No Time to Waste!

If my quick review of NewsFire in my list of “Amazing Mac Software” didn’t convince you to buy NewsFire, this definitely should:

For the next two days, if you buy NewsFire, you also get Inquisitor for free. For those of you who don’t know, Inquisitor is a very cool plugin for Safari that takes over the Google search field. When you start typing, it instantly brings up the results (it can also be programmed so that shortcuts search different sites). This is very handy if you already know what you’re looking for and just can’t remember the URL.

So, if you haven’t already, go pick up NewsFire and get Inquisitor for free. Both of them are great applications!

Sidenote: today Bugdar 1.1 sound a round of bug fixes and testing. Beta 2 is due out soon–probably Monday or Tuesday. More about that later.

ISSO3

A few posts ago, I mentioned ISSO3. Well, work has been started on the trunk. ISSO3 will require PHP 5 or higher. I know a lot of hosts don’t yet meet this requirement, which is why ISSO 3 won’t be used publicly for quite some time. But that is a Good Thing(tm) because it allows plenty of time to give ISSO the overhaul it needs.

What’s different so far?

There’s now no more single kernel that you instantiate. Instead, you use the BSLoader class (now all classes are prefixed with “BS” for Blue Static) to create a new BSRegister. BSLoader is responsible for loading modules and creating new registers. BSRegister is responsible for setting objects for a given key, like this:

$register = BSLoader::NewRegister();
$register->register('db', BSLoader::LoadModule('DB/MySQL.php'));

Then, you can get the object later:

$register->get('db')->query("SELECT * FROM foo");

BSLoader also has the ability to set a “main register” which is the register that all modules are linked to by default (if they need components from other modules). This allows you to do this:

BSLoader::SetRegister($register);

… and then in some function, you don’t even worry about scope:

function random_function()
{
     $result = BSLoader::GetRegister()->get('db')->query("SELECT * FROM moo");
}

So that’s what’s happening on the ISSO3 front. And because ISSO is no longer installed separately, it will stop getting standard versions (3.0.0) with the release of ISSO3 and instead will be given build/release numbers. ISSO3 will probably be somewhere between #11 and #13.

I’ll post more about ISSO3 development as it happens.

As a side note, Bugdar Beta 1 has been very-positively received with only minimal bugs. If all goes well, we could see another beta sometime next week. I do think we’re on track for a early-September final release.

Burlan 1.1 Beta 1

Well, obviously the new Bugdar 1.1 (“Burlan”) Beta 1 has been released. Accompanying it is this gorgeous new Blue Static web site that will be the new home of Bugdar!

So, about Bugdar 1.1.0 Beta 1:

There are two known bugs. The first is #25 in which deleting a comment doesn’t update the last post information. The second isn’t reported and is more of something I want to fix. The drop-down for product selection will have a blank row inserted when a product has only components and no direct versions. I don’t really know how to fix this as don’t show up without having at least one underneath them.

As for the release itself, I’m quite pleased with how far this has come since the 1.0.0 Alpha days with all kinds of scary code all over the place :P. Bugdar 1.1 will be a huge improvement over 1.0 in that it introduces much more OOP code through APIs and cleaned-up classes to handle notifications, history, and other data. To give you an idea of how many new classes were added, Bugdar 1.0 had 13 files total in the includes/ directory. In Bugdar 1.1, there are 28–more than double the previous amount!

Bugdar 1.1 also takes advantage of version 2 of the ISSO framework, which is excellent because it means that I can finally drop version 1! Even though ISSO2 is just finally reaching full adoption, I’m already thinking about version 3–but that’s a whole different post.

Moving Party!

Well, if you haven’t noticed, many things are moving over (including this blog) from the iris-studios.com domain to the bluestatic.org domain. This transition reflects the shift of organization. Iris Studios used to be a more art-based site and grew into a more software-oriented site. However, with the advent of the GNU GPL usage in most Iris Studios products, I thought that a .com domain was no longer suitable (and I was growing tired of explaining the iris-studios.com domain to people), so I created Blue Static. All of the projects (except Cryption and SimpleCalc) will be coming over when Bugdar 1.1.0 Final is released.

Basically, it’s all the same stuff under a new domain.

Revision #1000

I thought I’d take a quick break from preparing the Burlan beta and inform you that in the Bugdar repository, I just checked in the 1000th revision. I consider it quite a milestone! About a year and a half of work has gone into this project and I’m completely impressed with the way it has turned out!

Beta 1 is coming soon…. 🙂