Our wacky calendaring system

Just a word of warning: this is not going to be a useful entry so if you're in a rush please feel free to skip it. ☺

I've been working on the calendar view in MacJournal off and on the past few days and the view itself matured very quickly. Then I put that done to work on some stuff for the new searching architecture. Now that that's looking better, I went back to the calendar view to get multiple selection working (so you select multiple dates to only show entries from those days). All I can say is that whomever designed our calendar obviously hated humanity. I mostly blame Julius Caesar: he had the chance to make it a lot more sane than the previous Roman calendar and accomplished some of it but he didn't go far enough. Obviously Julius Caesar when he designed the calendar in 45 BC had never written any code before and never had to describe a calendar and multiple discontinuous ranges of date selections in C.

I'm not really saying Pope Gregory hated humanity. But a zero-based array of days with a upper-limit that is easily expressed as a power of two would have made my life a lot easier right now. ☺

I don't yet know if the new searching will have any special UI in 3.1. It might not be prudent for this release. The search field and calendar view might be only ways to control the search for now. A special search window like Mail's Rules configuration is planned but will take a little while to implement so it's up in the air for now. There are other things I want to accomplish for 3.1 as well, such as a real way to start auto-scrolling in Full Screen mode (shift-command-2 was never meant to be a permanent solution) and a way to publish a journal to .Mac. We will see in time. 3.0.1 will be out very soon (the code is all finished) and I might start with 3.1 alphas sooner rather than later to just get the new features out there and in use.

I guess this did turn into a more useful entry than I had planned, but that's what happens when I get off topic and on to something actually informative.

MacJournal 3.0.1 tonight or tomorrow

Since I'm already knee deep in 3.1 stuff, I should probably release 3.0.1 before the water gets any closer to my waist. I will finish up 3.0.1 and make it available before the end of the month since the betas expire on Tuesday (although you can always use 3.0 after they expire). It should be a really good release.

I will also release 2.6.1 separately using the appropriate fixes from 3.0.1 as promised within the next few days.

Back to WordPress

Thanks to the suggestions I got I was able to do some testing with publishing to WordPress from MacJournal. From just the test text that I had everything seemed to work okay, titles included. Now, I know some people have had problems so I just don't have the right tests here. Can some that has had problems publishing before (specifically with the title) please send me some text that exhibits this problem? An RTF file would be super. At this point any changes are probably too late for 3.0.1 as that will most likely come out by the end of this week but a 3.0.2 release is a possibility and there's always 3.1.

Calendars and WordPress

Two topics to mention today:

Calendar view

I worked on a calendar view for 3.1 last night and it came out pretty well. It's not too attractive yet but it's functional. I just have to integrate it into the MacJournal UI in a meaningful manner. I've got a few thoughts on the best way to do that:

1. Clicking on a day will bring you to the first entry in the current journal from that day
2. Optionally, clicking on a day which does not have an entry will create an entry for that day (and maybe the current time)
3. Shift- and Command-Clicking on different days will start a search and only show entries from the selected days.

#3 is the most ambitious because this is something MacJournal's search engine can not yet do. However I was also ruminating over some enhanced search features (such as having an Advanced Search window with a bunch of options and such), so this might be the first usage of that.

WordPress

Does anyone know of a WordPress blog somewhere that has development accounts? I have accounts at Blogger and LiveJournal for testing protocol compliance and I'd like to test WordPress as well as it seems to be gaining in popularity. But the WordPress site itself just lets you download the server software; they don't have any servers up and running themselves. So I'm a little bit of a bind there and if anyone has any tips I'd be much obliged.

MacJournal 3.0.1b2

http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/dev.html

- Fixed Stats panel on Jaguar
- Contractions are no longer considered seperate words in the frequency analysis in the Stats panel
- Print margin settings are saved in between launches
- Fixed some rare erratic behavior (caused by exceptions)
- Fixed some more List Style behavior

Plus the following new localizations:

- French
- Danish
- Spanish
- Japanese
- German

The final release is close at hand.

MacJournal 3.0.1b1

MacJournal 3.0.1b1 has been released. It contains a few bug fixes and some localizations. More localizations will be coming soon. Read the release notes and version history for details about 3.0.1; it should fix up some issues that some people are seeing, i.e. Services.

http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/dev.html

MacJournal 3.0

MacJournal 3.0 has come out over at <http://marinersoftware.com/>! Sorry about the lack of announcement here; the past week has been very very hectic for me. I'm way behind on my e-mail too, so apologies to anyone that has e-mailed me in the past few weeks. I will get back to everyone eventually, I promise!

I'm going to post a beta of 3.0.1 tonight as localizations are updated. We've already got one back and I'm expecting a few more very soon. In the meantime there are a few bug fixes in the beta.

Localization

Localization information will be sent out very soon for 3.0.1. I’ve made a few small changes to the menus since 3.0b2 and I’ve updated the strings files to the current state. I have one more minor change to make (an invisible change) and then I will package them all up.