What's it all about, Alfie?

I've a big fan of Gus M's work at Flying Meat, and this morning I was reading about his alternative to AppleScript - JSTalk. The idea is simple - when creating a Mac app, adding AppleScript support is something most users expect from a high-quality app. But from what I've heard, and Gus seconds this, doing so is not easy which is why not all things you can do in an app can be done within AppleScript. In many cases, it's a limited subset.

So Gus made JSTalk - built on JSCocoa and WebKit's JavaScriptCore, that allows you to write JavaScript and interact with an application on that level as opposed to using AppleScript. He's got a command-line tool, an editor, and a framework for people to put into their apps to allow it to be 'automated' from JSTalk. The examples are compelling. The ideas are pretty sound.

What remains to be seen is how many will adopt it. It's all open source on the MIT license on GitHub, so it's there for the looking, fixing, using. If I had an app, I'd look at using this because there are a lot more people that know JavaScript than know AppleScript. It's just a language that not a lot of folks spend the time to learn.

So I'm going to keep an eye on this... if I make an app, I'll use it. It looks very nice, and all the hard work is done. Glad to see an alternative to AppleScript.

There were a few bugs in Snapshot 43, so the MacVim team worked on them and today I got an email notice that Snapshot 44 is out. This fixes various issues with the display as well as the python syntax highlighter.

Glad to hear about it. Got it right away.

Once again, there's a raft of security fixes necessitating a new release of Firefox. Seems reasonable, but it's amazing the number of security fixes that there are these days. Maybe it's the increased attention each platform is getting, but I have to wonder if it's not, at least in part, due to sloppy coding. Sure, it's a complex bit of software, but still...

Oh well... it's easy enough to update, and so I do - for all the obvious reasons.

Daniel tweeted that he found a much faster way of browsing the flickr picture stream for the media manager, and so this morning I saw that MarsEdit 2.3.1 is out with this enhancement. Nice to see.

I'm not that big of a flickr fan, but I can understand that there are tons of folks that are, and for them, this is a real boon. Good enough.

I was coding fast and furious today - trying to get the back-end persistence into a web servlet I was writing. The requests were being handled perfectly, the first-line persistence was great in an in-memory H2 database, and the back-end MS SQL Server database was the saving, I just wasn't able to load the data from the back-end store on restart. Something was causing the servlet to have problems on startup.

In order to get the last 14 days of data from the back-end, I had code that looked like this:

  // create the Calendar with today's date
  GregorianCalendar    start = new GregorianCalendar();
  // set it back two weeks for the SQL statement
  start.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, -14);
  SimpleDateFormat  fmt = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
  // build up the SQL
  String  sql = "select * from portfolio where acquired > '" +
                fmt.format(start) + "'";

And for about 20 mins I was wondering what on earth is wrong with the formatter that's causing the problem? I was looking at the spelling of the class... the format string... all kinds of things.

And then it hit me. Duh!

I couldn't believe that I'd spent all that time looking at the code and not realizing that I was passing in the wrong argument to the formatting. Funny thing was, it wasn't caught by the compiler. Wild.

Just goes to show that even pros make silly mistakes.

This morning there was another update to Skitch - this time to Beta 8.1. The release notes say that it's related to PPC issues on 10.4 and the ability to snap X11 windows and the DVD Player application. Good enough for me. Gotta update Skitch - it's one of my favorite apps.

This morning there was a big update for iWork '09 and iLife '09 on Software Updates. I'm assuming it's bug fixes and security fixes. iWeb has a fix for publishing via FTP to a site that's not .Mac. iMovie has general fixes and usability issues addressed. iPhoto has similar stability and usability issues addressed, and iWork says it's "just needed". Sounds very stability and security orientated to me.

Gotta get it - even if it means a reboot.

Had a pretty nice day today... kept very busy, got a lot of things done, but at the end of the day I had a meeting with my new manager and the list of expectations for April are daunting to say the least. Not that it's all that hard - it's just all things that are somewhat out of my control and I have no idea how to do them. For instance, getting machines set up in New York and London. Now, at my old job, I knew all the ins-n-outs of doing this and could get it done with a very predictable timeline. Here? I've no idea how the process works. I know what Liza would say - give it time, it's all part of the learning process. But it doesn't keep me from feeling like a slacker.

I then started to look back at my day - a day that was filled with lots of coding on the web site I'm working on, but all of a sudden it didn't seem like I had actually done all that much. I didn't have a lot more new to show for it, but I know the infrastructure in the web app had to be built and there was a significant amount of work there.

I know it's all just self-doubt. I need to put in the time and keep focused on the day-to-day and let the months take care of themselves. There's no doubt I can get all this, but it's nonetheless a little daunting when faced with it all at once.

I just need to keep my head down and keep working.

Today I spent a lot of time getting the UI of the project I'm working on working nicer given the fake test data I've got in the system. It turned out to be the right thing to do as the amount of data slowed the page responsiveness significantly, and therefore sent me down the path of adding a calendar to the page to interact with the graph so that you can see a day's worth of data at a time.

When you're only looking at a day's worth of data, it's not bad. But what was most interesting to me was the JavaScript that drove the page. I've never been one for the whole Web 2.0 thing, but today I'm a believer. It's pretty amazing. The point is not to put computation in the page, but to have the user's event flow in the page. That way, you can fire off requests to the back-end for data, and populate it into the GUI components without having to reload the page. It really isn't that hard.

I know the little app isn't all that much, but if things work out, it's going to make a significant impression on the users, and it's really amazingly interactive. I have to say, it's something that I'm glad I'm doing. Nice addition to my tool chest.

My favorite image editor was updated today - Acorn is at 1.5.2 and has a spiffy new icon to boot. The release fixed a few brush issues, and a few crashing bugs, but nothing that seemed to impact me - save the icon. Still... always nice to get the latest goodies.

Excellent work.