Month: January 2002

Manila Envelope 1.0.1 has been released. Bugfixes, mostly, and a few new features, including importing text files and automatic translation of special characters (e.g. å, é, î, ò, ü, ç, ñ, etc.) to their HTML entity equivalents. Check out the full release notes for more details.

In doing this project, I’m continually reminded of things that I knew once and have subsequently lost. For instance, making sure that I follow a consistent process for building and publishing. I just realized that the build I made yesterday still showed 1.0A1 as the version number in the About box. As a result, I started a checklist for my build and deployment process. Our old configuration manager at AMS would be so proud…

I’ve finished all the bug fixes (that I know of) and a few surprise new features for Manila Envelope. I’ll release v. 1.0.1 tomorrow (I can’t get to my iDisk tonight).

For now, I wanted to publicly thank the folks who emailed me to report bugs and make suggestions: Nicholas Riley, Jeremy Wilker, Martin Fenner, Oliver Wrede, Clark Venable, Walter, and Peter Gallagher.

Snow falling in Boston tonight. A slow day waiting for the snow to start.

I fixed some bugs in Manila Envelope the last few days, including a dumb error with the icon this morning. I’m a very junior developer, but I’m finding that it’s difficult to get a good icon creation program. Apple ships IconComposer, which allows editing four sizes of icons. Then there’s Iconographer, which would be perfect if it would automatically scale images that were pasted into its icon windows. I had to use both to fix the icon problems I had today–the masks weren’t working very well and the icon was surrounded by a black outline at certain sizes. I will be releasing the bugfix Monday or Tuesday.

This is pretty cool: Manila Envelope got picked up by FrTracker at Bluedays Software, a software tracker in French. And the app isn’t even localized… If anyone out there wants to help me translate Manila Envelope into your language of choice, please let me know. (Hint: the biggest issue will probably be the Help file.)

I love the Mac community. The people who blog from the Mac are willing to try new things (about 171 people have downloaded my app from VersionTracker, not counting the ones who went to my site) and ready to tell you when they find bugs. I am really glad that you guys are out there–I was panicked that I had no testers, but I do now and they’re piling up the bug reports! Look for a new version soon to fix the initial bugs.

Dave asked for a screen shot for all the “Mac-impaired people” out there… so here it is.

I just released Manila Envelope 1.0. It’s a native Mac OS X app, written in AppleScript Studio, that allows posting to a Manila-compatible site via SOAP.

I think this is what Dave was asking for last week with respect to Watson. But my app isn’t a screen scraper–it is a non-browser-based simple native blogging tool that uses the Manila API.

The software can be downloaded from my software and scripting page. Source code is available, not because I’m an open source movement guy (I’m not) but because AppleScript Studio is a young environment, I don’t understand it very well, and I figure other people can learn from my pain.

You can read about the development of Manila Envelope by clicking on the application icon to the right.

It looks like preferences have been broken for almost two weeks in Manila Envelope because, while rewriting the code on the train, I swapped the order of two arguments to a function. Two weeks!!! As Dave says, “We make shitty software….with bugs!!!”