Thankful for PHP

I know PHP like the back of my head. And know enough Python to write a desktop application in it. But recently had the urge to try C++ again. I really recommend http://www.cplusplus.com/ to anyone who wants to learn C++. It’s a great learning resource.

But back to the main topic. Until you’ve done some programming in another language like C, you cannot truly appreciate how easy it is to write PHP code. The C++ syntax is the same in a lot of ways, but yet a lot more complicated. For example you have to declare each variable, constant, class, and function. And I have never used Pointers before either.
Everything is so strict–although that is a good thing–it makes it hard to write code when you are not familiar with all of the C++ syntax.
So having now written a wxWidgets application in C++ using Xcode I can say that I am thankful, truly thankful for the relative simplicity of PHP.

And no I don’t want to try assembly next

Starting to Learn C++ Again

Triggered by more problems with the Mac OS X FlightGear application because of of the fact I used Python and the fact that I only know scripting languages. I have once again started to learn C++.

Hopefully it will go better this time and in the future I may actually be able to do some really good stuff.
I’m also learning wxWidgets while I’m at it.

Another Small Side Project

I’ve been working on a different project for the past two days. I got a little tired of ACal.

This project involves XML, templates, and web sites. Well almost everything I do involves the web.
Anyway I’m working on a system which stores all web site data in an XML format, caches it, and loads it when needed. This is all loaded into a template and served as a web page. Or pages.

It’s kind of neat actually and I expect it to work nicely. A nice little content management system.

I do not like time zones or DST!

I’ve been trying to add support for different time zones in ACal 3 for the past two days and what’s the result? Nothing that works as expected.

I’ve read some tutorials and articles on time zones in PHP but to no avail. It’s just too complicated for my little mind

Actually I’ve hardly worked on it for an hour so far. I need to work out a reliable algorithm within the next few days.

But then there’s daylight savings time which is even worse because of the really great inconsistency.
But you can be sure I will not work on anything else until this is done.

Much more work in ACal 3

Much more work needs to be done before ACal is a viable alternative to other popular calendar apps.
Today I’ve got the new preference pane system working well and have started redoing the time and date system so that we can allow user defined timezones instead of always using the system default.
And while I’m at all the time bugs should be fixed at the same time.

But putting that aside there are still many minor bugs all over the place like PHP notices and simple errors.

When I have this time thing done, event categories will be added. And when all this is done users and groups is next.

The beta is shooting for May 2nd now.

Localization in ACal 3

One of the most requested features has been localization support. If we would have released ACal 2.3 it would be available now. But we didn’t and it’s going to be in version 3 and better than ever.

Each language has it’s own file in the languages folder. The file is a plain XML file named (&Language.xml) and you can install a new language simply by dragging it in and it will be instantly available.
The XML file consists of a element and each string is translated like this:
Translated String
The lang element consists of a language code compatible with the PHP setlocale() function which automatically localizes strings generated by the date() function.

I’m starting out with a German translating and will add a Spanish locale later. Both will be available in alpha 2 which is expected later this month.

Cool Stuff Coming

Hopefully you don’t mind one more post about ACal 3.0 today

I’ve been working on a way to get rid of all popups. Well sort of. In ACal 2.x a popup window is used to manage events. In v3 alpha 1 a popup is used for the preferences window.
But I thought it would be neat if the preferences could use the same idea as the event pane.
For those who don’t know in ACal 3.0 an event pane slides into the right side of the screen vertically from which you can add/edit/delete events. It is semi-transparent so you can see the calendar under it. Kind of neat.

Now for the preferences window why not do this?
Contain the preferences interface inside a single div. This div is hidden by default using CSS {display: none}
Now when a openLayer() function is invoked the div class changes and the div turns into a normal absolute positioned div. It is also semi-transparent, like a layer floating over your calendar allowing you to dynamically make changes.
So I’m going to base the new prefs off of this idea. With all these popup blockers today, it’s safer to use pure CSS. (As long as the use is legitimate)

And today I have added full localization support. And fixed some bugs.
Everything hasn’t been checked in yet.

Road to ACal 3.0 Alpha 1 – Part #4

This is the final “Road to ACal 3.0 Alpha 1″ post. Why? Because we’re at the end of the road.
Last night I uploaded ACal 3.0a1 and the new web site. The web site needed some work to get it working with PHP 4 but that was a snap.
So check it out at http://acalproj.sourceforge.net/
It’s looking good so far. Now if only Sourceforge.net would roll out Subversion support and get the statistics working again

Interestingly enough I fixed two bugs after testing the alpha in Linux. One in the alarms system and one in configure.
Then shortly after I released alpha 1, I found another bug in the configure script. It’s fixed in the latest snapshot.

You can’t win them all I guess. In two weeks or so I expect to release alpha 2. And then at the end of the month get a beta out.

Road to ACal 3.0 Alpha 1 – Part #3

As of now only one thing needs to be done before Alpha 1 is released. And that is testing. I will make a snapshot and test it on a Linux system. All the development is done on my Mac and sometimes you don’t notice problems until you try it on a different system.

So this alpha release will have bugs. Some I left purposely so nobody would actually use it in a big way. Others I don’t know about yet.
All in all it should be pretty stable as long as you have PHP 5 and a good HTTP server like Apache. I have no idea if it’ll work on Windows.

So what didn’t make it into this release?
Event categories, users and groups, and a lot of other things are incomplete. Aso RSS support, iCalendar export/import, and an embedding API are missing as well.
So a lot needs to be done and this is just the first preview of it.

Road to ACal 3.0 Alpha 1 – Part #2

The ACal Project now has a new web site. Well it’s not exactly online yet but it’s done and ready to go. The new web site will be made public alongside the 3.0 Alpha 1 release.

Friday is certainly going to be a busy day. We have two more days before the alpha has to be ready and everything needs to be well tested and ready to go. Not a whole lot of time.

But about the new web site. It’s designed to be easy to maintain and yet look good. I have a feeling that it looks terrible in Internet Explorer though. But that’s why I have a get Firefox button
And of course a valid XHTML and CSS button as well.
The previous web site actually depended on my computer to keep it updated as a cron job would run every night updating the content. But this one is totally independant.

And about the ACal 3 alpha release in two days, it’s going to be good but please don’t use it if you care about your data because it’s sure to break before the final is released.

Road to ACal 3.0 Alpha 1 – Part #1

Well I’m planning on pushing out the alpha in 4 days so I’ll probably do daily updates on this blog until then.

Today:
Bug where if more than 10 events are added they will have the same ID number. This has been fixed by using a unix timestamp plus a random number between 1 and 999. This means that even if a new event is added 200 times every seconds there’s little chance it will have the same ID number as another event.

Events can now repeat every year and the monthly recurring code has been revised. It took a little math skill for that

And the configure script is now fully functional. Configure is a small program that can be run from the command line. It asks you some questions then configures everything for you making sure it all works at the same time.

I’ve also added an INSTALL document.

There’s been other small changes and fixes here and there but are small enough not to notice.
Next I’ll be working on event editing. Time for some fun

ACal 3.0 Alpha Update

Today there’s been some new bug fixes and features checked in. Major things include full SQLite and MySQLi support and monthly recurring support.

The official alpha release will be coming out on the 8th of this week.
Major things that really need to be done before the 8th is yearly recurring support, and the ability to delete and edit events. Those 3 things are currently blocking the Alpha, but is by no means all that needs to be done before the final release. For example the Alpha will not have support for users, groups, or event categories. The Notes features will not work either. It’s not yet been determined whether or not the alarms feature will be fully complete or not. One major part is not yet functional.

So a lot needs to be done. But I’m optimistic that we’ll get a beta this month yet. ACal 3.0 will be the greatest web calendar available when I’m done with it.