Solipsism Gradient

The source code page is up, with version 1.0 of RBSplitView as the first item. I’ve also opened up a support forum for source code. Enjoy!

After some very tense days, I’m up and running on the new hosting provider: DreamHost. Prices are good, support seems to be fast and quite good, and there’s lots of options. More if you buy before year’s end; if you do so, be sure to mention my domain name as the referrer, or click through from the link above; I’ll get a modest commission.

The Santy worm, now apparently renamed Spyki, is still pounding the servers in ever-new combinations. Still, the security hole remains closed and I have added some new stuff to avoid having the server respond to the worm, which should ease the load quite a bit. If you have seen the site responding very slowly or even not at all during the last two days, it was a hardware problem and should be fixed by now.

Some other things are still shaking out but everything should return to normal on January 1st. In particular, Bill Bumgarner has tested RBSplitView and made some interesting suggestions; so have several other developers. It seems I should put up a new “source code” page with that and other goodies, so that will be my first priority.

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

… In particular, Bill Bumgarner has tested RBSplitView and made some interesting suggestions; so have several other developers. It seems I should put up a new “source code” page with that and other goodies, so that will be my first priority.

While I’m working on the source code page, Erik Barzeski of Freshly Squeezed Software wrote on his NSLog() that they’ll be using RBSplitView in their new version of PulpFiction:

Total time to convert from our hacked up NSSplitView (which can be collapsed, stores sizes, has minimum sizes before collapsing, etc.) to RBSplitView and to add the feature I just mentioned: about ten hours. Coded, bug fixed, and tested.

Now that’s the sort of thing I like to read…

Also, Steve Gehrman, the mastermind behind CocoaTech, will be using RBSplitView in the forthcoming version of Path Finder. My thanks to all who’ve helped with suggestions and debugging!

Meanwhile, I’ve belatedly noticed that my last post below was #1000, and that this weblog’s second anniversary has passed unnoticed on last Sept. 21st. Not bad…

Suddenly, a number of XRay users began e-mailing me with questions about a supposed version 4 (!), or saying that someone else had published an application with the same name, and that I should do something about it.

Well, I already knew there was a video app around called DivXRay (as well as dozens of Windows app with various spellings of the name), but nobody had ever confused them before… but upon checking more closely, there certainly was a new app there called XRay 4. Worse, their website made reference to “XRay 3” and “XRay 2”, and as you all know, I’m still working on XRay 2 myself… so something indeed had to be done.

I e-mailed Martin Hering, the author of the application, and in some few minutes we had a long conversation over iChat. He’s German too, so I got a chance to practice . Turns out he was indeed the author of DivXRay, took it with him when he left the company that formerly sold it, and had now shortened the name of the new version at the request (with a cease&desist, I suppose) of DivX.

He wasn’t at all overjoyed at the news that he would have to change the name again – especially since he’s already selling boxed CDs in German stores. However, XRay is a common enough word – although not in that particular spelling – so my intentions were just to avoid user confusion on VersionTracker and MacUpdate. We finally agreed that he would call the application “XRay Video 4” on those sites, and that we would link to each other’s sites to avoid user confusion; since our apps are not competitors, that’s quite satisfactory for me.

Well, there’s a lesson here: searching carefully for existing application names (and trademarks) is always advisable…

jason wrote:

Just discovered your new-and-improved split view. VERY COOL!

Thanks for sharing it with the community.

Thanks, feedback so far has been very positive.

jason wrote:

I was wondering if might have some pointers on modifying the framework to incorporate rearranging the subviews via drag-and-drop. This is cool feature of Eclipse and seems to a natural enhancement to your objects.

How much effort do you think this would take?

Very interesting suggestion, I hadn’t thought of that – I’m not a Eclipse user.

The user interface would need some place where you can “grab” a subview to drag it over; the rearrangement itself shouldn’t be difficult. Offhand I can’t think of an unobtrusive way to do that, however. If the subviews had title bars – like the columns in NSTableViews – it might be possible. Hm…

Posted by jason:
Just discovered your new-and-improved split view. VERY COOL!

Thanks for sharing it with the community.

I was wondering if might have some pointers on modifying the framework to incorporate rearranging the subviews via drag-and-drop. This is cool feature of Eclipse and seems to a natural enhancement to your objects.

How much effort do you think this would take?

thanks,

– jason

My RBSplitView seems now to be working well – I killed all known bugs in the implementation itself, and nearly all in the Interface Builder palette. There’s a sample application and documentation, and some developers seem to be interested in using it in production code. So, unless a serious bug is discovered in the next few days, I’ll call this version 1.0 and make a separate “Source Code” page here.

Thanks to Steve Gehrman of CocoaTech for helping with debugging and offering many suggestions. I also looked at dozens of code examples of IBPalettes and NSSplitView subclasses and learned a little from every one, although I didn’t copy any actual code.

Now at last – hopefully – we’ll return to our regular programming…

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…but seems to working quite well.

Hah. That was somewhat premature… I tried to put some new features into my RBSplitView, and found several bugs in the process. The main addition – an option to force subviews to always have a dimension multiple of some integer – failed after several days of beating all available neurons against it. It’s just too complex and I have urgent things to do elsewhere.

So, if you’re interested, you can download it from the above link, and please let me know if you find something wrong – or even if it works spectacularly well. Meanwhile, I plan to resume work on XRay, using the new view, of course, early next week.