Angus Thinks…

Well no updates for a bit. Humm?

The main things I’ve been working on:

1) SQLEditor. Lots of things are being worked on. The user interface is being rewritten to improve speed and increase flexibility, the data layer is being rewritten to switch it to cocoa (instead of java), the JDBC code is being rewritten to make it use JNI instead of cocoa/java and a new crash reporting system based on Google BreakPad is being worked on. There are also some other things too like live source view and assorted bug fixes.
2) HTMLValidator. Also undergoing development. It recently moved across to use Sparkle (yey!) instead of the SQLEditor derived update system (which will also be replaced eventually). The final 1.0 release is due very soon now and several people have set in nice comments.
3) A new idea (still secret)

4) Web site improvements for malcolmhardie.com. Some have been deployed, others are still waiting to be deployed. Although the biggest one which is almost entirely invisible is the rewritten order processing system, which now supports multiple different products and better management features. But only I (and my somewhat-trusted minions) will ever see it.

Then when I’ve not been working I’ve been playing Pikmen on my new gamecube. (Many thanks to Leynos!). I’ve wanted to play this game properly for years and years and it definitely meets and exceeds my expectations.

Although I also played some theme hospital this morning using Parallels 3.0 (new release). It runs really nicely, although since it is an ancient game (1997) this shouldn’t be too surprising. I hope to try out some of my other really old games to see how they perfom under parallels.

SQLEditor 1.3.2 received a very limited release to a few selected testers at the end of 2006. However there were some additional issues that needed a bit more work, so the current plan is for a 1.3.3 release before the end of January.

SQLEditor 1.3.1 got released on Friday afternoon, this was really just a bug fix release which fixed a handful of problems that were identified. I think the only major fix was that the new UID system was slightly broken in that if you copied an object, or duplicated it in some cases, then SQLEditor would not always recreate the unique ID numbers that represent each object. This had the effect that if you copied an object, SQLEditor couldn’t distinguish between the objects when reloading and so all connectors would be attached to the original object and not the new one. An unfortunate bug.

It has now been fixed, along with slight improvements to image saving and a fix for a menu shortcut not being correct. The latter was an odd problem in that a shortcut was set, but it actually conflicted with an existing shortcut and the cocoa menu system is smart enough not to display the same shortcut for more than one menu.

[Download] 2.8MB DMG

For some reason also I don’t think I posted about the 1.3 release. But the 1.3 release was posted on November 23rd and is the first non-beta release to be released since May 2006. It rolled all of the improvements that had been made during the beta testing phase into a new release and is definitely worth upgrading (especially since the upgrade is free). However the 1.3 release has been superceded by the 1.3.1 release, so download that instead.

About the new MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog.

The new weblog will contain posts about SQLEditor and other products.

If you already reading Angus Thinks you probably don’t need to read the MalcolmHardie weblog as well because all the posts on the MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog will appear on Angus Thinks.

This mirroring is done using the xmlrpc api and code from the blogger api plugin for wordpress