Yes, I’ve been sidetracked again :p I decided to investigate how easy it would be to do a client-server app that would handle audio-video streaming. Basically to create an application which would allow two people to communicate using speakers, microphone and webcam without needing a server – as long as they know at least one person’s IP of course. It was supposed to be another one of my simple proof-of-concept type of apps just to see if it would work but it has become entangled in a whole heap of other technical stuff like COM and multithreading and TCP/IP based client-server architecture :p I am tempted to drop the project since it looks as if it’s going to take me a while before I can get anywhere with it but then again, I am reluctant to stop something once I’ve started on it. So I don’t know if I will still try to go ahead with it or if I will drop it and get back to work on my regular apps 🙂

Speaking of regular apps, I still haven’t done much with BlogMan. I do use it exclusively to publish to my Movable Type based blog, Solipsistic Meanderings, and haven’t even been to the site in a while 🙂 But while the app works fine for me under Movable Type, there are things in it that might not work so well for somebody using Blogger or B2. In fact, I still need to come up with some code to handle the title workaround the B2 uses with the Blogger API (sorry about the delay Greg <g>) Then I also need to add support for other blogging utilities that either support the Blogger API or the MetaBlog API. I know there are others who are anxious for me to get back to Blog (or PostMan :p) and I’ve been extremely sidetracked of late <g> but the only good thing is that several apps have come out of me being sidetracked :p In the end, I believe that you must do what you enjoy most and so I guess I will continue code (because I enjoy that) but I will also code what I find the most interesting at the moment – unless (of course there is always an unless :p) there is something impacting performance for a user of an existing app …

I did manage to get Schemer out the door yesterday – no page up for Schemer yet I’m afraid (but then again, there are no pages up for Snipper or MailCoder either …) but you can download it from the sidebar. Incidentally, Duane noted yesterday that the Download page is woefully behind on the latest downloads and that’s true I’m afraid 🙁 I have to add at least three or four releases (if not more) to the Downloads page before I am caught up. I will eventually do that but for the moment, the best place to get the latest software release from, is the sidebar.

I’ve been receiving lots of fixes, suggestions etc. for Blog and a fair number of requests for a new release of Scope as well. In the mean time, I continue to work away slowly at BlogMan but I’m also working on a few other projects. Things are a bit chaotic at the moment and I really have no idea which will see release first but I suspect that it will be either Scope or BlogMan. Then there is the eternally neglected PostMan which needs to be worked on too but I have a feeling that the Blog crowd will get impatient by that time :p I wish I could work on one thing without getting distracted and starting work on a completely new project but that’s the way I work and in the end I think I do come up with some useful stuff so I guess it evens out. Oh BTW, if you’ve thought I gave up on Solipsistic Meandering – you are mistaken :p I’ve started writing there again and actually made two entries on the same day yesterday :p

The next member in the RookSoft suite of software is here 🙂 It’s called Schmer and it basically allows you to design the color scheme for a web page by dragging and dropping colors on a form which displays the various elements of the web page. You can select the body background color, the text color, the link color, the link hover color, the visited link color as well as certain colors for the scrollbar and some form elements as well. You can also define colors for various elements of a table. Once you have got a page looking the way you want, you can simply click a button which creates the CSS for the colors for all the elements on the page. It’s as simple as that! Of course, you can also save the current color scheme or to load an existing color scheme and the color grid from which you drag and drop colors is customizable and is saved upon exit.

This is not a major application – I wrote it in the course of about one day. Schemer, like MailCoder, is what I would call a proglet – a little program which does one thing and one thing only but can be handy at times. Incidentally, don’t look for it on the sidebar yet :p I still have to write some form of documentation for it and then I will list it on the sidebar for download during the course of the day. Hope somebody finds it useful and if you do, let me know – or if you have any suggestions/enhancements in mind, let me know about that too 🙂

I heard from one of my users yesterday that Blog is listed at NoNags and that it had received six ducks – their highest ranking 🙂 Edward had asked me some time back to list Blog at NoNags and I had done so but had forgotten all about it since then. Now I guess I’ll have to add a NoNags awards button to the Blog page – ah I hate all this work :p It’s a funny thing but I have not listed any of my applications with any of the major sites – I think I did submit Blog to Download.com but I have no idea what happened there. BetaNews is the only place that lists my apps regularly and that’s mostly due to the diligence of Eddie who reminds me when I forget to tell him about a new release 🙂

Incidentally, Scope has been receiving some publicity recently too – even though I haven’t worked on it in a while. ShellCity, which had listed it a long while back when I first released it, had featured Scope again this week and that had been picked up by a few other sites including MajorGeeks. So I’ve been getting a few bug reports, suggestions about Scope again and will probably go back to that somewhere along the way and do a proper 2.1 release of Scope while I am at it. But I do have to finish up BlogMan too – I do get sidetracked don’t I? :p I think I’ve done at least two new apps (Nailer and Schemer – hmmm, sounds like a pair of gangsters :p) while working on BlogMan …

Not much in the way of coding again – Jen was interested in finding a pink Trillian Pro skin and there didn’t seem to be any good ones around. So I told her that the easiest thing would be to take the graphics for the default blue Whistler skin and change their color to pink :p Seemed like a good idea at the time but once she’d done it we discovered that while the skin did look good, it didn’t change all the UI elements to pink – there were still annoyingly blue bits around. So I decided to take a look at the skin and see what I could come up with. Now I’d done some messing around with the original Trillian skins and so delved into the XML files to see what I could do with the skin but what not many people seem to mention is that Trillian Pro does not use the XML file format – at least, I don’t think so. It seems to have all the skin settings in one INI file! It took me about half a day to figure this one out and once I did actually find where the settings were it was a much easier task to do the basic changes necessary to get a pink skin 🙂

Jen was pretty happy with the pink skin at this point but I wasn’t :p I wanted an all pink skin since the original Whistler skin was actually a combination of blue, the normal windows/buttons grey and white for the background of certain elements – but I wanted an all pink skin with different shades of pink. Yeah, I am a sucker of punishment. So I went about delving more into the skin structure and the graphics. I managed to get the other UI elements like the statusbar and the toolbar pinkified but then discovered that all icons still had a grey background. So I opened up the bitmaps containing the icons to discover that that was because they had a grey background in the bitmap! So I changed the background color for all the icons too. I finally have a respectable, all pink, dancing, prancing, eye catching pink Trillian skin … but there are a few anomalies – mostly because I suck at changing colors and being consistent :p Ah well, I guess I’ll get those sooner or later too …

Not much at all in the way of updates, coding etc. I’m afraid 🙁 I almost feel guilty about not doing much these days but there are periods when either personal life takes a hand in things or I just don’t feel the urge to work on something – this seems to be a combination of both those things and I hope that everybody who relies on me for the next version of an app or the completion of an existing app forgives me for my tardiness. Hopefully, I’ll get things sorted out and get back on track soon and we can all go back to enjoying the shiny software :p (OK that was to be a Kiki reference but then again you might not read Sluggy Freelance :p)

I have finally updated the list of sites using Blog (I had two lists as long as my arm to be included in there from about a month back) but it is possible that some of the sites I added are either no longer in operation or have shifted to some other software from Blog :p I also need to go through the list of sites and weed out the ones that are no longer there or no longer use Blog – ah, to have a dial-up connection which does not charge you by the minute or to have broadband at home! Oh well, no use thinking of what cannot be now, is there? I will eventually get around to cleaning up the list of sites using Blog but at least for the moment, it does include all the sites that *I* know of. If your site is not there (and you do have a Powered by Blog link on your blog) – do let me know and I will add it to the list.

Duane pointed out that some of the styles on the forum do not have the RookSoft logo – that is true. Only two of the styles contain the RookSoft logo and the others have their own individual logos. I need to sit down and change those and add some mods which would make life easier for everybody. Of course the problem with adding mods is that they have to be done individually for each style and some of the mods are customized for the default style and then you have to sit down and figure out how to change it to suit the style that you are applying it to. So it’s a lot of fun and a lot of time consuming work. Ah well, that too will get done eventually. In the meantime, I am (finally) considering paying for my own hosting solution due to the fact that it will allows me to have everything in one location without needing to bother anybody or to abuse their kindness. Of course, since I’ll have to do all the payments online, I’ll need to get myself a credit card and this will of course mean a delay of about a month while I get all that done :p But the good thing about having my own hosting solution would be that I can install myPHPChat and we can finally have that chat forum that people have been asking for and who knows, maybe we can even build a community around the whole RookSoft thing :p

Yes, I didn’t update in the morning :p We left Kurunegala in the wee hours of the morning to come back to Colombo and I went straight to work as soon as I got to Colombo. But that is another story and probably something that I would better leave for my entry on Solipsistic Meanderings (how’s that for a plug? :p) and instead talk about what I did yesterday in the way of coding – or at least site updates. Since I have not updated the individual application pages in ages, I decided to spend yesterday doing just that and even create a few new pages for apps that I’d released a while back but had not bothered to create application pages for.

Since I use DreamWeaver, I thought it would be a good idea to use a template for all the application pages since that would allow me to change the look of all the pages in one go without affecting the content. Of course, I had figured on this without taking my basic knowledge of DreamWeaver, bad documentation, being on dial-up and a few other factors into consideration :p I realized that when I used a template, that I couldn’t have a title of my choice for the page. I thought it would be as simple as changing the page properties after the page was created but it turned out to be not so simple. So I referred to the DreamWeaver help and while it had a lot of stuff on what to do in similar situations – it just didn’t have anything to do for this particular situation. Or it might just be that I wasn’t looking in the correct place due to preconceived notions as to what had to be done. Either way, several hours later and half the day wasted, I still hadn’t found a solution :p So I finally did what I should have done in the first place but was reluctant to do because I was on dial-up, I went online and searched for a solution.

I found a solution almost immediately (I think the second search result on Google if I recall correctly) and was finally able to change page titles. So then I set to work and either modified the existing pages for certain apps or created brand new pages for apps that did not have a page at all. The afternoon passed in creating screenshots, thumbnails and writing up descriptions of applications. I finally had a full list of applications except for Snipper – I actually created the app page for Snipper but couldn’t get any screenshots since I couldn’t compile it to run it :p I had left out one vital source file and so had to wait till I had access to that file before I could do anything. Oh well, at least I had everything else done and I uploaded it all today when I got to work. So enjoy all the brand new application pages on the sidebar :p

Yesterday I wasn’t at work since my parents decided to go to the house in Kurunegala since today is going to be the Ramadan festival and they didnt’ want to leave early at dawn today – there just was too much to do. Since I don’t much like traveling by bus (and the buses are going to be jam-packed with long queues since everybody would be going home for the festival), I went with them (plus they sorta asked me to do so :p) I had brought my computer and my source code for a few of my apps with me because I knew I was going to be bored silly and missing Jen to boot.

I started on the Nailer source hoping to fix a couple of minor bugs that Duane had mentioned – one was that the local copy path *had to* have a trailing backslash or the files went to the wrong location and the other was that the wizard acted up sometimes on the second run and the Next and Previous buttons weren’t enabled properly. He had also mentioned that clicking on the Add dialog did not bring up the file selection dialog even under NT4 and not just Win9x. So I wanted to fix these things but I ran into a few problems as soon as I started on the source. I had worked on Nailer till then on my work machine and it turns out that I didn’t have some of the components that I used there, on my home machine. The most important was a folder browser dialog which had been supplied as part of some component set or other. Since I didn’t have that component set on my home machine, I wrote a routine to call the Windows API SHBrowseForFolder call. This is what I should have done in the first place since this would have been less resource intensive than using a component (at least I think so) but I’d been too lazy at the time :p

I then turned my attention to the truant file selection dialog. I could have added a simple file open dialog and solved the problem but I wanted a real picture open dialog which allows you to preview the images before you select them. The solution? I wrote my own custom picture open dialog derived from the file open dialog. This took almost the whole day since I ran into some problems with the image management library that I use but I finally had it working the way I wanted. Implementing the other two fixes for the bugs that Duane mentioned were pretty trivial indeed by comparison :p Of course, it’ll take till tomorrow for this build of Nailer to be actually uploaded since I am on dial-up here in Kurunegala and can only connect at 16.8 – ugh 🙁 So give me till I can get back to Colombo and the new build will be up!

I am really happy about how the RookSoft forums are progressing 🙂 Yesterday Jen and I were on it and there were five other people on the forums at the same time as us! And I’m even more glad to see that now people are helping each other and I wouldn’t even have known how to answer some of these questions :p And yes, that *is* my pic but lay off my hair will you? :p As for the question as to how you can have *your* pic as your avatar, it’s simple enough. Upload your pic (maximum 80×80 in dimension and less than 6k in size) to your website so that it can be accessed via a URL (such as http://www.mysite.com/images/mypic.jpg) and then simply log in to the forums, select the profile option, check the delete this image checkbox at the very bottom under your avatar if you have one selected, submit, then go back to your profile and type in the URL to your image where space is given under the avatar section, submit and you are done 🙂

I did quite a few new releases yesterday since I did a new version of BOB, a brand new release of Nailer and also another build of BlogMan 1.0 Beta 1. Yes, I know that this is like the third or fourth new build of BlogMan 1.0 Beta 1 but since there are no new features and Beta 1 is still very basic, I see no point in changing the beta version number 🙂 Greg tells me that this particular build does actually work with B2 except for a few problems. So we are making progress.

I’ve already received a few bug reports about the wizard in Nailer since it tends to be a bit temperamental on the second run – the settings you enter are saved in an INI file but it doesn’t seem to work just right on a second run. I will fix those things and release a new build of Nailer soon. I’ve also heard that the image selection dialog for Nailer does not appear even under NT4 (not just Win9x) and so I might have to do something different about that too. We’ll see …

Duane had a nice idea today – he asked me if I’d considered having a support team for my software. Since this is pretty much a free effort, I am hesitant to ask anybody for a firm commitment to provide support – because I know you will have to do it in your spare time and that might be better utilized in some other way … such as spending it with your family. Plus, sometimes a commitment brings expectations on both sides – the users (and I too probably to an extent) would expect you to be there when needed and you would expect gratitude for what you do :p Unfortunately, neither side sometimes get what they want. So I am hesitant to ask anybody to become part of a support team but if anybody wants to volunteer, I would not say no either. Of course, all of you are free to provide support on a if-I-am-there-I-will-do-it basis as we’ve been doing all along – this is I guess an effort to formalize it a bit more so that even if I am unavailable due to something or other, there is somebody else you might be able to go to.

Stuff is happening thick and fast (sort of :p) on the coding front. I did some fixes on BlogMan but heard from Greg today that nothing at all seems to go out from BlogMan when he either saves or publishes to a B2 server. Now both B2 and Blogger use the BloggerAPI whereas Movable Type (which is what I use to test) uses the MetaBlogAPI in my implementation of BlogMan. So I am beginning to wonder if my implementation of the BloggerAPI is broken. I’ll have to try publishing to my old Blogger account and see if all is well there. I also need to write some documentation for Nailer and put that out there for you all to use but since documentation is a bane of my life, you might expect some reluctance from me :p

BOB is one of those apps which crops up at the most unlikely times :p I often think that I am the only person who is using it and then somebody comes up and requests a feature or a change 🙂 I just heard from a user who wants to use BOB but finds the UI unresponsiveness during an upload (due to the way the Indy FTP components works) to be disconcerting since he’s not sure if the app has stopped responding or if it is still working. I told him that I’d try to get that fixed (at least as far as I can) and get a new build out today. This is actually a problem that I have with all apps using Indy components – it’s there in Blog as well but you don’t notice it most of the time due to the fact that most of the uploaded files are so small. I need to sit down and try to find a workable solution for it but I never seem to have the time…

The forums at FirstLust seem to be a definite hit. Quite a few discussions have already started on various topics over there and I keep on posting since I want to get out of the No Flame ranking to the next one :p Incidentally if you are curious about the No Flame thing (there is a topic under the Chat forum about that) – it’s just a ranking system based on how many posts you make and since the imagery used is that of flames (and since flame has another meaning on the Net), I thought it would be funny to create a flame-based ranking system. OK, maybe it’s not *that* funny – but then again, I might be humour impaired :p

I’ve been doing some coding work too. I sort of refurbished Nailer so that the UI would be more informative and let the user know what is happening instead of simply displaying the hour-glass cursor for minutes on end and making you think that the program is stuck. Jen seems to be happy with it and so I think it is about time to release it to the public. Let me get some documentation done and it should be ready to go. Hopefully today but if not, in the next few days.

I also managed to find another proxy server to test out BlogMan with. This one’s called ComTun and was a 30-day trial but since I just wanted to get the proxy authentication stuff sorted out in BlogMan and won’t really need a proxy after that, I think I’m OK with that. Turns out that the original code that I’d used with BlogMan and the Indy HTTP component was correct after all – there was no bug with the proxy settings. It had all been the other free proxy server that I’d been using because I was able to both retrieve posts and publish posts to the server through the proxy using ComTun as the proxy server. So I uploaded a new build (still as BlogMan 1.0 Beta 1 :p) and I hope anybody who wanted to try out BlogMan with a proxy will find that it works for them now. Of course, I totally forgot to fix a few UI defects that Greg had pointed out to me – I keep on meaning to do that but then get caught up in something or other and forget about it. If the proxy stuff works, the next step will be to clean up the UI stuff, add more Blogger API or MetaBlog API supporting servers and add code to hide or show server specific UI elements. Then I should be ready to release the BlogMan 1.0 but I get ahead of myself – let’s do this a step at a time …