Something, but not Much

I’ve been fixing bugs and adding stuff in ACal over the past while since the release of alpha 2. I expect to release one more alpha before the beta release.

Recently I think I might have added Windows support to event notifications. Later I will be posting some unofficial snapshots so that Windows people can test this. Contact me if you think you can help.

Currently I’m working on finishing event notifications (alarms) and hope to finish this week. I’m starting to see the end of the tunnel in ACal 3.0 development. Like always much still needs to be done. For example the current HTML and CSS is hopelessly incompatible with IE. It works fine on Gecko, WebCore, and Opera. But Internet Explorer plain chokes on it. This is one of the beta blockers (in my head).

There are still some bugs in Users and Groups. But I’m going to rework some of that because users need to be able to specify an email address. Or else email event notifications will not work as planned.
And as always, you can checkout the latest code from the svn repository.

I do, yet do not, like Objective-C

After playing around with Cocoa (Objective-C) for a couple of days, the feelings about it are mixed. I do not like it for the following reasons:

1) There is no official documentation of the language where you can learn the syntax and standards.
2) The documentation that there is is sparse and spread over the internet in a thin layer.

But I do like it because:

1) The language is so flexible (much more than C/C++) and from my little experience easy to work with. (Relative to C)
2) Creating a GUI is a simple as using a Interface Builder application where you can drag and drop widgets and create complex interfaces without writing a single line of code. (Better docs would be nice though)

So Obj-C is nice. I still like PHP and Python better but they are scripting languages. I’m trying to learn the world of C/C++/Obj-C as fast as possible for the upcoming wxPHP project.

Mac OS X Tiger – My Take on It

I just installed Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) yesterday afternoon and after using it for awhile here is what I think about it.

1) It took them a whole year just to come up with this? It’s a good upgrade and all and I have not ran into many problems at all but there really is no “killer feature.” Spotlight lives up to it’s hype. Automator is confusing at first. Dashboard is nice and something I will use but don’t know how much. I like Xcode 2.0 although it’s not that much different. Some bugs are fixed. GCC 4.0 works well enough, so far. I also found out that wxWidgets, wxPython, and wxPerl are all installed by default in Tiger. Sadly the wxWidgets version is rather old (2.5.)–the latest stable release being 2.6.0. I Also got some undefined symbols errors when trying to build my wxWidgets application in Xcode.

2) Speed? I have noticed a speed boost but it is really small. Not at all what I expected from what people told me. Safari actually seems to be slower in Tiger than it was in 10.3.9. Kind of weird.

3) Problems? Well I tried to build plib 1.8.4 and it didn’t work. Fixed some of the problems but gave up due to my yet minuscule knowledge of C++.

4) I was really hoping PHP 5 would be included in Tiger and Apache 2 but Apple stuck with Apache 1.3.33 and PHP 4.3.10. Not exactly the latest and the greatest but it works.

ACal 3.0 OS X Installer

I have included an ACal installer for Mac OS X before but discontinued it because of the lack of demand for it. But I’m going to start again with ACal 3.0 for the following reasons:

1) Really easy installation for Mac OS X users. (Obvious but true)
2) PHP5 can be installed along with the calendar if necessary.
3) An ACal widget can be installed as well at the same time.

Which brings me to the next bit of news. I have decided to write a dashboard widget for the ACal calendar. Doing this will allow you to manage your calendar from your dashboard.
Things are getting kind of exiting now

ACal 3.0 Alpha 2… When?

First I said the last week of April. Then the first week on May. Now I say if not this week then next week.
I thought that development would go a little faster than it is. But I control 4 different projects now and it’s rather hard to get a lot done on all at the same time.

What needs to be done? I’m working on the last RFE (Feature Request) and when it is done, I’ll release alpha 2. Much more needs to be done yet though and so it might even be next month before we see a beta release.

A free Mac Mini

Yeah, I know. I just had to try it because it’s available in Canada.
Check this out and by completing an offer (which doesn’t have to cost anything) and referring 11 other people you can get $550 or a free Mac Mini (If you are in the US).

And from what I’ve seen this is completely legitimate. So please check the link out and complete it. I’d love that $550!