode Misses Upgraded MBP+MB+Imac's, Not bad for my first round of WWDC predictions.

Why not join the club: Leopard predications

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-08-04T23:55:04-07:00

So it seems that everyone and their mother is giving out predictions for Leopard and WWDC in general. For what it's worth here are my thoughts. HW:

New Mac Pros (that's a gimme), upgrade MBP+MB+IMacs+mac mini to core 2. New Displays with eyesight.
Ipod: No significant announcements (although I'd love the rumored ipod+ebook reader!) -- Maybe a '8Gb' Nano
Intel: "our most successful transition ever"

Leopard:

All of the usual goodies (safari 3.0, upgrades to core apps such as mail, addresss book, etc.)
Timeframe: no way will it be released this year. Figure Jan/Feb 07 at earliest (I may live to eat these words!)
Garbage collection in Obj-c!
Improvements to Core Video/Audio/Graphics/Data. Quartz 2D extreme (whatever its called) officially turned on
Virtualization: no big news here. Parallels type solution (perhaps) or boot camp but nothing radically new
XCode 3.0 -- A nice incremental upgrade.
Dashcode is finally announced (even though it ships with macbooks!)

-John

One of those days (in a good way)

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-07-29T23:27:28-07:00

Or sometimes the bread falls butter side up. I'm down in

A few new things

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-07-13T22:02:32-07:00

I've been playing with a few different projects recently... I thought it was time to point them out to anyone who reads this (which, you know, including my mom is two people)

I've added a handy google search bar to let you search the content of the web site. Go forth and Google!
I've begun to play with Javascript a little bit. I've honestly never spent much time with it but it's sort of fun and there are some cute things you can do with it. For example you can look here to see a small script that opens your flickr photos in an external page
Thirdly, I've released a plug in for iMediaBrowser that adds your delicious bookmarks to the browser. It's not complete and this version will time out in early August (I just want to make sure everyone gets the final version) but give it a spin if you like. One caution: Due to the way the RealMac guys implemented the browser it doesn't work in RapidWeaver but it does work fine in Sandvox and in anything else that uses this fine media browser
Finally, I've been playing with Sandvox API. It's really nicely done and you can do quite a bit fairly easily. My first effort is a plugin that adds a new pagelet type "Google Related"

Markdown

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-07-02T22:54:19-07:00

I've been playing with John Gruber's Markdown syntax a bit recently. It seems like a pretty slick solution a number of problems with writing for the web. What I like about it best is how it sort of 'just does the right thing' (from my point of view). The input text is how *I* would write it and the output is about what I would expect. Of course it's not very Maccish. Sort of more unixy in feel but I wonder how many people think it's a interesting way to write web pages. If you are intrigued let me know!

Win Every plugin in existance

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-06-21T22:52:50-07:00

Want to own every RW plugin in existance? Here is your chance

Tired but back

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-06-16T15:21:09-07:00

Well to say it was a whirlwind trip is a bit of an understatement, I always enjoy Japan but was it ever muggy on this trip. You wake up in the morning take a shower and never really get dry the rest of the day! I've had a lot of email in the past days and while I've tried to keep up it's been tough. If you sent me a note and I haven't responded feel free to ping me again.

Japan

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-06-12T06:47:29-07:00

Hi All, I'm in Japan for a few days -- It's a reallly short trip ( think I almost spend more time in the Airplane than I do in the entire Country) but it does mean that if you have any questions I may not be able to respond back until I return (Friday, California time) and possibly I won't be in any shape to respond Friday either!

Rapidflickr

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-06-09T23:06:51-07:00

I pushed out a new version of RapidFlickr tonight. 1.1 adds the nifty 'Lighbox V2' effect. You can see it in action here or here. While I think I got all of the rendering code correct I did have to make a lot of changes so please tell me if something looks broken. To see the effect click on one of the pictures from the above link, you can hit 'n' and 'p' to go to next and previous picture.

RapidWeaver Rocks. Plugins at a discount Rock even more

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-06-01T23:17:08-07:00

Well by the time you read this RapidWeaver 3.5 should have been released. It's a great release that really adds some awesome features. I've been playing with it for a few weeks now and I'm happy to report that all plugins available from Loghound.com that end with a 'u' are compatible with RW 3.5 (they are also compatible with RW 3.2) To celebrate the release of RW3.5 I've teamed up with YourHead software with a special offer. For 35 hours all plugins are 35% off. This is a special offer that will likely never be repeated so if you have ever considered buying any extra plugins from either my site or YourHead Today is a great time.

New Plugins

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-29T21:07:54-07:00

Hello All, As I prepare for RW 3.5 I've been relatively happy with the effort required. For the most part once you get the hang of the changes they just tend to 'work'. Tonight I spent a bit of time rethinking icons. My old icons were OK but I was never really happy with them (except for Lockdown which suited me just fine). in a ichat session with nik today he made two terrific suggestions for new icons (Compass for Sitemap and the little rotating balls for RapidFlickr). For Rapidflickr Nik even went ahead and designed it for me! I think they all look pretty good given the constraints of 16x16... What do you think?

No Monkey Business

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-29T13:28:10-07:00

I've just built up a new version of MediaMonkey Not too much changed except it now has a 'u' at the end. This version should work a bit better in more recent versions of RapidWeaver

Rapidflickr working (sort of)

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-29T00:26:44-07:00

Worked some on improving my build system so now all of my DMG's should properly show background images. Also cleaned up Rapidflickr, it now renders the same way in both 3.2 and 3.5. There is a new option called "Fit Pictures" in the output section. This isn't 100% functional yet.

More Universal Plugins

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-27T23:34:15-07:00

Ok, I'm pushing out a few new version. These still need work (specifically Rapidflickr) before I put out a release suitable for a broad announcement but for a few brave early adopters they can 'go to town' Changes from the last release: 1) Sitemap & Lockdown were PPC only 2) Rapidflickr was broken horribly in 3.5. I've done a quick fix but it's ugly. Expect something nicer soon but at least for now it will render out cleaner. Rapidflickr 1.02u Sitemap 0.91u Lockdown 1.53u

Universally Good

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-24T19:59:43-07:00

Hi All, I've put a few new builds of plugins on my server. You can get them Lockdown 1.52u RapidFlickr 1.01u SiteMap 0.9u You should be able to guess what the 'u' is, They should work in Rapid weaver 3.2 and 'future releases' so go ahead and grab them now if you like.

New Toy Plugin

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-19T00:05:21-07:00

I Just put a new plugin on my server. It's really a toy and honestly most of you should avoid it like the plague. I call it Media Monkey and it simply adds a imedia browser to any styled text in RapidWeaver -- This is the same iLife browser that SandVox uses. It's not really tested that well and it may well crash RapidWeaver so if you really want to play with it (again, you are kind of crazy if you do) I'd first use it on some 'toy' sites before considering leaving it on your system. To remove it delete the MediaMonkey plugin from your ~Library/Application Support/RapidWeaver directory You have been warned. You can get it Here

random thoughts

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-16T23:35:35-07:00

Well it's been quite a day -- I've been meaning to do some really well thought out, nice blogs since that hasn't been happening I thought I would throw out a few random thoughts. First of all the fine folks at Apple released the Macbook. I must say I'm fairly impressed at the features & price point. Isaiah purchased a 17" MBP which he loves and while I'm totally jealous of it, I've really been looking for something small & portable. I'll run down to the Apple store tomorrow but if they have them in stock I might be coming home with one -- The only bummer is the graphics chipset is kind of cheesy (Intel 950) but I do love that small size! Also the fine folks at Flickr updated their web interface. Really nice... It's always been the killer online photosite and know it's even better! Combined with RapidFlickr this is a great way to share photos. I've also been working a bit on RapidBlog. It had become moribund but recently I've picked it up and made some steady progress... Still a ways to go and I'm not going to make any estimates at this point since I've been spectacular at missing them but it may see light of day some day. Finally, I really need to talk briefly about Palm OS vs. Pocket PC. I recently purchased a Dell AXIM X51V which I mostly use for reading e-books. Great hardware but the software...

Lockdown now in German

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-10T23:12:02-07:00

Famous last words "It certainly took longer than I thought" That sort of describes my attempts at providing Lockdown in German. I've thought it would be fun (yes fun) to make a localized plugin. "No problem" I thought "First I need to find someone who actually speaks German" Enter Marc Widmer who is from Switzerland where everyone (apparently) speaks about 5 different languages. "Ok, now how do I actually do this" Enter ilocalize which is also from a couple of brothers who are, curiously, also from Switzerland and who have a company called "Arizona Software" which, in case you are wondering, is not at all close to Switzerland. "Great... Let's see just type in the german words where the english words, hit save ... ok that should be it" .... Hmmm.. still in english ... Hmmm Read more docs from apple where they say things like "You don't have to do anything really... it's all automatic" Hmmmm.... (Each Hmmm is several weeks passing) So I finally sat down and got it working... It's not pretty folks. You see the fine folks at apple never actually considered (as far as I can tell) that an application may not be localize but a plugin may. Stubbornly once OSX decides you are a non localized app in English it never reconsiders. Why do I share this interesting bit of trivia? Well it's a warning, I may at some point in the future drop German localization if it becomes too painful but in the meantime if you put "German" before "English" in your system preferences enjoy

Macbook & Sitemap 0.90

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-05-09T00:09:27-07:00

Rumor has it (or at least had it) that Apple releases the new MacBook (non-pro) tuesday (which as I write is now today!) Even though I keep on eyeing the 'pro' version the fact is my iMac works great in my day-to-day life, what I do need though is something for Intel testing as well as traveling. If the price is right and the feature set isn't too crippled the ~~intel iBook~~ MacBook may be just the ticket. Oh, and i just put Sitemap 0.90 up on the server. It fixes Google & Yahoo sitemap export (previously if a page was hidden they didn't show up in the search index).

Rockets and warm Northern California weekends

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-30T22:29:31-07:00

So I've been working on German localization of Lockdown.. Turns out it's harder than you would think to localize a plugin when the main app is not localized, however it's taking me much longer than normal to get this complete. The reason? The weather. It's been a really beautiful warm weekend here in Northern California and we've had friends over for dinner, bar-b-que's etc so instead of pounding on objective-c code I've, well, had a bit of a life. Take rockets.. My 4 year old son and I have been working on a little project to make water rockets out of 2 liter bottles of soda, this weekend was so nice that we were outside most of the time and spent a lot of time working on it. The result? We've been flinging 2 liter soda bottles all over the neighborhood, I took a video of him launching one of the bottles and extracted a photo (below). In this photo I extracted from the video you can see the bottle mid flight and if you look closely you can see the water spray as it ejects water. I did the math (looking at the bottle as it traverses the frame) and it's at 25km/h (16 mph) and accelerating as it leaves the top of the frame (not bad for a used soda bottle and bicycle pump)

Longhound

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-27T22:03:57-07:00

My friend Nik pointed out today that I got another TUAW mention (that's two in April!) for GoogleFill. Nice enough of the TUAW folks except they called me "Longhound" which is substantially different that "Loghound" But you may wonder, gentle reader, what exactly is a Loghound, and how I come across this canine handle. The answer (as is often the case) is quite boring. Back in the darks ages of the internet I could get accounts and email addresses with things like, well, "John". In fact until 1998 I was known as "john@hp.com" (totally true!) but then something happened. "John" was harder and harder to find so I switched to "johnmcl" for things like hotmail, forum's, etc. which worked for a year or two but about 2000 that stopped working also and I was often given the choice of login or account names like "john_47" which didn't really suit me because I wasn't 47 and even if I was that would only be a temporary condition. So one night I was logged in and trying to set up a account (I forget for what) and I started my usual list "john" - Nope "Johnmcl" - Nope "john_mclaughlin" - Nope "John_F_McLaughlin" - Nope "ccrjohn" - Nope! (this was my email at college) I was in a panic with the idea of forever being known as something like "john_47" and as I sat there I looked down and saw my keyboard which was made by Logitech and I thought "Log" and then I thought about a movie I had seen earlier that day and I thought "Hound Dog" -- Ah Ha! "Loghounddog" but my plan was foiled when the site complained about the length of the name so i shortened it to "loghound" and It's been with me ever since.

Universal Binaries

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-23T08:06:46-07:00

I was on a tear last night moving to Universal Binaries. First of all, PorDiBle the open source convert to palm doc format that I maintain is now universal Binary. Secondly some, ahem, other-projects-that-I-can't-discuss-3.5-plugins were ported to universal binary. Initially nothing seemed to work and I was in a fair panic but once I actually sat down and calmly read the docs it was as Steve described... you more or less select both i386 and ppc and hit compile -- Kind of amazing. Of course I can't actually test the universal binaries but maybe I should get something to fix that problem (for testing purposes only of course)

Sitemap 0.84 -- Finally

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-19T00:35:34-07:00

Sitemap 0.84 is finally up (in the download newest tab)... Lots of improvements but also lots of internal changes and limited testing so I've also kept 0.83 up (in the download stable tab) Change Log is here...

SiteMap 0.84 (again)

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-18T00:09:07-07:00

Well I had really hoped to get sitemap 0.84 out tonight but it's not going to happen. Progress has been a little slow mostly because of the Easter Holiday (Relatives in town) as well as in the US April 14 is 'Tax Day' (e.g. you need to figure out and pay taxes). Needless to say I've been scrambling the last few days gathering receipts! I actually have a build that seems to work (mostly) fine but I've not had enough testing and i really don't want to subject people to quite yet. Hopefully I can get 0.84 out Tuesday evening (California time)

Sitemap 0.84

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-15T14:44:32-07:00

I've gotten a lot of great feedback and suggestions on SiteMap that I'm working on for a 0.84 release. One of the ideas I'm playing with is a better way to document your web site. I've hooked up the ability to create some pretty nice documentation via OmniGraffle & OmniOutliner... These examples took a few button clicks and then a slight amount of tweaking.... I have no idea if there is any interest or not.... What do you guys think? Let me know

Sitemap 0.82

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-10T23:10:40-07:00

Thanks to everyone who has tried SiteMap and given great feedback... Although it works well I hope we can work out the last few niggling details soon. Speaking of which we are on the usual beta per day roller coaster (in this case two beta's per day) I discovered a performance problem where a SiteMap could slow down the editing of your page (it was how I handle notifications of changes).... Version 0.82 is on the server and should fix this. I wouldn't have put one out so soon except for on very large sites it could cause a noticeable delay when editing pages.

Sitemaps again

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-08T02:26:01-07:00

It's pretty fun to map out your site.... There are lots of opinions on the internet for how to do it best... For instance some people like the good ol tree view Other folks prefer alphabetical or even by category What do you prefer? Do you have a favorite?

Sitemap

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-06T00:42:45-07:00

There is a new feature on my page. I have a site map now... It wasn't as hard to generate as you might think.

TUAW mention

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-04T14:42:31-07:00

Rapidflickr got a nice mention at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (or TUAW as it's known to its friends). http://www.tuaw.com/2006/04/03/publish-flickr-images-to-rapidweaver-with-rapidflickr/ The great thing is that they used it in a way that I never considered but it works out to be a pretty neat solution. If you've tried Rapidflickr and want to purchase a registration to get all of the features I've set up a 10% off coupon to sweeten the deal. Simply use TUAWRPDFLKR at checkout to get your 10% off (note the coupon is limited use so when it runs out it's done)

Lockdown 1.5

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-04-01T22:24:51-08:00

I'm back from Vegas. It's an interesting town -- it's hard for me to say "I recommend it" since honestly I don't care for it that much but if you have never been you should see it at least once. The real upside is instead of heading to Germany next week (Which was my original plan) I'm staying home. This is a really good thing. Nothing against Germany but I've been traveling a lot recently (I'm in Monterey right now) and I'm looking forward to a few quiet days at home. I just put Lockdown 1.5 final up on the server. I've had no problems with b2 and there are only a few minor changes. If you haven't tried it now is the time as it has some nice improvements over Lockdown 1.1

Vegas Baby!

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-25T23:37:11-08:00

Yes, I'm headed to Vegas. And no, it's not to feed my gambling habit or to partake in other 'Adult' activities. It's actually for work (Day Job). Apparently you can get really cheap conference centers & hotels and we are having a largish internal meeting with our field organization. They are sending me as an Expert from R&D to help answer questions, etc. Upshot to anyone who reads this blog is I'll be away from mac-land (my mac is not portable... Something I hope to fix very soon!) but I'm only gone for a few days (Sunday - Tuesday) so it's not a large trip. In the meantime I'll probably snap a few pictures with my horrible cell phone camera. You can monitor my progress here as I wend my way through Disneyland for Adults.

Rapidflickr 1.0 - Crazy Delicious

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-24T12:02:45-08:00

After a seemingly endless stream of Beta releases I'm happy to announce the release of Rapidflickr 1.0 This release is very similar to 0.9.3b7 with a small number of changes that honestly I doubt anyone will notice. As I've mentioned previously this plugin is really a labor of love so I'm pretty excited to be able to call this 1.0. The next 'big' thing for Rapidflickr is new output styles... I've been doing some research on different types of albums/gallery's/etc and I've got some ideas.... To celebrate I've set up a coupon CPN4934344478 which provides a limited number of 10% off any order at loghound.com (e.g. you can use it for rapidflickr or lockdown). If you have 0.9.3b7 then no urgent need to get 1.0 but feel free to grab it if you like. Get all of the 1.0 goodness here As always change notes are here

Lockdown beta 1 of version 1.5 is here

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-24T00:04:19-08:00

Hi All, As promised here is beta 1 of version 1.5 (download). While it seems to work OK for me it probably still has some problems (I don't know of anything mind you... It's just I made a lot of changes and my own testing has been limited). I'm only going to announce this on my blog (for now) For those brave souls who want to feel free to give it a try. I'm especially curious for the following: 1) Password Expiration.. Does it work for you? 2) Error page redirects 3) Import of version 1.1. Especially if you used the page redirect feature of version 1.1 4) GUI & Wording.... . I'm not crazy about what I called some things (Error Pages?) and some of the new gui elements. Any input here would be great If all goes smoothly I'll probably get the Localization started by Saturday (started == requests out to folks to begin localization with a list of strings to be localized) I'm going to Las Vegas this Sunday for my "Day" Job (don't even ask... you wouldn't believe it if I told you...)

Lockdown version 1.5

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-22T23:45:33-08:00

Version '1.5' of lockdown is well underway... This should bring some neat new features...... I'll probably have the beta out in a few days but here is a sneak preview (In case you are wondering.. "Error Occured" is a page in my RW document... The SW is not saying one occured just to redirecet to the page called "Error Occured" so to speak) This shows off the two big changes... You can now 'expire' passwords after a length of time and you can now set the error document (e.g. what should happen if file isn't found or bad username/password) I am also hoping to get French & German localizations. Probably not in the first beta but hopefully before final release (and if you contacted me regarding translations don't worry... I still haven't gotten back to anyone. I'm going to figure out the localization process first and then get back to people on the actual translation -Jm

0.9.3b7

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-17T20:32:44-08:00

The crazy parade of Rapidflickr releases continue. I just put up 0.9.3b7 which mostly just fixes HTML rendering. I've spent a LOT of time on rapidflickr recently and the rate of change will probably slow down a lot for a while since I've been ignoring rapidblog. If 0.9.3b7 doesn't have any major problems I'll probably call this 'version 1.0'. When I first started Rapidflickr I had a few ideas of what I wanted. * Robust (e.g. it makes it hard to make a mistake) * Easy to use & predictable (e.g. hide the complexity of the flickr web services API, PHP, etc.) * Support .mac (e.g. provide for semi-static pages) * Support live updates (e.g. allow for a dynamic web page that's always up to date) In fact I'm willing to share 'loghound.com' super-secret design documents... This is pretty much what I started with with when I was first trying to pull together this plugin... In looking through it I'm pretty happy with how close the final product is (in truth, the final product is I think better than I captured here) View the vision here (warning 1MB) It's taken me longer than I expected but it's been really satisfying -- Thanks to everyone for all of the support. Don't get me wrong, I'm not done developing it I'm just enjoying getting (very) close to this major milestone.

A story of releases

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-15T22:32:56-08:00

I hate the release process of software. Mind you I like actually developing software and talking to people about it, getting feedback and improving it but the process of releasing it I hate. It takes much longer than it should and I'm always worried that something was broken in the process. The worst however is that feeling when you put something up and hold your breath for 8 hours to see if you made some huge mistake. I almost did that last night. I made a 0.9.3b6 and put it up and then started doing a bit more testing before bed (and posting to the forums that it was up) Horrible! So many things were broken I didn't know where to start, it was late, I was tired and i was dreading re-releasing it. So I took it down, put an explanation in the change log and went to sleep. Of course the problem was very simple and in fact a classic C mistake. I had a check and instead of using '==' to test for equality I had used '='. The check was part of my continued zealous hunt for adding error checking but it happened at a spot that had a lot of 'bad' consequences. Anyway I'm happy to report that a proper 0.9.3b6 is up on the server. This one seems pretty solid but like i said earlier there are a LOT of changes so more so than most this one could have problems (although I think it's pretty clean at this point) I've also put together a 'fun page' of rapidflickr ideas. If you have an idea or if you use rapidflickr in a fun or interesting way send me a note and I'll add you to the list.

0.9.3b6

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-14T23:56:38-08:00

Hot on the heels of 0.9.3b5 is 0.9.3b6.... out so quick because (as I feared) I found some problems with overzealous error checking.

0.9.3b5

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-13T23:24:18-08:00

I just put 0.9.3b5 on up on the server, you can get it by going to change log here I'm not going to announce it widely at this point... only for folks who frequent my blog and are brave enough to risk running it. This ended up being a big update... Externally not much has changed but a lot amount of internal code clean up. I think it's all work works fine (in all of my test cases it's fine) but I really want a few of you adventurous souls to try it out and report back thumbs up or thumbs down before I announce it on the Forum. Changes: * Group Support... To use groups click on the 'Flickr Username' pulldown... if you have authenticated with rapidflickr and have groups they show up in this pull down to select. you can narrow your group search via tags if you like -- Of course this works with live updates also * Preview Pane now work after a 'load' -- Previously the preview pane was only functional if you started a new pane. Now it will work after you load a saved file (but it won't actually show anything until you change something so load an old file and then change something such as authentication on/off or tags or selected group, etc.) -- It's still not working like I want but it's closer * on-line detection. I now detect if your computer is online or not. It works fine for me and detects if I unplug lan cable, etc. but PLEASE tell me if rapidflickr reports it can't connect (for fun you can get off the network and see this working) * Improved error checking.. I try harder to catch & detect errors from both user & Flickr. * Dirty Bit is now set if you change things like # of columns, etc. * Improved error messages (I think improved anyway)

0.9.3b5 & group support

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-13T00:28:59-08:00

I have group support working so now you can view photos via Groups. They can be public, private, invite only and you can even narrow your search via tags within a group (or leave tags empty and get the 'N' most recent groups) -- of course groups work with lives updates -- The only restriction is you can only view groups you've subscribed to (I think this should be OK?) However I don't have 0.9.3b5 up on the server yet... Group support which I did as 'a quickie' turned into a massive amount of changes partially due to the fact that groups act strangely different than the other elements of flickr and partly to the fact that I, personally, never use groups much so I didn't do a good job initially planning for it. Consequently I've had to make a HUGE number of internal changes, a good part of it was much needed maintaince so I can't completely blame groups but the result is it's late and although it seems to be working well, I really haven' tested it enough (and it's getting very late where I live) so I decided to let it 'sit' for another 24 hours before I unleash it on the public. The good thing is I found a number of potential problems that are now (I hope) no longer issues AND I've continued to improve error handling AND I've fixed a major worry I've had since 0.5 -- How do you handle a situation where a person isn't on the network? Now rapidflickr detects if you don't have a network connection and recovers gracefully (e.g. it tells you "can't connect to flickr")... Great for folks editing their sites with a laptop away from a wlan hotspot. I've put an example of groups here, it's the RapidWeaver users group... Look for 0.9.3b5 about 11:00PM california time/Monday.

Step into Xcode

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-11T19:10:31-08:00

I just received a book last friday, Step Into Xcode, if you are a Mac developer or considering being a Mac developer this is one of the two 'must have' books... The other book is, of course, the classic Cocoa programming for Mac OS X. I love collecting programming books but sadly on the mac most of them are either fairly obtuse, or try to hard to be funny (but really aren't) These two are the Crown Jems of beginning mac programming. The Author keeps a nice weblog here which so far makes good reading. My favorite tip so far out of this book? Accessorizer, Makes some of the tedious parts of Mac OSX development in Objective C go away.. Wish I had know about this 6 months ago!

Update

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-10T23:31:20-08:00

First a rapidblog update... Progress has been slow for several reasons not the least of which Is I think I caught Nik's cold from across the pond. I'm still inching along but I refuse to continue to put out estimates of the first public beta. Now a Lockdown update. Just put 1.1 up, download it here and see the change log here.... This fixes an annoying problem I was getting about once every two weeks where someone was able to get the password prompt but the password was never accepted. Turns out in some cases I wasn't pointing to the password file correctly. I also took this opportunity to fix up some error handling & messages. Finally a rapidflickr update. This continues to soak up a lot of my time... It's sort of a labor of love for me at this point... The number of people who are heavy flickr users & rapidweaver users isn't so big but I just enjoy the idea of this plugin so much I can't stop adding features. On dock is Group support and a modified 'lightbox' effect to make it seem a bit, well, mac like plus a few other misc bug fixes & clean ups (Sadly, group support has turned into a bit more work than i expected as they don't function like other parts of Flickr... Look for a new version later this weekend)

0.9.3b4

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-07T11:06:59-08:00

Just put 0.9.3b4 up. Thanks to the persistence of Nik & Seb I've tracked down a number of nasty little problems that were keeping some folks from having the live updates working properly. If you've tried it in the last few days and not gotten live updates to work try this release. It should be much more robust! Change log as always is here Note, you may have to 'clear publishing cache' in order to pick up the changes in this version (not sure about that but if you have problems give it a try) you can do this from the 'file' menu in Rapidweaver

Rapidflickr 0.93b3

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-06T21:51:51-08:00

Newest version fixes some 'small' problems.. See change log for details

Back in front of my mac, Rapidflickr 0.93b1 with live updates!

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-03-05T00:30:34-08:00

Hello All, I'm back from Japan... I always enjoy it there but it was a pretty busy trip so I'm glad to be home. On the airplane ride home I started thinking about live updates for Rapidflickr. You see when I first imagined this plugin I originally only imagined a 'live' version... It was after I thought about the headache of supporting a non static page (plus the folks on .mac) that made me do the static version first. Anyway I've been putting this off for too long. I'm happy to announce 0.93b1 (I know, I went from 0.92b2 to 0.93b1 without ever releasing a 0.92 final!) Change log is here but the biggest thing you will notice is that it now supports live updates, this is very, very cool since now you can throw up a page and say things like "Show my top 10 most interesting pictures" and as you add it will always show the most interesting. Or you can show your most recent (by upload date or taken date)... It also works with authentication so if you want to show private pictures it'll do that. There are a few things that are not working..... Most notably the newly introduced photosets (they'll be in there for the next beta) and also the cool drop shadow effect is broken (I know why, I just don't know how to fix it yet) I'd like to get some feedback before posting on the rapidweaver forums so if you are reading this and you have a registration code go ahead and download all of the live updating goodness here Remember please give me feedback... I'm not especially happy with my GUI choices for enabling the live updates (check box tossed at the bottom of screen... There has to be a better spot or way) Any suggestions are welcome. Also it should work pretty well (not withstanding the comments above) so if you see anything funny let me know!

Off to Japan

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-25T23:41:49-08:00

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

Rapidflickr 0.9.2b2

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-24T22:43:43-08:00

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)

Rapidflickr 0.9.2 is here (sort of)

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-24T00:01:51-08:00

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.

Rapidflickr 0.9.2 coming...

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-22T23:51:16-08:00

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.

Rapidblog Update

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-20T23:28:56-08:00

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.

Speak French or German?

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-18T22:47:02-08:00

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

I've never localized a Mac app before (ok, I can probably figure this out easily enough)
I don't speak French
I don't speak German

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

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
Is interested in helping make Lockdown better by providing it in those languages
Is willing to help update the localization as I add new features
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

Why I'm now a Mac guy, part 1

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-18T14:25:26-08:00

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.

Steady Progress

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-10T23:12:31-08:00

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.

A Breakthrough

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-08T22:58:56-08:00

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

Lockdown 1.0b3

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-06T09:08:22-08:00

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.

Introducing Lockdown

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-02-01T15:37:53-08:00

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

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-28T00:17:18-08:00

Hot on the heels of 0.9 is 0.9.1.. Defect Fixes: * The CSS style sheet always forced a white background * The preview pane wasn't always working (and in fact it still doesn't always work... this may have to go eventally) * Some spelling mistakes fixed Enhancements: * You can now choose to sort by many more factors "Relevance", "Interesting" "Date Taken" or "Date Uploaded". The free version only let's you sort by Date Taken * You can now pick the size of the picture to 'lightbox" * You can now restrict date search either by "Date Taken" or "Date Uploaded" Known Problems * Archiving has a few problems... I need to redo the way I save data, I'll do it in a way so all of your current pages still work. * Preview pane doesn't work sometimes for what appears to be random reasons, I'm using the webkit engine and I always feed it the data but it stops sometimes... Get it here Enjoy

Difference between 0.9 and 0.7? .2!

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-25T22:05:13-08:00

I'm so excited to release version 0.9 of my rapidflickr plugin... get all the flickr+rapidweaver goodness information here I know I've been talking about 0.7 but I spent so long getting it out and in testing it was working so well I decided to call it 0.9 Why 0.9 and not 1.0? Basically I've not had as much feedback on the advanced features as I'd like so I wanted to get it out there and see what the community thought first..

Case Insensitive Compare -- Avoid it like a swarm of angry bees

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-24T10:22:59-08:00

So 0.7 continues to be 'just a few days away'... I've been working on some slick slideshow features that have required me to work with photosets. Everything was going well until I started running into 'invalid signature' problems. You see when you make authenticated calls to flickr there is a particular method to creating the calls. Part of that mechanism is to create a 'signature' (basically a MD5 sum) of the arguments including a 'secret key'. It's actually kind of a slick system as it provides secure access without having to give out your flickr username & passwd. I've had authentication working for quite a while but when i tried to use photosets (which require authentication since I'm creating & adding photos to them) it didn't work and complained about 'invalid signature' Thankfully I got help from another cocoa/flickr developer (Blake Seely) who eventually pointed out my problem, I was ordering the arguments wrong. "How can this be" I thought "I'm using the standard NSString compare functions"... Well not exactly, you see I was using 'caseInsensitiveCompare' not 'compare'. The arguments to photoset include both photo_id and photoset_id. Guess what? Turns out that case insensitive compare sorts them one way and 'compare' the other which was the cause of my signature problem. It was strange to me until i looked at the ascii chart: 0 nul 1 soh 2 stx 3 etx 4 eot 5 enq 6 ack 7 bel 8 bs 9 ht 10 nl 11 vt 12 np 13 cr 14 so 15 si 16 dle 17 dc1 18 dc2 19 dc3 20 dc4 21 nak 22 syn 23 etb 24 can 25 em 26 sub 27 esc 28 fs 29 gs 30 rs 31 us 32 sp 33 ! 34 " 35 # 36 $ 37 % 38 & 39 ' 40 ( 41 ) 42 * 43 + 44 , 45 - 46 . 47 / 48 0 49 1 50 2 51 3 52 4 53 5 54 6 55 7 56 8 57 9 58 : 59 ; 60 < 61 = 62 > 63 ? 64 @ 65 A 66 B 67 C 68 D 69 E 70 F 71 G 72 H 73 I 74 J 75 K 76 L 77 M 78 N 79 O 80 P 81 Q 82 R 83 S 84 T 85 U 86 V 87 W 88 X 89 Y 90 Z 91 [ 92 \ 93 ] 94 ^ 95 _ 96 ` 97 a 98 b 99 c 100 d 101 e 102 f 103 g 104 h 105 i 106 j 107 k 108 l 109 m 110 n 111 o 112 p 113 q 114 r 115 s 116 t 117 u 118 v 119 w 120 x 121 y 122 z 123 { 124 | 125 } 126 ~ 127 del Yup, there it is... at 95 the '_' character, right between uppercase and lowercase. Lesson learned

rapidblog in the works

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-23T09:04:24-08:00

I've gotten a lot of email recently about rapid blog.... Just let me say it's in the works. Basically it will allow you to edit/manage a blog from either rapidweaver OR remotely through a web interface. Either way you will get the nice rapidweaver page layout. My goal is a public beta before Valentines Day (February 14)

Back from Germany

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-22T13:29:26-08:00

Hello All, I've been in Germany for my 'Day Job' this last week... Now that I'm back I should be able to start doing the work to finish up version 0.7... I usually don't bring a camera with me for business trips but my 4 year old was very insistent that he wanted to see 'Pictures of me' so I brought it and snapped a few pics.... It ended up being pretty fun, below are a few pics Greg & I Enjoying some brew On the manufacturing Floor.. German Bagels!!

No 0.7 for at about a week

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-14T21:30:18-08:00

Hello All Sorry but 0.7 will be delayed a week. I've been sick the last few days and I'm heading to Europe (sans mac) for my 'day job'. I have a candidate release but it really hasn't been tested enough to release yet... hopefully next sunday. However let me share a recent build screen shot See the pictures to the right? That's the live preview.. I'm not 100% sure this feature will make the final release but I'm playing with it (the feature works fine, I'm just getting worried about the UI getting too cluttered). It is sort of slick that as you are changing things this little window is updating in near real time. Any thoughts? Let me know loghound @ gmail . com Regards -jm

version 0.7

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-12T00:10:14-08:00

Version 0.7 of rapidflickr is close to release..... Hopefully by Saturday evening... If not it will have to wait since I'll be out of the country starting sunday for a week.. Biggest changes include authentication, new visuals (lightbox & drop shadow effect) and registration (sorry) I may not have the purchasing system online yet and in that event I'll just give out a SN that will unlock all of the features (until about mid feb). If you prefer to only use 'free' features just don't enter the SN and the features that are enabled will always be free.

Hey, how did you do that?

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-08T00:39:59-08:00

So I'm going to macworld in a few days and I'm sooooo excited. Isaiah was laughing at me because I'm geeking out even more than he is. Right now my plan is to be there tuesday & wednesday (sadly I can't stay through thursday because I need to get some work done at my day job) So I was thinking it would be fun to set up a blog of what I see & do, and since I own a fine Treo 650 phone I can pretty easily take pictures, add a little text (using the surprisingly good keyboard) and then mail them out. in order to make it somehow cohesive I put a seperate blog for macworld '06 coverage here and I'll send updates via my phone throughout the day. Right now it just has a few pics of my kids as I was testing the service..... "But wait" you say "How can this be? Your new blog is a Rapidweaver blog and we all know that you can't remotely manage them. You have to be on the original computer that made the web page to add entries is that so? Funny.. I was able to send emails to have the blog automatically update and I'm able to edit it online and I'm able to create new posts away from my mac, but it sure looks like a native RW page... If I change themes then it updates properly... For instance compare this and this. Same exact blog but different themes applied without any other changes! (edit 1/21/06 the e-mail link below has been disabled but trust me, it works) Hey, maybe you can try it. Send e-mail to loghound.test_macworld@blogger.com and then refresh this or this page... Hmmm too bad someone hasn't made a plug in to enable this in an really easy way.......

A new feature on display

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-07T00:05:31-08:00

Well I was originally going to have my next version out before Macworld but for a couple of reasons (including my concern over what Apple introduces in the way of iWeb) I may not make it However I do have a teaser.... What new feature am I showing here but I'm not showing here? It really shouldn't be that hard to notice (and the fact that the pictures on the two pages are different sizes has nothing to do with it) Let me give you a hint. It's a feature that makes viewing 'gallery' type pages like this much more enjoyable... You sort of don't lose your place in the gallery. Another hint. in the blog entry from yesterday you can see the new option in the GUI. (scroll down a bit to look at some of the new options) Think you know it? Email me at loghound @ gmail . com

Let's clean it up for the kids

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-05T23:02:28-08:00

Ok, day two of my blog (well technically it's day 3 since I skipped yesterday). Some big news today, the 'rumor' sites were saying that a new iLife app, 'iWeb' is to be released at macworld next week. Depending on what Apple actually does it could be very, very bad for RapidWeaver Let's take a look at the three scenarios, shall we?

Apple puts out a doggy version 1.0 app that only works with .mac -> Possibly this is actually good for RW (get folks interested in the idea of their own web page but leave em wanting more)
Apple puts out a decent app, (based on pages) and charges < $35 for it -> Probably this is the death of RW
Apple puts out a decent app, bundles it with iLife -> This is the death of RW

Not too optimistic am I, only way RW survives in any meaningful way is if apple either doesn't do it or they flub it... Before we get in a panic let's see what they do next week. Now on to a more fun topic. rapidflickr The nice thing about how I did this app was the technology preview/beta has a ton of 'infrastracture' work complete meaning to add new features I just need to start 'hooking stuff up' in a fairly small way For instance.... Yes that's right... I have authenticated searches working... and they work great. Now you can create a photo page of any of your photos (public or private) I'm also working on a bunch of new styles This (hopefully) won't be the Final ui... It's more of a playground right now for me but you can see what version 1.0 will look like. Any comments or suggestions?

It's not half ass... It's whole ass!

loghound@gmail.com — 2006-01-03T23:35:32-08:00

Ok, I know it... I need a blog... Truth be told I'm so busy on working on rapidflickr that I really haven't had time to things such as update the web page... make it look halfway decent, etc. So it occurs to me tonight that even though this is a 'half ass' (no, no, it's really a whole ass) it probably makes sense to get SOMETHING out there as opposed to NOTHING... So this is what you are seeing... First a thanks: Let me start out by publicly thanking Isaiah Carew for all of the great help he's given me so far... My plugin development days would not be nearly as far along without his help.. Now on to an update Let's talk about rapidflickr... So far the response has been quite nice, several hundred downloads but I've yet to receive an email about a problem or bug... I suppose my first public beta release was so bullet proof that no one has a problem or (just perhaps) people aren't using it? I suppose upon reflection that the market for this plugin could be quite small. Basically the intersection of flickr users & rapidweaver users. I'm hopeful that with some of the new features in the works this plugin will increase that set of people.