Author: Tim Jarrett

A slow day

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.

Crossing the Ocean

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.)

Thanks, and bugs

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.

Blogging and AppleScript Studio

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.

Burned.

Looks like some of my genealogical research is seriously suspect, according to this article. This is really disappointing: the Freeman family (my grandmother’s family) was one of the genealogies I was pretty happy with, but it looks like some of the records (and it’s not clear how far back) are suspect.

This is an important lesson to me as an amateur genealogical researcher: always document your source…and investigate any second hand evidence before adding it in.

It’s not work, just fun

I’m playing around a bit more with Radio UserLand. It’s going to take some patience to make it work, as I really want to get it to point at this site and not at my Radio Weblog. Meanwhile I’ve decided how to move forward on Manila Envelope, which was felled right before launch with an impossible problem with the preferences. I’m going to have to write my own code to write and read an XML preference file. Should be fun. Dig we must…

But much less tasty

Tomorrow morning the Galileo probe will take its last photos in a low-altitude flyby of Io. It’s due to crash into Jupiter in early 2003 so it doesn’t accidentally land on Europa, which has the best chance of any of the Jovian moons to contain life, and contaminate it with bacteria. I’m looking forward to seeing the photos; as I’m married to an Italian-American woman, there’s always been something amusing to me about a planet that looks like a pizza from hell.