10.21.07
Posted in Life, Open Source
at 12:43 am
by Smokey
Not too long ago, someone emailed me looking for a Mac OS X version of the excellent libwpd tools for converting WordPerfect documents. Said correspondant had found my email and a now-404ed URL from a message in a mailing list archive, but couldn’t find a live version of the tools. After that, I told myself I needed to do a better job of blogging about libwpd and our releases, so that there would be fresher hits and valid URLs in search engines.
To that end, we released libwpd-0.8.12 earlier this month (it’s been a busy one for me, hence the delay). The main addition in this version is Fridrich’s fine work in bringing support for tabs and text alignment in WordPerfect 5 and WordPerfect for Mac 2.x and 3.x documents. Tabs and text alignment are probably the last common, “daily-use” features that were not converted in these document formats, and they are now supported more-or-less on par with WordPerfect 6/7/8/9/10/11/12 documents. This release is great news for Mac users who formerly used WordPerfect, as document fidelity should be much improved. In addition, for the first time ever, the Mac OS X versions of the tools are Universal Binaries.
Meanwhile, Fridrich is pushing forward on support for converting text and image boxes for the 0.9 series. Great things are in store for the future.
In the meantime, you can download the libwpd command-line tools (and an AppleScript wrapper for wpd2sxw) for Mac OS X from the project site and go convert documents with tabs until you’re blue in the face. Enjoy!
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10.11.07
Posted in Camino, Software
at 5:17 pm
by Smokey
Back in August, Peter wrote about his work on creating an infrastructure for custom toolbar items. If you can dream it—and write it in AppleScript—you can have it in your Camino toolbar. After a long period of code review, comments, and some last-minute fixes from Peter, I’m happy to announce the toolbar capability has landed in nightly builds of Camino (both branch and trunk) and will be in Camino 1.6.
Here’s how it works:
- You write an AppleScript to do something useful, perhaps string together a few commands from Camino’s enhanced AppleScript support, or to connect Camino to another app on your Mac, or whatever you can dream.
- Save your new script as a (compiled) script, script bundle, application, or application bundle—even text (
.applescript) files will work.
- Give your script an icon (I can hear the phones ringing off the hook at the studios of our local icon designers!).
- Put your script in the
~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Camino folder (creating any of those folders if necessary).
- Launch a Camino nightly (October 10th or newer).
- Customize the toolbar and add your script.
And you’re off! Show us what you can dream up!
No introductory post is complete without some sample code, so I’m happy to announce Clone Tab and Combine Windows to get everyone started pimping their toolbars!
Thanks to Peter for all the AppleScript work this summer and for handling all my “bugs,” and to his partner in Summer of Camino 2, Jeff Dlouhy, for the rockin’ icons!
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10.03.07
Posted in Camino, Life
at 11:17 pm
by Smokey
Recently, some people have apparently grown tired of checking in the increasingly-large number of patches I’ve been generating. After a little bit of pushing from Sam, I finally filed a bug requesting cvs write access to the mozilla.org source repository, attached the supporting documents and whatnot, and ended up with approval to check in code. (Write access and approval to check in code to a source code repository is a major rite of passage in modern open-source projects.) Being somewhat exhausted last night, I followed good check-in practices and abstained from committing any patches. 
This afternoon, however, I landed the patch to upgrade the Flash-blocking code in Camino to the latest stable version of Flashblock. In fact, I landed the code on the trunk, the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH for Camino 1.6a1, and the CAMINO_1_5_BRANCH for Camino 1.5.2, for the vaunted (and somewhat cumbersome) “triple.”
To follow-up on that (and fix a bug that’s annoyed me for quite some time), I landed R P Mozley’s patch for bug 287709, giving our toolbar progress spinner (née throbber) an obvious inactive state on the trunk and the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH.
And the tree’s still green (actually, I turned the tree red for the first time a long time ago); here’s to it staying green for years to come!
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