ArcticFox on 10.6

ArcticFox, currently in my own fork, succesfully compiles natively on MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard and runs! 64 bit currently.
Great news for those who use older but still perfectly capable Macintoshes....

ArcticFox derives from PaleMoon 27 which in turn is FireFox derived.

I tried Facebook and even WebGL samples as this screenshot shows.

This Blog entry is written natively on my MacBook and ArcticFox.

first release of StepSync!

I'm proud to announce the first release of StepSync, a file sync tool for GNUstep and MacOS (even for venerable PowerPC).

StepSync allows synchronization of folders, optionally recursively descending in sub-folders. It allows thus various options of performing backups: pure insertion, updates and including full synchronization by importing changes from target to source.

After months of development and testing, I consider it stable enough, I tested it with thousands of files and folders.

You can find it at the GNUstep Application Project. I already have plans for new features!

Graphos 0.7 released

Graphos 0.7 has been released a couple of days ago!

What's new for GNUstep's vector editor?

• improved Bezier path editor (add/remove points)
• Knife (Bezier Path splitting) instrument fixed and re-enabled (broken since original GDraw import!)
• important crash fixes (Undo/Redo related)
• Interface improvements to be more usable with Tablet/Pen digitizer.

Graphos continues to work on GNUstep for Linux/BSD as well as natively on MacOS.

Graphos running on MacOS:

Graphos GNUstep and Tablet interface

I have acquired a Thinkpad X41 Tablet and worked quite a bit on it making it usable and then installing Linux and of course GNUstep on it. The original battery was dead and the compatible replacement I got is bigger, it works very well, but makes the device unbalanced.

Anyway, my interest about it how usable GNUstep applications would be and especially Graphos, its (and my) drawing application.

Using the interface in Tablet mode is different: the stylus is very precise and allows clicking by pointing the tip and a second button is also possible. However, contrary to the mouse use, the keyboard is folded so no keyboard modifiers are possible. Furthermore GNUstep has no on-screen keyboard so typing is not possible.

The classic OpenStep-style Menus work exceedingly well with a touch interface:the menus are easy to click and teared-out they remain like palettes, making toolbars not necessary.
This is a good start!

However, Graphos was not easy to use: aside from typing text, with no keyboard, several components requried typing (e.g. inserting Line Width).
I worked on the interface so that all these elements also had a clickable interface (e.g. Stepper Arrows). Duplicating certain items available in context-menus in regular menus, which can be detached, provided also an enhancements.
Standard items like the color wheel already work very well

Drawing on the screen is definitely very precise and convenient. Stay tuned for the upcoming release!

DataBasin + DataBasinKit 1.0 released

A new release (1.0) for DataBasin and its framework DataBasinKit is out!

This release provides lots of news, most of the enhancements coming from the framework and exposed by the GUI:

• Update login endpoint to login.salesforce.com (back again!)
• Implement retrieve (get fields from a list of IDs, natively)
• Support nillable fields on create
• save HTML tables and pseudo-XLS in HTML-typed formats
• Fix cloning of connections in case of threading
• Implement Typing of fields after describing query elements (DBSFDataTypes)

DataBasin is a tool to access and work with SalesForce.com. It allows to perform queries remotely, export and import data, inspect single records and describe objects. DataBasinKit is its underlying framework which implements the APIs in Objective-C. Works on GNUstep (major Unix variants and MinGW on windows) and natively on macOS.

GNUMail + Pantomime 1.3.0

A new release for GNUmail (Mail User Agent for GNUstep and MacOS) and Pantomime (portable MIME Framework): 1.3.0!


Panomime APIs were update to have safer types: mostly count and sizes were transitioned to more Cocoa-like NSUinteger/NSInteger or size_t/ssize_t where appropriate.
This required a major release as 1.3.0 for both Pantomime and GNUMail. In several functions returning -1 was replaced by NSNotFound.

Note: When running the new GNUMail it will update your message cache to the new format. In case of problems, clean it (or in case of reverting to the old version). Message size is now encoded as unsigned instead of signed inside it.

Countless enhancements and bug fixes in both Pantomime and GNUMail should improve usability.
Previously there were issues of certain messages not loading when containing special characters and/or decoding personal part of Addresses.

Pantomime:

• Correct signature detection as per RFC (caused issues when removing it during replies)
• improved address and quoted parsing
• generally improved header parsing
• Encoding fixes
• Serious iconv fix which could cause memory corruption due to realloc
• Fixes for Local folders (should help fix #53063, #51852 and generally bugs with POP and Local accounts)
• generally improved init methods to check for self, that may help avoid memory issues and debugging in the future
• various code cleanup in Message loading for better readibility
• more logging code for debug build, should help debugging

GNUMail

• Possibility to create filters for To and CC directly in message context menu
• Read/Unread and Flag/Unflag actions directly in the message context menu
• Size status for Messages in bytes KiloBytes or MegaBytes depending on size
• Spelling fixes
• Improved Menu Validation
• fix for #52817
• generally improved init methods to check for self, that may help avoid memory issues and debugging in the future
• GNUstep Only: Find Panel is now GORM based

OresmeKit initial release: plotting for GNUstep and Cocoa

Finally a public release of OresmeKit.
Started many years ago, it has finally come the moment for a first public release, since I put together even a first draft of documentation. Stay tuned for improvements and new graph types.

Oresme is useful for plotting and graphing data both native on Cocoa/MacOS as on GNUstep.

OresmeKit is a framework which provides NSView subclasses that can display data. It is useful to easily embed charts and graphs in your applications, e.g. monitoring apps, dashboards and such.
OresmeKit supports both GNUstep and Cocoa/MacOS.

An initial API Documentation is also available as well as two example in the SVN repository.

Graphos printing fix

Important Graphos fix.

Graphos had issues when printing and the view was not 100%: to speed up drawRect, all objects were represented scaled, so that they had not to be scaled each time, which especially for Bezier Paths is expensive with all the associated handles.

Thie issue is finally fixed by either caching both original and zoomed values for each object and conditionally drawing them depending on the drawingContext.

Here the proof with GSPdf showing the generated PDF!

Soon a new release then!