At the moment MMISoftware is testing a number of their programs to make sure they work with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)…
10.3.6 Weird Bug – a solution?
A solution to the ‘weird bug’ reported earlier (see post).
Anyway, I now have a possible solution!
Repair permissions and another restart did nothing….
I then ran MacJanitor and ran daily, weekly and monthly tasks. Weekly rebuilt the locate database and that seems to have fixed the problem.
‘Tunes Menu: 10.2 versus 10.3
Fun and games making ‘Tunes Menu’ 10.2 compatible!
‘Tunes Menu‘ was written using Xcode and tested on a number of machines running 10.3. However, when the program was beta-tested on machines running 10.2 it was found not to work! The question is, “why wouldn’t it work”?
It turns out that it was a number of problems. First, 10.2 doesn’t contain the necessary features that would allow ‘Copy and Find’ to work (this was known and had already been solved in version 1.0); second it was known that 10.2 did not support ‘user initiated menu updates’ (this was known and a solved); and third, it was discovered that there were major differences in how system-wide preferences were stored and handled.
Problem 2 was solved by using a ‘run-time’ loop that automatically updates the menu every 5 seconds, plus, any ‘incoming data’ also automatically triggered a menu update.
Problem 3 was solved by putting in a check for the OS number and then using the correct calls.
This was all a bit of shock and shows how Mac OS X is maturing and changing!
PLEASE NOTE: TUNES MENU IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE AND IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED
iCalMaker update
iCalMaker updated to 1.6.5
iCalMaker has been updated to 1.6.5
The update includes a number of bug fixes and a few new features.
New Features:
- Added the option to allow the expansion of repeating events in tab- and comma-delimited export
- Major improvement to the help system – searching (10.2 and greater) and context-specific (10.3 and greater) help now works correctly
Bug Fixes:
A number of minor bug fixes
- Recompiled using Xcode 1.2
- Updated the eSellerate integrated purchase engine
iCalMaker 1.6 is released
iCalMaker 1.6 is finally released!
After some delay version 1.6 of iCalMaker has been released.
The program contains a number of new features:
New Features:
- Improved the handling of poorly formatted iCal (ics) files upon import
- Removed the ‘five-event-limit’ on the import of iCal appointments from iCal (ics) files and direct from iCal
- Improved error message reporting
- Added additional help information on error messages
- Added an updated eSellerate integrated purchase engine
Bug Fixes:
- Dealt with a 10.2/10.3 specific bug which was causing some problems with the import of comma/tab delimited data
- Complete re-write of the iCal (ics) import method (now has better error reporting and conforms more closely to the vcal version 2 standard format)
- Dealt with a rare bug that would cause some iCal file output to be incorrectly formatted
- Fixed a bug that was causing problems when importing some short duration events
- Minor correction to text export so that ‘shifted-repeats’ (repeating events where one or more of the events have been moved to a different date/time) are now correctly handled
- Fixed a bug that was causing occasional crashes on the export of events to vCal (vcal version 1) format (thanks to Martin Haas and Joshua M. Whitman for finding that one!)
- Solved a problem with the import of iCalMaker generated vCal files that would not import correctly in to iCal (thanks to Martin Haas for providing calendars that demonstrated this really weird bug!)
The program can be downloaded here and purchased using either the integrated eseller or at the secure MMISoftware webstore.
iCalMaker 1.6 – Famous last words!
Another day, another ‘date’ problem!
Well, I keep saying the thing is finished and then beta testing throws up a new problem!
The latest is some flakiness in NSDate and the handling of ‘natural language’ (dateWithNaturalLanguageString). Some times it works as advertised, and sometimes not. In addition, the behaviour seems completely different between 10.2.x and 10.3.x!
The program now tests for which OS X version is being used and then applies a solution to the problem depending on the OS!
Hopefully, the program will now pass final beta testing and will be released soon.
mailMaker and pre-10.3
Bug problems with Mac OS X less than 10.3
After several long days of wrestling with bug in mailMaker which only appeared when the program was run on machines not using 10.3 it has been decided to drop support for 10.2 in mailMaker. It is a shame that mailMaker will not run on 10.2 (or 10.1) but I was left with no option (the program now puts up a warning window if you try to run it on a machine pre-10.3).
There were two problems in 10.2 that couldn’t really be nailed:
- Unicode support - Unicode (international text) support is a problem is somewhere in the ‘deep depths’ of the OS, hence mailMaker was unable to satisfactorily pass international text to the default mail programs (also, some of the mail programs have poor support for Unicode).
- Machine dependent - There is something going on with the configuration of some users machines under 10.2.8 that meant they did not work well with mailMaker. After much chasing it appeared that the problem may be with a component installed by Toast (and for the life of me I can not figure out why that should be the case), but, equally, there was also something else going on….
Therefore, it was decided to concentrate development efforts on mailMaker under 10.3.
Going native!
Re-installing an OS on an iBook
Well, an iBook had a ‘melt-down’ yesterday and the hard-disk got to the point where it needed to be erased and the system re-installed.
Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) took less than an hour to install, however, putting back all the applications and recovering the ‘home directories’ from the back-ups took considerably longer. The machine is now back in operation.
Why going ‘native’? Well, for the first time ever I have not loaded Mac OS 9 on to a machine, the machine is 100% OS X. Will OS 9 be needed? When was the last time I used OS 9? Well, I couldn’t remember the last time, or what program I was using, therefore it seemed like a good way to save a bit of disk space and the perfect time to say good-bye!
