Jarrett House North: ManilaEnvelope

Brent: multiple weblog support harder than it looks

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 19 Nov 2002 20:07:22 GMT

Brent points out that there’s a non-trivial cost to supporting multiple kinds of weblogs in a blog front end tool like NetNewsWire or Manila Envelope. Weblogs may look alike on the surface (and to an RSS aggregator), but they’re all different software platforms underneath and accordingly have different information needs. This is fine as long you don’t have to expose the mess to the user.

This is one of the reasons, I think, why the MetaWeblog API came about. Abstracting the common elements of the data elements into a new API layer is smart. Unfortunately not all the platforms support it...

Oops

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 14:14:49 GMT

Sincere apologies for the temporary triple posts. It looks like I got false error messages from Manila Envelope making me think I had to repost. Ah well. Another day, another bug.

More bugfixes coming

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 14:10:59 GMT

After the big release of 1.0.3a on Tuesday, a reader in England found some bugs I had missed in the first go-round with Manila Envelope on Jaguar. Specifically, people using the software for the first time can’t post!

The problem was a result of two things. First, the problem with Jaguar requiring plain text for XML-RPC extended into an additional function call that I hadn’t investigated, one that passed a URL as one of its parameters. This particular call only happens if no successful calls to the server have been made before, so I didn’t catch it in my haste to release 1.0.3a. Once again the importance of thorough testing...

Second, I made a big fuss about the importance of separating user interaction from business logic back in February, but didn’t catch all the problem areas. This particular problem was caused by a function that returned a string value. In the first implementation, I had the calling functions make the assumption that an empty string meant an error had occurred. Only problem: if the calling function in the UI is handling error notification and I’m returning a single empty string parameter, there’s no way to provide detailed error information.

This is where I miss “pass by reference” in other programming languages. It then becomes simple: you pass in a variable to be transformed by the method, and you check a return value for success or failure. Instead, I am using multiple return values:
return [Macro error: Can't compile this script because of a syntax error.]which means I have to use AppleScript’s copy syntax instead of a simple set. Ah, growing pains.

Manila Envelope v.1.0.3a Released

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 14 Oct 2002 14:01:33 GMT

The release notes are here. This version adds Jaguar compatibility. It has not been tested with pre-10.2.1 versions of Mac OS X; feedback is appreciated. Also noteworthy: this version now uses XMLRPC exclusively. You can download the software here; source code is also available.

I’ve deliberately avoided adding new features in this release since it took me so long to get the Jaguar bugfixes figured out. But there may be a couple of new features coming soon.

Argh.

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 20 Sep 2002 02:57:48 GMT

A while back after installing Jaguar I found that Manila Envelope no longer worked, or worked only intermittently. I upgraded to 10.2.1 last night, and I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but it worked again--for about two minutes. I posted two test posts successfully to the editing region, but now it's not working at all.

Did Apple break something in 10.2? I'd love to know. One possibility is the new Core Foundation web services framework, which has probably been shimmed under the existing AppleScript SOAP support introduced in 10.1 (at least, that’s how I'd do it). Another possibility is that something broke in the CFString search and replace functionality that I use to do fancy text processing. Debugging it is really really painful.

At least I have wireless. I had forgotten about my Wayport membership. My flight takes off in another hour or so, and I can't wait. It'll be the first time all week I've had any sleep.

Hmm...

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 25 Aug 2002 05:32:50 GMT

So Manila Envelope doesn't appear to work as is under Mac OS X 10.2. In fact, even rebuilding it doesn't do the trick. Never fear, I'm working on it, but I can't figure out what the hell is wrong...

Well, darn.

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 21 Mar 2002 15:42:11 GMT

On a tip from a mailing list, I tried a change to Manila Envelope this morning to see whether I could stop an intermittent crashing bug. The change may have stopped the crashes, but unfortunately it also screwed up the text being posted quite badly. Apologies to all who were confused by posts on the page (or in the RSS) that said something like: "tMcWrldTky,pplennuncedBluetthsupprtfrtheMc".

For the record, if your script is designed to convert accented characters to HTML entities, it's a bad idea to convert them to Unicode first. It apparently converts them down to regular unaccented characters rather than their proper Unicode entities. When you search and replace on a regular vowel, this is what you get...

What I've been up to

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 00:46:40 GMT

It's been quiet on the programming front. I'm getting smarter in Cocoa and AppleScript. Here's a feature that'll be coming in 1.0.3 - a News Item Department drop down list that syncs with your Manila blog.

Here's where I am:

The RPC call works
I can basically parse the XML that gets passed back (though all the department names are lowercased and I'm not sure what's up with the vertical bars around one department)
I can populate the dropdown
The above three steps are triggered temporarily from a button. I need to add UI to get the departments in the first place, cache them in the prefs file so I don't have to hit the website every time, and add more UI to refresh the categories if they get out of sync.

So it'll take a while longer for me to finish up. But I thought this would be the hard part and it's done already. Now I have to figure out how to use some of these Cocoa functions to write a list into a plist file as an array. Dig we must...

Small progress

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 20 Feb 2002 20:35:31 GMT

Looking again at the Manila RPC spec, I see I've missed something that might enable populating a drop down list of news item categories. Comforting after I've hit so many walls with other feature implementations over the last few weeks. I'm now looking at "manila.sitePref.get" which allows retrieving named portions of site preferences. I can grab the department list using "newsitems.departments" as the preference name, but now I have to see how to parse the reply using AppleScript. Dig we must...

RadioService.app

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 13 Feb 2002 16:49:26 GMT

I'm looking at the source code for RadioService now. The author took an opposite approach to mine--most of the code is Objective C with just one AppleScript. But he did answer some of my questions about how to address the keychain and other tricks with Objective C. The answer is it looks really hairy and I'll be figuring it out for a few days.

The competition: RadioServices.app

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 12 Feb 2002 19:53:23 GMT

Watch this guy. Unlike yours truly, he can really program Cocoa. RadioServices.app looks like it may be the "post from anywhere" model I dreamed about in July of last year.

Inconsistency and bugs

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 16:18:19 GMT

I've finally figured out why Manila Envelope occasionally gets stuck in spinning progress bar hell. It has to do with how I handled user notification in the code.

Basically, there are three types of function involved: one gets user input, one executes a series of Manila function calls, and one wraps a SOAP call to a particular part of the Manila API. Unfortunately, I was reporting user errors via dialog boxes in all three functions in the chain.

This sequence diagram shows the problem--I was letting the Manila handler do the notification to the user. This caused timing problems in the window controller that kept it from successfully stopping the progress indicator and returning control to the user.

Manila Envelope and Blogger: Progress Check

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 19:46:10 GMT

A little update before I go. I've been putting in some thought about the next version of Manila Envelope. There are some especially troubling bits about the preferences screen that will need some more thought before I can cleanly incorporate the Blogger API, but my first thoughts are here.

Some progress

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 02:45:48 GMT

I got the first part of the Blogger API working in Manila Envelope. I'm starting with the prefs--there will have to be a major overhaul of the whole app to make this work, including restructuring the preferences file. But hey--I got the blogger.getusersblogs call working. Baby steps...

One problem: If you have a regular Blogger site, the API calls go to the Blogger server. If you have a Moveable Type or Radio site, do you send the API calls to the Blogger server or somewhere else?

Slow news day

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 15:43:06 GMT

I'll be in and out today--I have a lot of errands to run before we head to Belgium for the weekend. I'm working on my own version of a Pictures tool for Manila Envelope. I'm really feeling the curve here... I thought about using AppleScript to hook into the Manila pictures API months ago but had difficulty making it work right.

I think I'm going to have to ask for some feedback from the users of Manila Envelope about how to proceed with incorporating the Blogger API. Look for a "survey" with some linked proposed screen shots in the next week or so.

Manila Envelope 1.0.2

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 24 Jan 2002 01:34:30 GMT

Manila Envelope 1.0.2 is out. See the release notes. In particular, note the caution about posting to Radio sites. As noted yesterday, Manila Envelope does not post to Radio based websites. The problem is that Radio and radio.weblogs.com do not support the Manila API (a way of communicating with the website via XML). Tentative target for support of Radio is version 1.1.

Manila Envelope and Radio Userland

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 22 Jan 2002 16:31:17 GMT

I've had feedback from a few people who have tried to use Manila Envelope with Radio, either against their desktop website or on radio.weblogs.com. The short version is that Manila Envelope doesn't work very well with Radio right now.

The long version is that Radio 8.0.1 doesn't support the Manila API for SOAP calls, just the Blogger API. I didn't start testing Radio until after its release, and just started to figure out some of the issues around the time that I did my 1.0 release.

The good news is that people had already requested the Blogger API as an option, and I'm looking at it for a future release. So this isn't a permanent incompatibility, just a short term issue. I'm somewhat intrigued that people want to run Manila Envelope against their local Radio site; I didn't think the Radio user interface through the browser was that bad, but I understand the desire for a consistent user interface.

Manila Envelope 1.0.1 Released

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 21 Jan 2002 18:40:28 GMT

Manila Envelope 1.0.1 has been released. Bugfixes, mostly, and a few new features, including importing text files and automatic translation of special characters (e.g. å, é, î, ò, ü, ç, ñ, etc.) to their HTML entity equivalents. Check out the full release notes for more details.

Getting serious

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 21 Jan 2002 16:14:14 GMT

In doing this project, I'm continually reminded of things that I knew once and have subsequently lost. For instance, making sure that I follow a consistent process for building and publishing. I just realized that the build I made yesterday still showed 1.0A1 as the version number in the About box. As a result, I started a checklist for my build and deployment process. Our old configuration manager at AMS would be so proud...

A slightly lazy day...

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 21 Jan 2002 02:12:27 GMT

I've finished all the bug fixes (that I know of) and a few surprise new features for Manila Envelope. I'll release v. 1.0.1 tomorrow (I can't get to my iDisk tonight).

For now, I wanted to publicly thank the folks who emailed me to report bugs and make suggestions: Nicholas Riley, Jeremy Wilker, Martin Fenner, Oliver Wrede, Clark Venable, Walter, and Peter Gallagher.

A slow day

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 20 Jan 2002 04:29:25 GMT

Snow falling in Boston tonight. A slow day waiting for the snow to start.

I fixed some bugs in Manila Envelope the last few days, including a dumb error with the icon this morning. I'm a very junior developer, but I'm finding that it's difficult to get a good icon creation program. Apple ships IconComposer, which allows editing four sizes of icons. Then there's Iconographer, which would be perfect if it would automatically scale images that were pasted into its icon windows. I had to use both to fix the icon problems I had today--the masks weren't working very well and the icon was surrounded by a black outline at certain sizes. I will be releasing the bugfix Monday or Tuesday.

Crossing the Ocean

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 18 Jan 2002 19:14:30 GMT

This is pretty cool: Manila Envelope got picked up by FrTracker at Bluedays Software, a software tracker in French. And the app isn't even localized... If anyone out there wants to help me translate Manila Envelope into your language of choice, please let me know. (Hint: the biggest issue will probably be the Help file.)

Thanks, and bugs

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 18 Jan 2002 15:22:30 GMT

I love the Mac community. The people who blog from the Mac are willing to try new things (about 171 people have downloaded my app from VersionTracker, not counting the ones who went to my site) and ready to tell you when they find bugs. I am really glad that you guys are out there--I was panicked that I had no testers, but I do now and they're piling up the bug reports! Look for a new version soon to fix the initial bugs.

You asked for it...

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 18 Jan 2002 03:27:18 GMT

Dave asked for a screen shot for all the "Mac-impaired people" out there... so here it is.

Blogging and AppleScript Studio

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 17 Jan 2002 23:26:32 GMT

I just released Manila Envelope 1.0. It's a native Mac OS X app, written in AppleScript Studio, that allows posting to a Manila-compatible site via SOAP.

I think this is what Dave was asking for last week with respect to Watson. But my app isn't a screen scraper--it is a non-browser-based simple native blogging tool that uses the Manila API.

The software can be downloaded from my software and scripting page. Source code is available, not because I'm an open source movement guy (I'm not) but because AppleScript Studio is a young environment, I don't understand it very well, and I figure other people can learn from my pain.

You can read about the development of Manila Envelope by clicking on the application icon to the right.

Manila Envelope Part 10: Idiot

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 17 Jan 2002 21:40:49 GMT

It looks like preferences have been broken for almost two weeks in Manila Envelope because, while rewriting the code on the train, I swapped the order of two arguments to a function. Two weeks!!! As Dave says, "We make shitty software....with bugs!!!"

Manila Envelope - Part 9b

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 03 Jan 2002 15:22:46 GMT

One additional thing about Manila Envelope -- it's a little bit of a paradigm shift from my scripts. I think the change is for the better.

With TextEdit2Blog, I started out trying to write a universal "save to the Web" script menu item for all text applications. The script was supposed to grab the selected text from the frontmost application and post it to the web. I soon realized that this just wasn't feasible. There was no way to address all text applications universally--some had a "selection" property and some didn't, and each exposed it differently. I decided instead to tie the script to one easily available application with a simple AppleScript Dictionary.

With AppleScript Studio, I don't think this makes sense any more. It's too easy to slap a text view onto the user interface, add some menu items, and essentially have all the functionality of TextEdit inside the app. Besides, as someone pointed out to me, copy & paste and drag and drop are pretty universally understood ways to get data into different places.

So Manila Envelope will have more of a text-based application feel to it. Cool. Now it just needs an icon. Anyone with skills want to share?

Manila Envelope - Part 9

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 02 Jan 2002 22:15:27 GMT

If all goes well, this will be the first time I've posted something using my tools that I've been able to set an explicit Department for the news item.

A point about how Departments are implemented in Manila. Each news item can be assigned to a Department (for instance, this news item is in the Scripting Department). A site editor can define the categories that can be used and assign them unique images. Unfortunately, the only thing I've found in the Manila RPC that addresses Departments is the ability to set the Department for a news item using a string. There's no way to get a valid list of departments for a given site.

That's a shame. I'd love to have a drop-down menu that allows the user to choose the department. As it stands I'll probably have to have the user type it in.

Manila Envelope - Part 8

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 02 Jan 2002 21:39:27 GMT

A follow-up to my earlier item about using secure text fields: Apple's mailing list comes through again. Tim Bumgarner, the tech lead on Applescript Studio, emailed me to point out that I could address the secure text field as a regular text field instead since the secure text field class inherits from the regular text field class.

What I find interesting about this is that it points up some interesting philosophical differences between Applescript Studio and other environments I've programmed in. Here, to address a control or other user interface element, you need to specify the control by class, for instance

get contents of text field "userPassword" of theWindow

Note the quotation marks around the text field name? The control's names are not bound at compile time but are interpreted--good and bad; you can pass the name in as a string variable but you don't get any protection from the compiler if you make typos.

Manila Envelope Part 7

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 02 Jan 2002 16:47:02 GMT

I've been digging for a while on Manila Envelope, getting frustrated by a few things. Still impossible to work with secure text fields in AppleScript Studio. However, I now have the application working with a preferences file. This is pretty critical, as this was the last missing piece of functionality to make Manila Envelope do everything that my old scripts did.

My original goal was to make this release an "everything and the kitchen sink" one, and add in lots of stuff like style translation and so on. I think, though, that it's time to avoid the Mozilla syndrome and fix on a reasonable set of requirements for 1.0. With this, I can hopefully release 1.0 in the next few days, before I go on my January road trip.

Manila Envelope - Part 6

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 20 Dec 2001 18:03:25 GMT

I didn't update about Manila Envelope yesterday because I didn't do a lot of successful things with it. I hit a few snags in AppleScript Studio, some having to do with getting data or states from controls and some having to do with lack of visibility in the debugger in certain situations.

However, I do have news items working (albeit with one major hack). One snag I ran into: "title" is now an AppleScript Studio reserved word (along with "password" and "URL"). This means that if you are populating a SOAP structure that has "title" as one of the element names, you have to escape it using vertical bars (e.g. |title|:myTitleVariable) or else AppleScript Studio just plain doesn't include it as an element in the structure. I had learned this with password and URL the hard way before, but title is a new one. I could say something learned and witty about the importance of avoiding namespace conflicts in published interfaces, but (a) I'm too groggy from fighting this thing and (b) after all, Dave et al didn't have AppleScript naming standards in mind when they were writing the interface.

Manila Envelope - Part 5

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 18 Dec 2001 15:59:38 GMT

I withdraw my previous objection about password text fields. It is pretty well hidden, but here's how you make a text field into a "secure text field" (one that hides the user's input behind bullet characters): select the field, in the Show Info window select Custom Class from the drop down menu at the top of the window, and click NSSecureTextField in the list of available classes. Build and run--the field now shows bullets as you type.

Manila Envelope - Part 4

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 18 Dec 2001 15:51:05 GMT

Success! The first story posted from Manila Envelope is on the Stories page now. News Items are not implemented yet, but this is a major breakthrough. Now that I'm sure I've got the SOAP stuff working, I can concentrate on adding features.

Manila Envelope - Part 3

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 18 Dec 2001 15:41:11 GMT

Good morning! I did some pretty intense work last night on ManilaEnvelope. I still don't have it up and running (for that matter, I haven't decided whether the name is all one word or two), but I have some new insights on AppleScript Studio.

Manila Envelope - Part 2

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 23:58:12 GMT

Other changes to make ManilaEnvelope work in AppleScript Studio: Properties don't persist across runs of the application. Guess this means I have to learn to work with preference files. :)

Manila Envelope - Part 1

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 15:22:46 GMT

I started writing the next generation of my Applescript-based tool for posting to Manila last night using AppleScript Studio. The first pass was just to host some of the existing scripts in an AppleScript Studio based application and get them to work. I got it working partway but I think ASStudio (I won't fully abbreviate that, for reasons that should be obvious) uses different mechanisms for accessing functions contained in separate script files. I need to dig a little more deeply.

By the way, the name of the tool will be Manila Envelope (sorry for the bad pun). I plan to wrap as much functionality to access Manila inside the tool as possible while still making it pretty seamless to use.