Bugdar 2.0 β Phase 1 Complete

I’m pleased to announce today that Bugdar 2.0’s first development phase has been completed. During this phase, all of the Bugdar code was ported to the ISSO3 framework, allowing it take full advantage of property access control, static functions, and the latest ISSO3 conventions.

The point of this phase was to upgrade the ISSO method calls to make refactoring code a simpler process. Had this first phase not upgraded ISSO-based code, the refactoring phase (phase 4) would have been twice as long and twice as much effort because the underlying ISSO code would be out-of-date.

Next in Bugdar’s development is the admin control panel rewrite. Before this can happen, however, a new ISSO3 module must be developed to make creating the admin interface easier. This will include removing the BSPrinter classes (which currently use PHP functions to generate HTML) and replacing it with well-designed CSS style sheets that will be used in templates in the Admin CP.

Separation of the view-controller logic in the Admin CP will make the code more agile and will allow for a more intuitive interface because the HTML will not be generated via on-the-fly code, but rather by designed HTML.

MacGDBp 1.1 Released

I just released version 1.1 of MacGDBp. This release is a minor feature update, as well as a bug fix release.

A few important features that made it into this release are settings to change the Xdebug port to use, keyboard shortcuts and menu items for debugging commands, and breakpoints are now saved on quit so that when you re-open MacGDBp all your old breakpoints are there.

Furthermore, the MacGDBp is now updated via Sparkle rather than the custom software mechanism I wrote for version 1.0 and 1.0.1.

Finally, I’d like to thank Ciarán Walsh for providing some key patches for stability and memory leaks.

Development Finished on MacGDBp

I have just finished all major work on MacGDBp. All the v1.0 features have been added and there are no existing issues (that I know about). I’m going to put it through a few days of dog-food testing, but expect a release sometime this weekend or very early next week.

Along with testing, all the release materials still need to be prepped. Those include the website, help/documentation information, and marketing/PR. So once those are finished, all systems are go.

See you soon!

Scrabbalize 2.0

I’m pleased to announce the immediate release of Scrabbalize 2.0. This version adds wildcard support. Merely add a ‘?’ to your tile set and it will match any letter:

And as you can see, the new version has a completely redesigned interface that looks fantastic in 10.5. Finally, as an extra treat, I have made it 10.4-friendly. So you can now run Scrabbalize on Tiger!

Enjoy.

The Road to MacGDBp, Part II

The bug with XML parsing I mentioned in the last post caused me days of grief. I’ve been trying to find the cause of that bug (off and on, albeit) for months. It turns out the fix was very simple. All that’s left is creating the breakpoint manager and then MacGDBp will be released. Hopefully by the end of next week v1.0 will be in your hands!

In this post, I’m going to talk about icon design. One of the ideas I had for this was to use the PHP logo in some way — but using logos in an icon is tacky. Instead, I decided to keep the purple of the PHP logo. Since PHP is internet-based, I decided to take inspiration from the words “World Wide Web” and I drew out a globe. So at this point, I had a purple globe. Now I had to decide what to design on top of the globe (because a purple globe only conveys internet connectivity). For this I really saw two options: a screwdriver and wrench or a toolbox. On Mac OS X, the screwdriver-wrench combination usually implies configuration (c.f. Color Sync Utility, Raid Utility, configure toolbar item, etc.). Debugging is not in the same vein as configuring, so I ruled that one out. The toolbox, while unused on Mac OS X (except for the Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit), seemed like a good fit. I should also note that I thought about drawing a yellow spray can — akin to the debug icon in Xcode — but quickly dismissed it for being too similar to Xcode.

This is the paper sketch I first did of the icon:

Then I recreated the sketches digitally. You can see how the design evolved here.

The final step (not outlined above) was adding drop shadow to the entire icon. This is the final design:

Hopefully the next post about MacGDBp will be the release announcement!