Project Status Report: November 2007

I have way too many irons in the fire right now. I thought I’d offer a quick status report on various projects so that those of you who are waiting for particular updates have an idea what’s happening…

Ajax Contact Form

The old contact form continues to get a lot of hits. I don’t support it anymore. The code’s a mess and it’s far enough out of mind that troubleshooting is a serious time consumer. So basically, use it at your own risk, hack away at the code, but don’t expect a lot of help from me. I say this with a certain amount of regret, as I love helping people out, but I also tend to be constantly working on new projects and couldn’t possibly offer support on every project I’ve ever undertaken. Know what I mean?

Jott2iGTD

This is, in most cases, currently broken. The next incarnation of it will bypass Mail.app and will not be based on Rubycocoa, so all of the current missing library issues will be a moot point. Development is on hold, though, until a few external circumstances work themselves out. First, I need to know more about the future of iGTD and whether or not I’m interested enough in it to dedicate the time to updating for it. For all I know, this could become Jott2OmniFocus. My current thought is that I’ll create a generic parser that can output the necessary parts of a task update and then be able to create modules, probably in Applescript, that can update different GTD apps. That way, you could use it for GTDAlt in TextMate, or just append tasks to a text file if you wanted to. It would be more useful to more people and if I could find maintainers for the various modules, it would be a lot less work to maintain. So there is no Jott2iGTD at the current moment, but it will be revisited and reincarnated in the near future.

MoodBlast

MoodBlast is under heavy development. I know updates have been stagnant for a while, but that’s because it’s undergoing some major changes, not the least of which is a conversion to a low-priced shareware application. The syntax is more usable, the live counter is far more accurate with Facebook strings, there are a host of UI improvements (tons) and a lot of changes based on user feedback. I’m hoping that Pownce will have updates in their API in time for the release, which would make it a complete package. I expect the shareware release to happen in the next week or so.

Here’s the way the changelog is shaping up:

• Revamped input UI, input is a text field (with margins)
  • ↓ moves to end
  • ⌘-↓ opens history menu
  • Selecting a history item doesn’t submit automatically
  • Scrolling through menu won’t delete current text
• Small Interface Redesign. Okay, total revamp.
• Lighter weight. 25% of the size of the last update.
• Super-fast Blasting.
  • Blasts to external web services are submitted in the background.
  • The panel is movable and can be closed while a blast is still running.
  • Notifications are posted as individual blasts complete.
  • Services are sent simultaneously (almost) and no longer wait for each other.
  • Option in preferences to preemptively hide before blast.
• Ignores Facebook additions in character counts
• Reformats Facebook specialties for easy viewing in test panel
• Loosened up =[x|y] syntax
  • Either x or y can be omitted, the | (pipe) will still be honored
  • Refresher: x goes to Facebook only, y goes to everything else
• Multiple +[], -[] and =[x|y] strings allowed in a blast
• Stored Facebook Permissions in user defaults to speed launch time
• Improved handling of return\escape key when test panel is open
  • After test panel opens, escape will close and cancel, return will apply replacements
  • Applied replacements save time in posting by not re-running them
• Enabled “go offline” support in Adium 1.2svn
  • Originally disabled due to Adium bug, fixed in latest svn build
• Keyboard shortcuts for +/- in statuses
• New time variables
  • %fuzzy: textual time approximation (quarter to six)
  • %rounded: time rounded to nearest typical syntax
• Removed Yappd due to site closing
• Test Panel and URL Auto-Grab feature clear out line-breaks now
• Progress indicators for each service, while control is returned to the user almost immediately after pressing the send button
• URLs equal to or shorter than 22 characters are not sent for shortening
• More status updates in panel about current activity (getting weather, shortening links, etc.)
• Fixes for Jaiku location, optional default location in preferences
• Handling for multiple links in a blast, only first link is shortened and dealt with in a special manner.

Miscellany

“Open in TextMate” for Path Finder was broken somewhere in the last couple Path Finder releases, hoping to fix that soon. Wordpress plugins desperately need updating that may never happen. I still haven’t had a chance to see if Autotag has any hope of working with the latest version of Wordpress, but that’s on my “future” plans. And yes, I intend to revisit the Wordpress Bundle for TextMate eventually, but that will probably be after the 2.0 release of TextMate. That should be about it, let me know if you’re looking for something I left out.