Things I Have Time For When I Don’t Have Class
Posted by Colin
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.