I’ve been feeling very anti-social the last few days :p I don’t know whether it was the short weekend (which always has the effect of making me grumpy …) or the fact that I am not getting enough sleep (which too can make me grouchy) at nights. Why am I not getting enough sleep at night? It’s because I’ve started dreaming like Morpheus Mentor (see story on sidebar) <g> Well, not exactly like him but the story originally started because I have these vivid dreams set in strange places. But I haven’t been dreaming too much for a while and suddenly the dreams started again. I’m not sure whether it was due to my current choice in reading – Heinlein’s “Glory Road” – or something else. Ah well …
I did start work on another project yesterday – yeah, yet another one :p I call this one Snipper and it is supposed to let me snip out pieces from different web pages and view all the pieces as one web page. I’ve seen two apps like that before – one was coded in Java and I can’t even recall what it was named since I saw it years ago. That one did work but was a bit clunky because of the Java interface. The other one is called InfoSnorkel and I believe was mentioned in yesterday’s (or last week’s) LockerGnome. I tried InfoSnorkel and found that it really didn’t work too well when it came to snipping out bits from a web page and so decided to see if I couldn’t do it better – plus, it’s got a really irritating nag at startup and shutdown even during the trial period :p
I did the preliminary testing stuff for Snipper and found that it was possible to do what I wanted to do – at least theoretically … So I began working on a full-blown interface for the app and that’s taking a little time since I’m taking a wizard-based route for adding new snippets. Since I’ve never done a wizard-based app before, it is taking me a while to come up with the whole wizard structure and even then it will probably be a pretty poor excuse for a wizard <g> But we’ll see how it goes – I will need to get the wizard stuff done before I can do a full-blown test of the concept and see if it works for all cases – not just this one site that I tried out … so who knows, it still might not come to anything …
In the mean time, Nigel has been selling me a new feature for Blog :p The feature is to have the ability to send out a digest version of a given blog to anybody who subscribes! I like the idea and have been coming up with additions to the basic idea myself and think it could turn out to be a pretty interesting exercise. Nigel’s been giving me further refinements to his original idea as well and if I get fired up on that, I might actually drop everything and start coding Blog 7.0 – though I hope not since I want to get these other apps coded too 🙂 Incidentally, I was hoping to release a Blog 6.01 release since both Brant and Phil have pointed out various minor bugs but I’m running into some problems fixing the bug that Phil pointed out – that the displaying of dates in bold on the calendar for days with entries doesn’t work when you switch journals. I know the cause but can’t seem to find a solution that works …