wire_v0.8.3

Magical days.. not getting a lot of coding in, though. Had three wee sessions since we last spoke.

° Fixed a couple of minor bugs in the directory handling of the drag-n-send™ window. As well as the usual evil .DS_Store files, the±wire is now savvy about other invisibles, and will ignore them entirely. A directory containing nothing but such files is considered empty.

• dns window titling is now more consistent, regardless of the filetype you are currently viewing.

• I started on converting all the internal strings to UTF8, I'm committed to getting on top of this. Truth is, I don't really understand this whole text encoding business, and I suspect, neither do you.

It occurs to me that many parts of the development process are invisible to users, most of them, in fact. How could you know the heartache and frustration involved in getting, say, an encryption scheme or communication protocol unicode savvy; a bag of bugs emptied slowly. It's a take for-granted, only when it's broken do folks notice, send emails.

• well, for fun, I added counters for zener scores with particular buddies; if you save the buddy's name as the entry name in your buddylist, zener will update that counter whenever you are challenged by that buddy. If they use a different nick during a challenge, it wont update the tally. This feature will polarise opinions. hahah

I've discovered a(nother) bug in the RB's implementation of metal windows. The workaround I used for the metal window drawing problems also fixes this.. LEAVE THE LOG BOX OPEN! I've added a warning message along these lines for when a carbon version user attempts to close the log box. hopefully the boys at realsoftware get this nailed soon *sigh*. It's been there all along, I just never put my window off the bottom edge before.

• Added a shortcut for secure chat (apple/ctrl-e) (think "encryption") you'll find this handy if you're the kind of person who gets a kick out of repeatedly switching on and off the ship's cloaking device.

• the±wire will now display its own logs if they are double-clicked/dropped onto dock/explorer icon, etc. Previously it just ignored them. It will send other (non-text) files to the dns window. On OS X, you can force any application to accept any dropped file by holding down apple-option as you drop the file onto the application's dock icon. This way, you can drag any file into the±wire, have it launch and jump straight to that file in the dns window. This works on windoze too, just drop any old file onto the±wire's icon/shortcut, which kinda makes up for the lousy drag-support in windows generally.

• Log Box: If you desperately want to change the font/fontsize of the log box, you can hack the values into the plist file. there's no pref for it, but I might do that yet. If you hack something invalid, the±wire will use its defaults.

• You can also hack the "jump" value, that is, how many files a pageup/pagedown will jump. The default is 10 files. Put in whatever you like.

• Another thing you can hack is the text files definition. Add any extensions you'd like to be displayed in the log box. Did you know you can drag text files straight into your log box and they will be displayed there? well, you can, and they will. Other filetypes get redirected to your drag-n-send™ window, and if they are images, displayed. Note: files actioned this way will NOT be automatically sent down the±wire via the drag-n-send™ mechanism, even if that is enabled. This is by design. Only files dropped directly into the drag-n-send™ window itself are eligible for this special treatment. It also prevents you from accidentally sending files to unwitting recipients simply by double-clicking them, or dropping them on the wrong dock icon, or whatever.

my body needs to get some sleep, it's been a long session, but with nice unicode handling throughout (at least on Mac OS X, fingers crossed for the rest), and a slew of improvements, features and fixes, I'm proud to announce we are at, erm 0.8.3

;o)