Development Diary

This area of the site is a record of my development process, the things I've learned, etc.

1999-11-27
• I've begun work on a new library - a gadget handling library which adds bitmap editing functions to PalmOS programs. The new module, called BitmapEditor, will be integrated into AppView and DTV as soon as it is functional.
• I'm continuing in my efforts to communicate with as many open-source PalmOS programmers as I can. I'm really hoping I can get some sort of information exchange going beyond what's on Roadcoders and the like. He hasn't written much, but Andrew Plotkin, author of ZCatalog tells me he plans to release source - more database handling, UI, and beaming examples. I sent mail to the author of GNU Keyring but no answer yet. I also talked with the author of ZDoc , the GPL'ed DOC editor/viewer to see if he could help with a solution to the multi-block field problem. Naturally, there's also Fred Bayer, author of LispMe , which has just been released under GPL (as of today!) in its new version 2.6.
• I've been taking a look at Qed, a shareware DOC editor/viewer. My main interest in it is that it's a complete, working version of the multi-record field I'm hoping to write myself at some point as part of DTV. Normally the Field Manager just takes a single memory block to store its text - with an addressing limit of 64K. With the appropriate manipulations of events and memory swapping, however, it is possible to make the Field Manager work with multiple blocks as though it were just one big block. This is really a very marketable type of library for PalmOS - with a working open-source implementation one could make high-quality DOC editors easily, and include similar big-text editing in other programs as well.

2000-1-15
• Do you even know how long all my projects have been on the back burner? It's sad, really. But development on the Bitmap widget and DTV have resumed. I've even managed to solve the problem in DTV text view which was causing crashes on attempts to delete. I'm also toying around with the idea of starting another, very small project - something I can complete quickly, a game maybe.
• The DTV text bug was something like this - when deleting a record in text view, the Delete control handler would do a bunch of stuff, disentangle the current form from the current record, close everything down, and switch forms. Then the form close event would come up, and TextViewDeInit() would run. The problem was TextViewDeInit() didn't properly handle that case - it ran FldSetTextHandle() whether or not the delete command had already run. This is fixed, so with a bit more work, the whole thing will run like a charm.
• Of course, the current DTV delete mechanism is way too clunky anyway. It should be replaced with a DTVUIDelete() function, and deletion handlers should be moved to the view's de-init routine. (Most such deletion handlers would be simple - abandon data, call DtvUtilRemove())
• Bitmap Editor is coming along. Still nothing complete enough to test.
• I've made some good contacts in the open-source PalmOS camp - the developers behind Plucker (an offline HTML viewer) - the guy I talked to was also into all kinds of other side projects - fixes to the prc-tools, pilot-link, contribution to other projects, and the Open Palm Group. I think this could be the sort of development community I've been looking for.