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Mon 02 May 2011
DuoMo
Category : Technology/Duomo.txt
This my GoLive/Dreamweaver replacement. It's tentatively called DuoMo, as in the Duomo, a cathedral. I was reading Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, when I started work on it and felt that building a website, or an OS X/iPhone/iPad app, for that matter, is a lot like building a cathedral.
I was using BBEdit to write my weblog entries but I've always wanted a wysiwyg (do people still say wysiwyg? what you see is what you get?) editor, that'll look exactly like my weblog entry on my actual web page, and where I don't have to enter HTML markups like <b>bold</b> for bold text, or to set the paragraph style, like :
Or where I can simply drag an image into the blog entry and the app would bring the image over to the right folder (and possibly scale it to fit the weblog page). And where I can create a web link just by control-clicking on a text range and entring the link address.
No more messing with HTML. Plus unlimited Undo support.
It's all done with the magic of editable WebKit, which is the basis for the Safari web browser.
So, this is a closeup of the blog editor I built into DuoMo :
So far I've managed to make DuoMo workable even over a very slow web connection, as when you're using the iPhone 4's Personal HotSpot feature to share your 3G connection with your MacBook. In such a case, GoLIve won't even work, with the spinning beach ball going on and on forever and you have to Force-Quit GoLive when you try to connect back to your web server.
Doing a sync with the home site is still rather slow with DuoMo (if via the iPhone's shared 3G connection, but it'll simply fly over WiFi because I've spent hours figuring out where the app spends its network connection time) but that's the great thing about writing your own code and building your own tools. I feel that I should be able to fix that also somehow, given time.
Posted at 11:39PM UTC | permalink
Some preliminary thoughts on OS X Lion Development
Category : Technology/OSXLionDev.txt
I've prepared one machine to run OS X Lion on one partition and Lion Server on another, so I should be all set to go to move all my apps over to Lion.
But it's not quite as easy as that.
First, all Lion development is done on the new version 4 of Xcode, which brings about significant changes to the way things used to be done. So far, I'm loving the new software development workflow in Xcode 4. After one month of work, I believe I'm really more productive on it than on Xcode 3.
But it's not all good, of course. Things inevitably break - e.g., my database access frameworks for MySQL, Postgres and SQLite. I needed some time to get used to the new Xcode build settings before I could figure out how to get them working again, including building for iPhone and iPad which are, of course, on another platform architecture altogether (i.e., Arm 6 and 7, as opposed to Intel x386, 32 or 64 bit). There are all these variations to build fat binaries for, and every time Apple changes something major like this, I go through this sinking feeling that I may never get things to work again.
Then there's this thing about FTP not being supported in Lion, i.e., you can't seem to be able to ftp onto a Lion server. There's no obvious way to turn it on - not in Sharing Preferences or even in Lion Server (I think).
I've been using this decade-old Adobe GoLive technology to manage my web site's static web pages, so this seems like the end of the road for it. I don't want to use any Adobe stuff when I move to Lion (or Microsoft stuff, for that matter).
So I've been building this GoLive/DreamWeaver replacement for myself, that I'm now using to write this weblog on (among the things I've made it able to do), and that'll be my key web site creation/management tool in Lion.
More on all these developmen later. But, in summary, I've got the piececs I need to move on to Lion development in earnest now. Hope I won't be too late for its launch.
Posted at 7:40AM UTC | permalink
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