Weekend's gone fast

It's amazing how quickly the weekend goes when you spend a large part of it working. I got home from work about 9pm last night -- I ended up working for 9 hours. But I got a lot of stuff taken care of. You can now switch tabs using keyboard shortcuts (more on this in a moment), you can navigate the code editor with the keyboard much better, all of our contextual menus now use the new underlying contextual menu changes I've been making this week (which means you can display them with the keyboard finally!) as well as fixed a bunch of random bugs.

Ok, keyboard shortcuts. Here's the one thing that bothers me about RB 2005 -- REALbasic doesn't allow you to assign keyboard shortuts for non-printable characters. So switching tabs with Ctrl+Tab or Cmd+Shift+Right Arrow has to be hacked into a KeyDown event instead of being a menu shortcut. And what's worse -- it means that these keyboard shortcuts aren't displayed in the menu like they should be! I'm looking forward to rewriting the underlying menu system (yet again) sometime in the near future so that we can support menus better. Here's my little wish-list for the underlying menu implementation:

• Support non-printable keyboard shortcuts. This means displaying the proper glyphs for them as well!


• Give a way to associate an icon with a MenuItem -- probably as a Picture that you can select at design time or change with MenuItem.Icon at runtime.


• Give better support on Windows for MenuItem.Visible and MenuItem arrays. I'm not certain why people would ever want to use MenuItem arrays when the new MenuItem API is so much easier to use and more elegant... but this support still needs to be shorn up.


• Start allowing declares on the Mac again for MenuItems.

I can't think of other things that I really want to see happen with the menu system since this would pretty much round out what you can do. But it's still a major overhaul to get all of this working on four platforms (Classic is vastly different than Carbon).

NEwho! Enough about that. After I got home from work last night I talked to dad on the phone about building a house. We're going to set up a conference call on Monday with the mortgage broker to see how much of a deal I qualify for. Dad's going to put a hold on the lot out on St. Augusta for me so that I don't have to worry about someone else coming along and snatching the lot out from under me while I get the paperwork lined up. He and I are going to sit down then later this week to go over the house plans for the house I want to build. It's just about perfect right now, but I need to cut some things out of the plan and reduce the price a little bit. For example, I don't need two bathrooms upstairs back-to-back -- so I'll cut one of them out and save some money. Once the house plans are finalized, I'll try to get a picture of the plans and post them here so you can have an idea of what my house is going to look like. I'm really excited -- things are moving forward on the house hunt quickly now, and this sounds like a helluva good deal for me.

I ended up staying up until almost 2 am watching Law and Order SVU on DVD. It was nice, but I was sleepy! I got up this morning and started playing more Final Fantasy II. I just got done kicking the Fiend of Air's ass and I'm about to go into the Underground. I've always been disappointed with the Underground because of it's lack of anything to *do* down there. There's like one major city and two (or three) places to go in that entire world down there -- but it's still the same size as the world above! I wish they would have put more stuff in there because this is the only part of the game where I've ever gotten bored. But then again, this part of the game has the Calbrena in it -- which is my favorite musical part of FF II (and, FWIW, the Atma Weapon is my favorite musical part of FF III).

I am thinking I may spend part of my day starting on a new networking project (top secret of course) for giggles. What did everyone else do this weekend?