Tuesday, 24th January 2006

TaskSetup pt2

After much feedback, I've made a few cosmetic changes to my TaskSetup RISC OS Boot plugin. Decided to get rid of the three selection buttons and implement a standard menu selection routine - although I'm still not entirely happy with the way it works, but at least it's slightly less code and effort than adding panes and radio buttons. I guess I'm a bit impatient to get working on some other projects, so I'll probably come back and tweak with the user interface once I've got some other projects released.

I always find it rather daunting (not to mention frustrating) whenever I start coding a new application, mainly because my brain works faster than the computer, so I can always view the finished product in my head and find it frustrating having an empty template of code that doesn't really do anything - at least until you reach a certain point and things start to slot together and form a coherent program that actually starts resembling what you've had in your head for ages. I guess it's a bit like doing a jigsaw - it's all rather tedious until you've got a few pieces in place and you can start to see the finished picture, and completion gradually gets faster the more you've done because it becomes a case of slotting in obvious pieces.

P.S. Note to self: Must get around to re-coding weblog script so that NetSurf users can view the comments....

Monday, 23rd January 2006

RISC OS Boot Plugin mania

I've been busy coding loads of new plugins for the RISC OS boot configuration. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be enough hours in the day at the moment, so coding is reserved for evenings from about 7pm until the early hours!

MiscSetup is pretty much complete now and only requires the additional 'tweak' when I think of something else to add.

The latest (version 1 released at 4am this morning) is TaskSetup which is designed as an easy way to control which items are loaded when you first boot a RISC OS machine. It's a kind of copy of the original Mac OS 9 'Extensions' manager whereby you had a long list of all the various modules and extensions installed on your computer and you could simply tick boxes to determine which ones were actually used when you booted the machine.

For a version 1.00, it's not too bad and appears to do what it says on the tin - but is subject to cosmetic updates, style guide improvements and general 'new feature' adding.

Another plugin, which I only started writing about 7pm this evening, is designed to make the management and configuration of filetypes easy to control. Unlike primitive operating systems such as Windows XP, which merely adds three letter suffixes to filenames in order to define filetypes, RISC OS uses an extended filetype (kind of similar to the Apple Mac - but different! ) which is independent of file names. Normally if you double-click on a file, the system will be aware of the filetype and go off and load the relevant application. For example, double-clicking on a DataPower file, will automatically load DataPower (assuming it's been seen) and load your file. However, some filetypes - such as JPEGs can have multiple viewers, such as ChangeFSI, SwiftJPEG, Photodesk etc and the one that actually loads your JPEG when you double-click on it is whichever application happened to 'claim' the JPEG file type last.

Additional confusion can arise when you double-click on a file which has an unknown filetype - maybe someone has sent you a file created in application 'wibble' and you don't have 'wibble' installed on your computer. In this case, you get a rather unfriendly error message informing you that an application which loads that type of file has not been seen by the filer and to try again.

My new FileTypes plugin is designed to make it easy to control all of this, so that users can simply say "Always load JPEGs into application XYZ" or "Remember that application ABC loads these type of files, even though ABC has not necessarily been loaded or 'seen'.

That's the theory at any rate, but the hardest part seems to be getting the user interface right, as it needs to be flexible enough for anyone to use, and powerful enough to implement all the features currently whizzing around inside my head!

Thus, I thought I'd release a non-functional, partially working version for people to get the feel of how it might look when it's finished. I say 'might' because it's very much subject to change and modification in order to make it as simple to use, yet powerful and flexible as possible.

Of course, once I've completed this plugin, I've got a fourth one also on the drawing board, which will also make life a lot easier for people, especially those like me who like automating things as much as possible so that the computer can do the hard, repetitive work and I can concentrate on coding, reading or simply getting my head around user-friendly program interfaces.....

Thursday, 19th January 2006

Life is uneventful.....

Now, either I lead an extremely boring life, or I'm singularly incapable of thinking of anything to write in this blog. Probably the latter, because I never intended to write a daily diary, but to develop the blog software as an exercise in perl programming.

However, when I read some people's blogs I find myself getting jealous that they can write about seemingly mundane events in their lives in an exciting and interesting way.

Perhaps I ought to give myself a belated New Year's resolution of doing at least one interesting thing each day - so that I can add something interesting here.

I could have a rant about the government - but they're an easy target and, these days, everyone seems to agree with me that they're a bunch of incompetent, lying wotnots (this is rated for family viewing) - so politics has got boring. One of my favourite Usenet newsgroups - argonet.zfc - seems to have gone into religious flame wars mode - which is another interesting topic to rant about. I'm more of an evolution person than a creationist, so of course I broadly agree with Richard Dawkins (he of "The Blind Watchmaker" fame). Although I've not viewed it myself (not having a TV) I believe his new TV series is somewhat controversial, or at least it is if you're a fundamentalist Christian freak!

Hmm. That's politics and religion covered. I think I'll leave sex for another day though!

Thursday, 5th January 2006

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