While the weather is still miserable around here (it's been raining. RAINING! In December! In MN! Who says there's no global warming?), today's at least been a much more productive day than yesterday.
After my bout with apathy yesterday, I watched Raging Bull and Samurai 7, and had a nice chat with Lis. Then went to bed.
I woke up this morning with a few ideas on how to tackle a long-standing annoyance with the menu editor: scrolling. You see, the original designer of that piece of code assumed that most people would have normal-sized menus. So the menu editor was never designed for scrolling, because that would mean the user has an extra large menu. It was assumed no one would need scrolling, basically. However, for people on lower resolution monitors (800x600, for instance), this proves to be problematic because even a normal menu can get awfully scrunched in that amount of space. However, implementing scrolling for that particular IDE feature was not something terribly easy to accomplish because everything in the code assumed a fixed position instead of a scrolled one. So I set to work, and about seven hours later, the menu editor now supports scrolling (but not for the current release as this is way too new of code with way too little time to test it). It was painful to refactor a lot of that code, but worth it as it now allows a bit better of a user experience. That being said, if your menus require a scrolling editor, you should take a serious look at the UI design of your application as chances are very good that your UI is bad. And not just bad, but really bad.
Aside from the menu editor, I polished off some neat debugger features as well. Those I'm going to keep under my hat for a bit so that I have something interesting to talk about another day. ;-)
I'm rather stressed out about not having enough time. I'm supposed to run out to my parent's place tonight, but I may have to bail on them because I still have to finish priming the basement, as well as clean the house from top to bottom. I'm heading down to Austin on Thursday this week, and when I come back I'll have Lis, her mom and her dad in tow -- I want to make a good impression on everyone, so I want the house to be spotless. Couple that with the massive amounts of sheetrock dust, and I'm in for a helluva project.
I played around with the particle system code a bit last night and implemented two new demos for it. One is sort of a sparkler type of fireworks display. The other is a snow storm. Heh, I'm having fun monkeying around with that project. The code isn't terribly pretty (or efficient), but that's fine since it's a just a demo. It's still neat to monkey with all of the parameters of the system to see what effects you can come up with.
Oh well -- with a little bit of time left in my work day, I'm going to see if I can tackle a few more minor annoyances with the IDE. I really love the new feedback system as it makes this sort of task easier -- I can just pick a category and run down all of the bugs with it. That's one reason why picking a good category is so important.
There is definitely something wrong with the weather... In Sweden we still have around + 5-10 °C. Normally it should be snow and around -10°C. It’s been raining and we have problems with flooding. That is something totally new for us.
Arne
Tuedsay: Worse than Monday.
I just had 3 finals today. That is enough to make it a bad day. ;)
Aaron - I think I'm going to suggest just closing all uncategorized reports
If they haven't been revisted or categorized then I suspect that the reporters have not even looked at them :)
I don't think I ever look at uncategorized reports (the ones which show up in bold) unless I stumble across them while doing a keyword search (and even then I tend to ignore them). Personally, I think that in about another year, I'd be all for the idea of closing those reports -- if they aren't categorized in over two years, they're chances of being relevant are slim to none.
What I was talking about are reports that are put under "Not Listed" in a category, or simply put in the improper place. Sometimes Not Listed is appropriate, but I do see a fair amount of reports going under REALbasic->Not Listed which belong somewhere else. ;-)
This week in Texas it was in the 60-70's which is about normal. I can remember as a kid wanting to go water skiing on Christmas day. Last week it was extremely cold and at least one record was broke. I was starting to think there was global cooling go on down here.