Yabbing on...

I have worked a bit with Yab, and I found it extremely easy to program with and quite powerful. Now, of course you won't create a Diablo killer with it, or an office suite, but certain software and utilities can easily be created with yab.

A few features that should be added for a version 2 would be SQL support (SQLite and Postgres for starters), attribute and query support (after all we are talking about BeOS) and perhaps basic network support. What do you think?

Even faster

I don't know how i did it, but MaxUpdater is now even faster. It loaded the 800 application info in under 6 seconds. It seems that serializing the read works best when all pieces of info are parsed with the code I wrote.

Now I start writing the code to handle the actual download and update. First update will probably be ready sometime on Sunday, because I have real life work to do also.

By the way, I will also give this to users of BeOS Max V3.1b1. The updates will start from that version. Any takers with unaltered Max V3.1b1 who wish to test it when it goes into beta?

Yab / MaxUpdater Testing performance

Yab amazed me today.

I tried to get MaxUpdater to show an extremely large number of applications and dynamically create tabs, views, checkboxes after reading a text file with the info needed.

What was the result? Well, not only did it do it for 800 applications, but it took only 14 seconds, when I was told that just reading a file of that size would take a lot longer. However that wasn't what amazed me. It was the fact that dynamically creating the 800 views (1 view per application) didn't take more than a few milliseconds and only raised the usage of memory by 1/7th (from 7500kb to 8600kb) !!!

This is cool. Hope I have enough time this weekend to get further along with the MaxUpdater. Next step is to do a real update/install of an app from the Internet repository. So keep watching this blog for more news of progress.

The mandatory screenshot.

D20 Dice Roller app for BeOS

The Be Dungeon Master Dice Roller 0.9 is now online for download at BeBits .

The break from Max Version 4 is over. Development will now continue. I plan to do a break every 7 days, work on a different app for 2 days and then continue on Max Version 4.

So, what kind of app would you like to see next? Please don't say a new Word Processor!!! Some simple app you think is missing from BeOS.

I am planning to do more apps for DMs in the future too as I have outlined.

Taking a break and DMing...

Yesterday I took a break and played a small Dungeon and Dragons game.

Before playing I did a little search to see if there are any programs on BeOS that can help Dungeon Masters (yeap, I am a DM... geeky heh?) and I found there is none. So today I decided to start a series of small programs. Don't worry, MaxUpdater and Max V4 are proceeding as scheduled. I just had a little more time off work....

So here we are. Introducing the BeOS DM Dice Roller

I will upload the program with the code as soon as one more feature is implemented.

more progress

MaxUpdater is progressing quite well. It now loads, parses and displays lists of Updates and Applications. It even creates categories on the fly and puts all applications belonging to a category on the correct Tab.

Next step will be to know what applications you have already installed, so they will be checked by default and shown on a different tab with installed apps. Unchecking them would mean unistalling them. Installed updates will not show on the list by default.

Now if anyone can help with making the interface better looking (I am a software engineer, not an artist) I would be very grateful.

MaxUpdater progress

Milestone 1 was reached with MaxUpdater.

It can now use wget to download itself (or any other file) from our file repository and it also updates itself.

The code will be 100% open, so you anyone can review it. Also I have decided to add 1 more feature to MaxUpdater. The ability to create your own repository so others can add it to MaxUpdater.

What I am thinking of finally creating is something that will work like the CNR service of Freespire.

Any thoughts, ideas or coding help would be appreciated.

Not much to report...

but I thought I'll let you know I am alive :-)

Happy New Year. May this year bring an R1 release of our favorite OS, Haiku.

Although not much work has been done on YaGui or anything else on Haiku by me, I am here and I am planning a few things. I will post some news of my plans soon I hope.

Yab and YaGui

Yesterday, I resumed work on Yab (Yet Another Basic), and fixed a bug on a feature I had added, that allowed me to continue work on YaGui, a Visual Tool for creating programs with Yab.

For now, I fixed a bug in the creation and destruction of Windows in YaGui (although a small bug still lingers) and started work on the Properties Editor. It follows focus and gives info on Name, Caption, Width, Height and position of a Window.

However, the CVS version of Yab is not enough for the creation of YaGui, since it is missing a few features that were temporarily disabled to keep backwards compatibility. No problem there... I will fork it, until the code can be entered on the main source tree.

I will later post some screenshots, and I will keep you informed of my progress.