Solipsism Gradient

Well, Zingg! 1.3 is out.

It took a few days longer than I expected. First there were some more bugs and suggestions; then I tested it on Jaguar and two things didn’t work at all; and finally I had a run-in with configuration problems for my local database server. If you’re wondering about the last item, it’s because Zingg! 1.3 now incorporates the latest version of my online version-checking code… which incidentally feeds me the user’s version of Mac OS X for my statistics.

As I type this, the VersionTracker page counts 387 downloads. If past stats are any indication, that means about 800 or 900 downloads total… many people go directly to my site. My site statistics run every midnight, so I have no exact figures yet. Meanwhile, 206 of those people (let’s say 25%) used the new version-checking code. 204 are on Mac OS X 10.3.2, 2 are on 10.3.1. No earlier versions at all! I’ll have to check whether this is a bug or a reliable statistic…

Then again, this is good news, as I’d like to do Panther-only software in the near future. I’ll try and hurry up the next version of XRay to get stats from those users, too.

The Jaguar incompatibilities were quite puzzling. The Zingg! Configurator relies on a main NSTableView to show a list of applications. I wanted to allow the user to sort the table by any of the 4 table columns. The standard way of doing this, by clicking on the column headers, seemed simple to implement. Since I used NSURL objects to store the application names and paths, I subclassed this to store a complete table row in each object and then used the standard NSArray sortedArrayUsingSelector: method to sort this in different ways. It worked on the first try on my Panther development machine… but then in Jaguar it threw an exception indicating that my subclassing wasn’t working at all.

This was complicated by the fact that I’ve migrated all my projects to Xcode, so I couldn’t use a debugger on the Jaguar machine… but I finally found some hints that the NSURL internal workings had changed significantly from Jaguar to Panther – apparently it used to be a class cluster, but wasn’t anymore. To save time, I changed from a is-a to a has-a pattern for my table row object, and this worked again.

Then I ran into a Jaguar bug: the delegate tableView:didClickTableColumn: method isn’t always called, unlike in Panther. The workaround is to turn on the option to allow column reordering (by drag&drop) – I thought it kind of useless but found no other way.

Then (after already uploading the disk image) I had to go back and rewrite the docs for the changes… c’est la vie. At least it’s out now and no bug report’s arrived so far…

Tomorrow morning the vacation’s over. Whew. It’s been marvelous: no interruptions, good food, beach runs after sundown, lots of coconuts and peace to work on my software; and terrible: heat, unrelenting sun, mosquitoes, constant Axé music thumpa-thumping along somewhere in the background, spotty Internet access and the general discomfort of being away from home.

The good news is that, as seems to become traditional over the Christmas holidays, I found time to do a new version of Zingg!, with lots of new goodies. Expect it in a couple of days; I just need to do some more testing and of course, constant Internet access to do all the publishing, notifications and hands-on support for early adopters.