What's it all about, Alfie?

You have to love Twitter for application updates. It seems to be the mechanism for indie Mac developers. Well... today I got a tweet saying that Fission 1.6 was out with a lot of improvements:

The biggest update is that Fission now has built-in iPhone Ringtone saving, using the same method found in our MakeiPhoneRingtone application. With Fission, you can take any audio file in any format (not just AAC), and easily turn it into a ringtone/alarm sound for your iPhone! Just crop it down to 40 seconds or less, then choose “Save as iPhone Ringtone”, and Fission will handle the rest. Your file will be transcoding to AAC if needed, then passed off to iTunes and ready for syncing.

Fission 1.6 also adds the ability to Insert Silence into a file, a command to set the exact location of the playhead, software updates via Sparkle, and almost two dozen additional improvements and bug fixes. It’s a free update for all licensed owners of Fission, and can be downloaded right here.

While I'm not into the iPhone scene -- yet, I can appreciate the Sparkle updater and the ability to make the ringtones as good, solid steps in the right direction.

This morning I noticed that BBEdit 9.0.2 was released with a ton of fixes and a few new features. Probably the most interesting new thing is the ability to choose the language on the scratchpad so that it can have syntax coloring. There were also fixes in the Javascript and HTML parsing. Lots of little things, which is nice to see.

A few days ago a developer stopped by to ask me if I could make a change to the BKit graphs as he had heard from the users that they didn't like the default behavior - bug is what he used, but it really wasn't.

Basically, if you pull up any graph, and then zoom in on a section of it with the mouse, and then change the axes the zoom remains in effect until you tell it to reset by clicking on it with the mouse. It's an orthogonal control set - zoom is one thing - axis control another. Seems simple to me. Sigh... not so to others.

He said they wanted to have the zoom reset (zoomed out) all the way when the axes were changed. I can see this. But I can also see the default behavior. He agreed that there were two ways of looking at it - but I'm guessing that he was only interested in saying what would get me to put in the feature he wanted. So be it.

So we settled on an option that can be given to the graphs, or set in the applet PARAM tags that will tell the graph when it changes the data sets to reset the zoom all the way out. The problem came in when I tried to find out how to do this in VantagePoint. It wasn't obvious, I tell you that. This was made for the mouse actions and not programmatically. So I had to send off an email to their tech support and see what I was missing.

Turns out, the tech support agrees with me that this wasn't easy to find, and the code to do it wasn't obvious either. But with two calls you can reset an axis, and given that we have two, and sometimes three, axes to deal with. I put the code into resetZoomOnGraph() and then added an ivar to see if we needed to call this on changes to the graph. If so, then call it, if not, no biggie. Either way, there's a way to do it manually now, which is nice.

I've got all the code ready to go, and as soon as I get the fix for the other VantagePoint bug I've got pending with them, I'll check it all in and then let the guys know that the new applet tag is there for their use and they can have it anyway they want.

Most of today I've been messing with getting the secondary Y axis on the BKSimpleLineGraphApplet in BKit to work with an additional list of the columns of data for the secondary axis. Basically, a guy stopped by and asked if it would be possible to make the dual-Y axis line graph have two lists at the top: one for the primary Y axis and the other for the secondary Y axis. That way, the user could pick what they wanted to plot on the "left" and what they wanted to plot on the "right".

Something like this:

The problem is that I got a lot of it working with just a few additional applet param tags, but there were problems with the selection of the columns of data for the secondary Y axis. I'd say show me the third column, and it'd show me the first. Very odd. I spent quite a while on this until I checked how the BKFixedLineGraphApplet worked -- It had the same problem! This shouldn't be as I wasn't messing with it at all. So there had to be a low-level issue in the BKBaseGraph when dealing with multiple Y axes.

I started running a lot of tests. What it appears to be is an issue with VantagePoint where no matter what 'Variables' you tell it to put on the secondary Y axis, it's only going to put one of the first two. Essentially taking the column number modulo 2.

Ask for columns 2 and 3 (zero-biased indexes) and you'll get columns 0 and 1. Ask for 1 and 2 and you'll get 1 and 0. Very odd. When I tried out the BKSimpleLienGraphApplet with multiple lines on the secondary Y axis, I saw that I picked up on what VantagePoint had thrown down: the first two columns - no matter what. Wild.

So tomorrow I'm going to have to send Gordon an email saying what I've found and asking if the most recent version he's sending me to fix the problem with multiple Y axes and version 4.6.6 will fix this as well. Because I'm sure not going to deliver this to the users - they wanted the pick lists in order to select what's on each axis. As it is now, it's really too broken to deploy.

This morning I saw that DrawIt 3.7 is out with lots of new features and bug fixes. I haven't seen a lot of changes in the UI, but I thought I read in the release notes that it's easier to resize the workarea, but I'm not positive about that. In general, it's my vector drawing app, and had to keep up to date.

There seemed to be a few issues with categories on a few blogging systems, and so a fix was put in the code and MarsEdit 2.2.2 was released today. I'm a WordPress-guy, so this didn't really effect me, but it's nice to see that progress is being made.

I do wish he'd add in a better media component. Something that allowed me to manage it independently from the app, and flickr pictures. Nothing major, as I have Skitch for that, but it'd be nice.

I can handle being questioned about the work I do. I know to many it's a series of rules that ends up with numbers that seem to defy explanation. But they all make sense, and when I put them in front of people, they all agree. "Oh... now I get it." is very common for me to hear. And for the most part, I don't mind explaining the way things work to people. Sure... if this is the fifth time I've explained the same thing to the same person, I'm going to get a little miffed because they clearly aren't listening, but barring that, I can explain this stuff to anyone.

Today, however, there have been a ton of questions from folks that aren't careful with what they are saying, or what I'm saying in return. If you're sloppy with the wording of your question, and I read it literally, then you might not get the answer you're looking for. I don't apologize for this, it's important - ask me what you want to know - and be accurate with your choice of words.

So we end up with these horrendous email chains. Even this, I see value in because it's teaching people that I'll be glad to answer their questions, they just have to be careful about what they ask. Better to be more general with the question than too specific. But what really gets me chapped is the complete and total bungling of a project my micromanagement.

If you're smart enough to be able to effectively micromanage, then that's OK... you're a partner to me in the process. I can live with that. It's a division of labor. But if you're not that smart, or well-versed in the topic, then you had better back off a little as you're going to mess things up and make both of us look bad.

Case in point - this long email chain. It started out by a user asking what's changed. In my mind, nothing. Since I was point on this project, I answered - Nothing. Then the micromanager that decided not to tell me what's going on chimes in saying "Well... this and this have changed." Nice... now we both look stupid. He's not able to effectively answer questions without me as he's not got the domain knowledge, and I can't force him to keep me in the loop on his other changes as he's the manager.

So to the others, we look like Keystone Cops. What a joke.

It doesn't matter that the changes didn't effect the quality of the data, they were changes that the user can believe might have changed the quality and it's just another thing we have to battle for no good reason. If you're going to micromanage, then you have to be really capable of it.

So the upshot of this is that I refuse to take point with this guy again. He can field all the questions, ask me what he wants, I'll answer him, and then he can answer them. If he wants to be a manager, then he had better be a manager. I'm not going to take any more heat for his mistakes - including mistakes in miscommunication, again.

I've been dealing with some users in London, and while I haven't worked with them in the past, I hadn't expected what I received either - near paralyzing panic towards any change. It was almost funny, if it weren't so sad, and they have the final sign-off on the deployment of the work I've been doing of late.

They want to think of themselves as "clued-in"... you know, aware of the ins and outs, the whys and wherefores, of everything that's going on. They are, after all, the users, the Big Cheese. You don't get much more important than that. But in reality, they are people, no more, no less, and have limited attention spans, and finite memories, and make just as many mistakes as the rest of us do.

So when one of the users doesn't like the price my injector is sending in, he calls it a "bug". Fair enough, he doesn't know it's acting exactly as it's supposed to - he sees something acting different from what he expects and it's a problem. So I explain it to him. I explain that there are rules that are followed, and why. I explain all this to him so that he understands that it's not a bug, it's a conscience decision. I feel that he may not be happy about the outcome, but at least he knows it's not a mistake.

Or so I thought...

Next he starts talking to other folks about the "bug" he's working on. Sigh... it's not a bug, I explain again, this time to a larger audience, it's a design choice made by the heads of the business, and not to be changed lightly. But it can be changed, if necessary. At this point, I think it's explained well... with examples and reasons for the individual rules.

Sigh...

I see it coming up again. Now I know this guy is not dumb... he's probably just not paying attention to the things I'm saying. Ignoring the details of my messages and just reading what he wants to read -- "You're not going to get it." From there, it's a simple "Oh yes I am!" and we're off to the races.

In other situations, this guy is probably a decent guy. But here and now, he's making me realize that I need to use smaller words, and treat him as I would a child. I have no desire to do this, but it's the only way to keep from wasting both our times. It's working the way it's meant to work, so it's not a "bug"... please stay with me, here, people.

On my way in this morning, I was thinking again about scientific visualization, and in particular, VRML. It's an interesting technology that I never got to do a lot of experimentation on at the time of my thesis, but since then, I've thought it would have been a wonderful way to visualize the results of the simulations. Given that I hadn't updated my VRML viewer on OS X in a while, I decided to see if FreeWRL had been updated recently.

Luckily, it had - to 1.21.0.

Interestingly, there now seems to be a vrml.jar that's part of the package, but I can't find a thing on it on the FreeWRL site. Maybe it's something that's in the beginning stages, but what a hoot to have it embed-able in a Java application. Interesting possibilities.

The tests work great on my aging MacBook Pro. Very nice indeed.

UPDATE: I found that there are a few tools for Blender to allow you to import and export VRML 2.0 files. This would be nice if I were creating them by hand, and it's nice to know about. I just need the talent now 🙂

This morning, I saw that Perian 1.1.2 was released fixing the problem that the updater never actually ran, thus making it impossible to use the built-in update mechanism. Additionally, some of the video stream codecs were dropping some frames. I hadn't noticed the latter, but I had certainly noticed the former. I was thinking Why is this taking so long?

Well, there's my answer. It wasn't ever going to complete. So I'm glad I went and grabbed a copy myself. Nice to have if you have media you have to deal with.