monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

Ok, I downloaded the Glyphix beta, and this program rocks. The style shelfs are fantastic. Now if I could just figure out how to add my own styles…

Mmmmm. OAAI has a beta of Glyphix 2 available for download. Tasty!

So two weeks ago we’re told - “move this java-based project to Visual Basic and COM”. Aaagh. Then today I hear someone say “so, we bring up bugzilla and CVS on that linux box over there and everyone uses that“. My head is spinning.

Cool! Both Jim and Greg have tried out Sid… Muahahahahaha!

Apple has updated the documentation for WebObjects.

Sid is a Mac OS X weblog client for the Conversant internet groupware product. More information about Conversant can be found here:

http://www.free-conversant.com

Prerequisites:
1) You’re running Mac OS X
2) You have a site (conversation) at http://free-conversant.com (or you are running a site hosted by Macrobyte).

Sid will be available for download soon.

What Sid can do:
1) Post messages to your conversant site. You’ll need to know the zone name and conversation name. If you do not know these, you can post a message at http://support.free-conversant.com and the nice Conversant community will help out.

2) Optionally add the message to a weblog on your site. Manage your list of weblogs.

3) Sid saves your connection document as a .conv file, and you can have multiple documents open at once. Each one will post to the conversation identified in the settings.

4) If an error occurs, a hseet will appear detailing the error. There’s an option to “email error report”. Click the button to launch/switch Mail.app, add any comments you’d like, and send it. I’ll try to respond to bug reports quickly.

5) Sid now lets you add italic, bold, underline, resources, and links to selected text in your post via the keyboard and menus.

What does Sid look like?:

I’m glad you asked! These are old screenshots of Sid, I’ll have new ones up soon, but for now this will give you an idea of what it’s capable of.

Here’s Sid’s main window, on the ‘Post’ tab:

Sid provides a ‘Text’ menu with which you can add simple formatting and links to your post:

Sid will let you see a preview, after a fashion, on the ‘Preview’ tab:

In order to post to your conversation, you’ll need to enter a few important settings:

Sid maintains a history of your past posts, and lets you select one and edit it by clicking the ‘Edit Post’ button:

Bug reports, gratuitous praise, or various forms of wealth can be sent to steve@redmonk.net, AIM:monkinetic.

Credits:
Engineering, Interface Design, and Person-whose-top-requested-feature-in-Conversant-was-XMLRPC:
Steve Ivy

Testing:
Steve Ivy, Jim Roepcke

With special thanks to:
Greg Pierce, Seth Dillingham and everyone at Macrobyte Resources (http://www.macrobyteresources.com) for creating Conversant (http://www.free-conversant.com), a fantastic internet groupware application, and then giving it an RPC interface. Seth, you guys are the bomb.

Jim Roepcke for constant encouragement. WDM? YDM!

Google, for helping me find all the documentation and mailing list postings that helped me get this far.

Hannes Wallnoeffer for writing the XML-RPC for Java library and making it easy to use.

Last but not least, to Apple for building such a kick-ass operating system, and letting Java weenies play in your Cocoa playground.

Apple has updated its WebObjects documentation to version 5, now shipping.