Did quite a bit of work on Scope yesterday and I’ve discovered a new (and irritating) bug :p I did some code changes to the way keystrokes are handled in Scope because of the fact that the address bar would behave strangely if you had the dropdown dropped down and didn’t type anything for a bit but somehow my changes seem to have introduced this extremely weird bug – when you type ‘Y’ in a web form, it gets duplicated! Just the ‘Y’, nothing else as far as I can see … Guess I need to look into that but I still haven’t got around to it because I’ve been busy doing a lot of other stuff …
Such as adding the much requested feature to open new tabs in the background 🙂 I am not really satisfied with the implementation because there is a flash while a new tab is created and sent to the background (tabs are always created in the foreground and I can’t seem to find a way to make them be created in the background …) and I hate that quick flash. I have been trying a quite a few things and haven’t still found a way to eliminate it. I also added tooltip hints to all the Option dialog items so that people won’t have to try to figure out what each item is for :p Plus, for those who just won’t read the documentation, I’ve added a Read Me item on the Help menu which will automatically open up the Scope.txt file in the default text editor – a la Blog.
My mind’s been bubbling with ideas for both Scope and Blog and to top it all off, I’ve also got an idea for a new app :p Somebody requested some time back that I somehow make Scope compatible with the Google toolbar. Now that seems like a bit of tall order and I really wasn’t sure that could be done but yesterday I ran across a new app named Dave’s Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar and I really loved it because it’s tiny, customizable and takes up so little space! The downside? It only seems to work with IE because basically it is an HTML page 🙁 I decided that I needed to code a new app which emulated the functionality and also provided the customizability by containing all the search engine info in an XML file just like Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar does. So I guess that is another project to eat into my time … I guess I could have somehow integrated this into Scope but then that would leave users of all other browsers out in the cold. So I am going to try to make it so that the app will basically call your default browser (or maybe even an option to call a specific browser of your choice …) and that should keep everybody happy 🙂
I watched “The Wild Bunch” yesterday on DVD – it was dark, gritty and grim … not at all like the westerns of today. There were no good guys and bad guys and the people didn’t look as if they’d stepped out of a catalog – they looked dirty, smelly and as if they’d been in the saddle for ages 🙂 But then again, the movie’s pretty old – who remembers William Holden, Ernest Borgnine or for that matter, even Sam Peckinpah these days? I loved the opening sequence though in a way it revolted me too. The kids pushing scorpions into an ant’s nest and seeing the scorpion’s writhe in pain and laughing and later putting some dry brush on top of both the scorpions and the ants and setting fire to the brush was the kind of scene you don’t seen in movies anymore. It tells you something about ourselves and makes you think. Yes, children sometimes aren’t as pure and innocent as we’d like to think they are but at the same time, we adults are the one’s who hurt and maim fellow human beings … So who’s more cruel and heartless? I don’t know …
Was going to complain about the Y-bug, but don’t need to, do I? Just started using Scope, and I must say I really like it. Maybe it will become my main browser in the future? The fact that I can check out how my websites look using both IE and Mozilla engines is great!
Keep up the good work!
btw: I’ve just started using Blog, too, and it’s amazing!
One of the things I noticed about Scope that bothers me is the address bar. When I try to freehand type an address, it wants to finish it for me. And won’t let me just type in the address, it has to put it’s two cents in and I end up loading webpages from the “run” menu. Does that make sense? Anyhow, I meant to mention it before this, but forgot. And then thought I might join one of the mailing lists and see if that had been talked about before.
Otherwise, I am very happy with both Blog and Scope.
Hey, how bout adding a manuel archive button to Blog and then I could use it for the journal? 🙂