DataBasin: advanced SObject describe

I enhanced DataBasin object's describe. First, I do parse the RecordTypeInfo now, but that was the easy part.  Salesforce.com returns only the record type ID and name, but programmatically, this is not very useful. The important bit would be the Developer Name of each record type.

I enhanced the results by querying automatically the RecordType table, extracting the Developer Name, matching it through the RT Id and merging back the results, so that the resulting DBSObject has a complete Record Type information, totally transparent.

Simplifying GWorkspace

I am streamlining GNUstep's Workspace. For many years it had a mode for spatial navigation, inspired essentially from Mac's finder and by GNOME. I personally never felt that it fits well in OpenStep's paradigm. MacOS X incorporated it for legacy reasons of Mac Classic, becasue Apple (sadly) wrote a new Finder instead of using OS's Workspace.
Spatial is good, but I think having a manager which incorporates both philosophies not.

Thus I removed spatial navigation from GWorkspace. Some loyal users perhaps will mourn it, but I want to remember that GWorkspace is just one possible application to implement NSWorkspace, anybody can write a replacement. In fact, I have already plans to write an alternative version, but this will be material for other blog posts.

FTP 0.4

FTP 0.4, the ftp client of the GNUstep Application project, has been released.

This is release has a couple of new features which should make usage a bit cleaner as well as many bug fixes and portability issues. I would recommend the upgrade. Among the many small changes:

• Reopening connections without restarting FTP is fixed, there were corner cases where this didn't work
• Better progress report, also for file listings. Indeterminate progress if size is unknown.
• 64bit and portability fixes. Smaller fixes about corner cases with empty selections and empty files and interface locking.
• When disconnecting, the remote connection gets cleared.
• More minor but annoying bugs, like problems with large selections on Cocoa. 

FTP running on NetBSD, Sleek theme applied

Graphos 0.4

Graphos 0.4 is out!

• The Text editor now uses the standard font panel 
• selection improved
• mouse constraints for boxes and circles
• undo for pasteboard operations
• many bug fixes
• 64bit fixes

Some shapes fun



GWorkspace 0.9.2

 pleased to announce the new release of the GNUstep Workspace application.

This is mainly a bug fix, stability and improvement release.

• updated to current APIs and changes to NSUInteger, NSInteger and CGFloat
• thanks to the above, improved 64bit support
• improved BSD support
• improved localizations and capability to localize better in the future
• Fix logout timer
• improved handling of Recycler and other daemons on logout
• MDKit and MDFinder improvements, although problems on some setups remain
• TabbedShelf crash fixes
• memory leaks fixed as detected by the clang static analyzer

Thanks to the many who tested and contributed fixes, first of all Sebastian Reitenbach.

GWorkspace with the Sleek theme

DataBasin 0.6

DataBasin 0.6 released!

• Support "." as Semi-Join
• Select Identify works now with multiple columns (all in AND as condition)
• Support LIMIT clause in Select Identify
• Improved Exception catching and display for Select Identify
• Object Inspector supports selection of items
• Log window with selectable log level
• Progress and estimated completion time displayed in Log
• Remember logins
• internal API improvement
• vast 64bit and portability improvements
• Support count and aggregate queries

Select Identify is now vastly improved. Supporting multiple columns and LIMIT, coupled together with the other improvements of this release, makes it an invaluable tool during support and maintenance of a Salesforce org. How else could you check the status of a lot of objects, say Cases or Accounts?
The object inspector is always handy too.

DataBasin allows you to work with SalesForce.com much easier and also from your favourite free OS  using GNUstep like any BSD or GNU/Linux or at need on Solaris or Macintosh.

Many thanks to my colleagues, Claudio and Paolo amongst them, for finding bugs and testing the 9 internal beta releases!

BatMon 0.7

Battery Monitor 0.7 is now available from GAP.
Improved BSD support has been improved, Support for linux on powermac has been added.

Cynthiune 1.0.0

Cynthiune 1.0.0 has been released, the Music Player for GNUstep. This is the first of GAP after Wolfgang handed over the source code.

Improved stability, portability, support for big-endian processors. Ported to Windows and Macintosh. Memory leaks and bug fixes. This is definitely a recommended upgrade. Thanks to Wolfgang for the code and Sebastian and Philippe for the long hacking sessions!

GNUstep on FreeBSD

I thought it would be fun to share how well GNUstep runs these days. FreeBSD now is a first-quality platform! Stable and not second to Linux at all. NetBSD is close to it too. I try hard that all application maintained by me are not "Linux centric" as most of today's desktops are!

Workspace

 First a clean desktop. Just the workspace and a terminal. Icon display in a viewer, miller column browser (my favourite) in the other. Transparent dock on the right, showing some running apps and some not.
Battery Monitor in the background and as AppIcon! Now perfectly running on FreeBSD!


IN the development screenshot, we can just admire ProjectCenter with the build panel and a detached editor window. In the background, a GWorkspace file viewer in "details" mode.

Development

BatMon on FreeBSD

I just have improved GNUstep's Battery Monitor support for FreeBSD. It now handles the High state, that is the state where the battery is present and charged and not charging. Furthermore the cases of Missing batteries or a battery in Critical low state are now handled much better.
Check out CVS or wait for the upcoming release!

PRICE 1.2.0

After 10 Years with PRICE a Christmas Anniversary release! 1.2.0 is out!

This new version sports JPEG saving along with TIFF! Thus PRICE rgisters itself as editor both for TIFF and JPEG files. Compression factor is of course user selectable.

Along with many bugfixes, the Curves function is now improved in usability: the transformed histogram is drawn specular on top instead of right. Furthermore bug fixes should make the display more reliable and faster.

Of course, for GNUstep and Macintosh.

Pie Charts in OresmeKit

OresmeKit, GAP's charting framework for GNUstep and Cocoa, got its first rudimental Pie Chart implementation.

Data colors, background and edges are customizable already, as a real OKChart implementation. The dataset is represented as the set of each first element of the series, so that for each the color can be specified, being the series color.

DataBasin development: logger and semi-joins

I am working on two long-needed features of DataBasin, the open source application to extract and inspect data from salesforce.com

The first feature is rather simple: a log window which shows some informative or debug output usually thrown to the console. While on standard Unix we always have the terminal emulator open and all debugging is very convenient there, on mac and especially on windows it is inconvenient: DataBasin logged every output as an Event in the windows log. Quite painful.

A much more complex, interesting and long awaited feature is that DataBasin now supports semi-joins! In other words, one can reference a field of a referenced object with the dot notation (like: Case.Account.Name) exactly as in the Salesforce.com Data Loader. The objects are recursively scanned and flattened so that they can be written to the CSV file. The column names are generated through the descent of the object tree.
This feature required a much more flexible approach in the CVS writer core. This means that some regression bugs could appear... hopefully not.

This feature applies to all queries, including the Select Identify query tool.

As the parser was being rewritten and the supported API bumped to 25, it is now improved to handle Aggregate Objects, thus one can now issue the following SOQL query:

select count(id), status from case group by status

and get the expected result:

"Status","expr0"
"New","16"
"Closed","31"

I hope these features make DataBasin much more useful!

NetBSD quick update guide

Since I always tend to forget and the documentation on the website is a bit incomplete, I sum up the procedure I use to update from source the kernel and userland:

Update /usr with cvs, create /usr/obj and /usr/tools (or clean its content).

As per documentation, build the tools. Inside /usr/src:

$ ./build.sh -O /usr/obj -T /usr/tools -U -u tools

Now build the kernel:

$ cd /usr/src
$ ./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools kernel=

Install it:

# mv /netbsd /netbsd.old
# mv /usr/obj/sys/arch/i386/compile//netbsd /

And now, important, build and install the modules:

# ./build.sh -O /usr/obj -T /usr/tools -U -u modules installmodules=/

Reboot and check that the kernel works. Then build and install userland:

$ ./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U -x distribution

# ./build.sh -O ../obj -T ../tools -U -u -x install=/ 

 Cross your fingers and happy BSD!

Grr 1.0 and RSSkit released

Grr 1.0, the RSS Reaseder, and its compantion framework RSSKit 0.4.0 were released on Friday.

PDFKit 0.9.2

PDFKit 0.9.2 released. Still based on xpdf 3.0.2, it solves several build problems. It now builds with clang and with current GNUstep. Portability to BSD's improved.

GWorkspace 0.9.1

I'm pleased to announce that GWorkspace 0.9.1 is out.


Some release highlights:

Enhancements / new features

• New Modern vs Classic style which control:
• classic vs. alpha-blended selection
• transparent dock vs classic dock style
• new "scale" attribute for the desktop, for uniform scaling
• Browser icons (Eric W.)

Fixes & Maintenance

• PDF Content Inspector fixed and updated
• NSUInteger updates for new APIs
• crash fix on exit when Grayscale background images were selected
• updates for integer positions and resolutions to avoid blurring of elements
• NSDragOperation updates

This release is highly recommended when compiling and running GWorkspace against the current GNUstep core release.

Terminal 0.9.8

Terminal 0.9.8 was released by the GNUstep Application Project. It is mainly a maintenance release to tix bugs, enhance portability to more platforms (including GNU/HURD and OpenBSD) and current GS core libraries.

GSPdf 0.5 released

GSPdf 0.5, the ghostscript front-end for GNUstep, suitable for PDF and PS viewing (and thus also as GS print preview application) was released on June 3rd.

DataBasin 0.5

I'm pleased to release DataBasin 0.5.

• quoted CVS support in reading
• support for reading DOS/UNIX/MAC file formats
• improved exception trapping and display
• fixed bugs in create and updates
• various fixes