You Can’t Fire Me, I Don’t Work In This Van

I’d just like to thank everyone for holding on through 3 updates this week on Gluestick, plus the registration system being temporally down. I’m very pleased at the response and the download numbers on Sparkle and other locations. It’s been a success, considering there has been zero marketing effort on Gluestick. But, we’re already hard at work on the next version, which will be a free update, but won’t be shipping for a bit (more on that next post).

The icns export added in 1.0.3 has a special feature I just wanted to write about real quick. It’s something that we had identified as something we wanted to be part of Gluestick from the very beginning, we just didn’t get a chance to throw the switch until 1.0.3.

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Every once in a while, I run into a Windows user who tells me that they don’t use OS X because Macs are for people who don’t know how to use computers. This flabbergasts me, mostly because the entire reason that I don’t use Windows is because Windows treats me like I’m an idiot, while the Mac treats me like I’m actually intelligent, and gives me more control over my computer. So, I’ve compiled a list of the ways that Windows treats me like an idiot, where the Mac doesn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

For those that don’t know, two things usually dominate my life during most of the year. Class, and work. Finals just ended this week, and work goes on break after Tuesday (school district employees also get a Christmas break).

This means I can get back into my usual programming grove, which has actually already happened. There are two other projects I have been working on that are getting most my attention right now. One of them is currently in alpha. It is being distributed to testers, and we’re overhauling significant parts of the UI based on tester feedback. The UI work is actually already about halfway done, we reached a significant milestone last night actually. More will be announced on this project when the time is right. I don’t plan on pre-announcing this project, but if all goes right we should be looking at a release next month.

The second project is something I’ve been working on for a long long while. Again it’s a project that hasn’t been announced (It’s not theme related, it’s actually something quite new). The project was prototyped in Tiger earlier this year, and I hauled it to WWDC with me to show around. I ended up showing it to some people at Apple, and they convinced me to go back and take advantage of some technology coming in Leopard. It’s actually a great story, maybe sometime I’ll have to share it. I can’t really say anything about the project right now, one reason being because it’s heavily based on Leopard features.

Everything on themes is on hold right now. Eventually I’ll have something to say about this. ThemeKit in Subversion is up to date with all the latest changes and fixes. It includes extremely new platform management code. The new version should do a much better job of swapping resources back and forth between Intel and PowerPC. It is also fully compliant with Geekspiff’s protocol on tagging Extras.rsrc files as PowerPC and Intel. It will tag outgoing rsrc files, and respect the tags on incoming rsrc files. I may post a new build of Extras2Extras2 based on this code. I know somewhere there was an internal version being given to testers as a sanity check… Definitely should be posting a new version of Catalyst based on this code. There was a new version being passed around to testers that had resource file import/export as one of it’s features. It’s just a matter of checking out that build to make sure it’s ready for public consumption.

Dradis is now back up. In addition, it’s email support has been enabled. So, if you’re in the Dradis system, Dradis has just flushed out all the emails it has had queued since we put Dradis online. Apologies if your inbox was the target of mass Dradis messages from months ago.

If you take a stroll over to http://www.whitemagiclabs.com/developers/, you’ll notice our SVN repositories are up and working. We currently are making the source to three of our projects publicly available. Extras2Extras2, ThemeKit, and their new friend DualityCore.

DualityCore is a daemon which runs in the background on your machine, detects application launches, and then patches applications on launch. It’s heavily based on the ProToys and Xtender code, but currently I’m moving that code into a more x86 friendly daemon, so you may find functionality lacking while the old code is retrofitted. Additionally, we will be working on restructuring Mach_* to properly patch Rosetta, but seeing as how this is a long and ugly process, we’ll gladly used an updated Mach_* instead if one becomes available.

I’ve moved all my projects into SVN now so code updates will be uploaded as I make them. Projects will be moved into the release branch on the next major release.

ThemeKit is available under the LGPL, DualityCore under the GPL, and Extras2Extras2 is available under the BSD license. We will be updating the developer’s page shortly to note this.

If you’re reading this, it means the dns server in your neck of the woods has had DNS changes for White Magic Labs filtered down to it and whitemagiclabs.com is now pointing to the new host.

I just imported the database and am working on getting all services back up. Obviously, WordPress is again running from the new database.

As part of this new server we will be doing some new things. Our open source projects will finally get a nice SVN repository instead of just being zipped bundles of code. I’ll also be getting email notifications working on Draidis.

Over time we will be offering additional services on this server as part of a longer term plan.

After a long wait I’m back finally finished up Catalyst.

Just to clear things up, my day job is working for a school district helping maintain a few thousand iBooks. We’ve been reformatting the iBooks over the last couple of weeks, and getting ready to add around 4000 Macbooks into the mix. With finals for schools going on at the same time, sayign I’ve been busy is an understatement.

Catalyst 0.8 is finally almost ready to go. Here is the preliminary list of changes.

General use:
-Catalyst will now allow you to manually add and remove applications from it’s skinning database in preferences.
-On first launch, Catalyst will ask whether it should import all applications from your applications folder, or if you want to import them manually.
-Catalyst no longer lists image editors twice in preferences.
-Application importing will no longer crash on an application included with the Macbook Pros.
-Search has been optimized.
-Animation has been optimized.
-Support has been added for marking a resource as “finished” or “incomplete”.
-Resources may be filtered by “finished” or ‘incomplete”.
-Launch time has been optimized. Additional support for dual core processors has been added.
-A bug that caused a previously edited resource to overwrite the next edited resource has been fixed.

Application Compatibility:
-Catalyst is now compatible with any 3rd party enhancement that alters OS X interface files including Candybar, Iridium, ThemeChanger, Uno, and more.
-Automatic theming per application version has been disabled.

CoreImage Editing:
-Importing an image from an image editor no longer breaks non destructive imaging.
-Applying a filter to the entire stack of images no longer breaks some images.
-General bugs with CoreImage editing have been addressed.

Theme Previewing:
-The Duality engine has been grafted into Catalyst. Catalyst can now live preview any system skin you’ve created. This feature is universal. Support for previewing your application skins is forthcoming.

Variations
-Several cosmetic bugs have been addressed within the variations window.
-You may now add HTML previews to variations via a WYSIWYG editor.

Resources and .Skin File Format (ThemeKit)
-Catalyst now handles pxms with different bit depths properly.
-The .Skin format has been updated. Older .skins will no longer open. This is a one time only situation. The decisions was made that .skin is not used enough to warrant backwards compatibility in this build. As a result Catalyst will have to rebuild it’s app skin database.
-Clr’s are now supported for importing, but not yet editing. Catalyst can now properly create clr’s for the Intel Macintosh platform.
-ThemeKit is being commented in preparation for release of the source.

ShapeShifter Compatibility
-Variations can now have a ShapeShifter textual description and preview picture added to them.
-A bug has been fixed within the DLTA exporter causing images to be written to the DLTA in the wrong format.

Sorry to disappear for a bit. I’ve taken a job recently, where I had to start work immediately I was replacing two other employees which had to take emergency leave. Given that any job that pays money is preferable to working on free software, I have had to devote time to my new job. So, I’ve been fitting in programming around schoolwork and work work. I don’t want to give a date on anything right now, as they only seem to cause problems. I’m still working on stuff, I’m still here, and I’ll leave it at that.

Sorry to leave everyone in the dark for so long. It’s been busy.

We will be releasing a new version of Extras2Extras2 with the new site. It will be compatible with ppat and CLR resources, which means it should move almost all themes to Intel with no glitches or unthemed pieces. I actually have a copy on my desktop right now, which was used to port Iridium over to x86, ppats and all.

I was actually very happy to help port Iridium over to Mac OS X x86. As a result of working on the port we’ve been polishing and bugging our x86 translation routines. If you have an x86 Mac and haven’t tried the Iridium theme yet, you should check it out!

http://sagefire.org/2006/04/25/iridium-a-universal-theme-installer/