An Experiment in Bloggery

Well, I’ve been busy lately. I finally re-installed CodeWarrior and I’ve spent the entire day working on plugins! I reorganized Norman Palardy’s GZip Plugin and re-wrote a good portion of it, as well as adding a bunch of stuff. That’s almost ready for release. And, in response to a request by Seth Willits, I’ve also created a plugin to fetch the icon for a given FolderItem. This one requires OS X, but that’s all Seth needs. Too bad he’s been offline all day, so I haven’t been able to give it to him!

I’ve also started reading up on the Speech Recognition Manager in the hopes that I can create a plugin to give access to that (since Will Cosgrove’s Speech Recognition Plugin doesn’t support RB v5.5). However, the documentation shows it to be fairly complex. Hopefully it won’t be too hard.

Recently I got an email from Ricardo Batista, the owner of MacShareware.net. He had a pre-release version of a new SDK for doing automatic updates on software sites. The only site to support this so far is MacShareware.net, but there’s hope that MacUpdate and VersionTracker will adopt this new format. Basically, it consists of a plist file with a specific set of keys and values, and these values are used for updating programs. The software site scans all known MacPAD files every few hours, and when it detects a change it updates its listing for that program. That way, you change the MacPAD file and in a few hours, the software sites have your update automatically. No more visiting each site and updating the listing there.

The other goal of the MacPAD file format is to give developers an easy way of adding version checking to their program. They can simply download the file and compare versions to see if there’s a new version. To this end, a PHP script was included that does the check, along with a snippet of C code that calls this script via the ‘php’ command-line process. Of course, this is a pretty ugly way to do this, but Ricardo just didn’t have the time yet to write up proper C code, and he already had the PHP. To this end, I have written REALbasic code to do the checking natively, and it works quite well. I sent the code to Ricardo (he knew I was writing it, as I offered to do so when he sent me the SDK). I sent the RB code to him and hopefully it will show up in the official release of the SDK tomorrow.

Perhaps next I should write some Cocoa code that does the same thing?

With the new AddressOf keyword in RB v5.5a5, callbacks are now possible. Given this, I recently created an example project to install a global hotkey that calls back into the RB project. This should be easy to adapt to any RB project.

You can download the example project here. Requires RB v5.5a7 or later.

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