So I use Facebook as a way to keep in contact with friends from back home, as well as family members. But lately, Facebook has been sucking significantly due to it's "Applications" crap. Now, I like add-ons as much as the next person, so long as I can ignore them (which is something I do vehemently with FB). However, now the applications my *friends* install start showing up on my news feed. That's all well and fine, except I really don't care which friend won what movie trivia challenge, etc. I want my news feed to be nice and clean
November 2007 Archives
Last time, we covered the basics behind what a REALbasic plugin was, and how they worked -- so if you didn't read that posting, you will want to go read it now. We put that knowledge to use with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and built the most basic plugin possible for Windows. Today we're going to take our knowledge and apply it to g++ (a variation of gcc, really) on Linux for building a shared library object to act as our REALbasic plugin. At the end of the post, we'll have made the same empty shell that we did last
So I just stumbled across a very unlikely, but still possible, thing to watch out for when making plugins for REALbasic. On Windows, some compilers (like Visual Studio) support special functionality for thread local storage. Instead of requiring you to use the Tls APIs, Visual Studio exposes a special __declspec for TLS: __declspec( thread ) int someVar; This would declare a 4-byte piece of thread local storage (so each thread would get its own copy of someVar, even though it's global in scope). REALbasic plugins cannot make use of this because it takes special magic from the system loader to
Everyone knows that there is nothing more enjoyable than writing plugins, right? I know I certainly enjoy it, depending on the day, how the planets line up, how much I've had to drink and what I need to accomplish. ;-) But seriously, writing plugins for REALbasic isn't nearly as hard as a lot of people make it out to be. The API documentation is lacking (to say the least), but that has been rectified for the next SDK release. The "how to get started", however, has not been updated in ages, and you can assume it's all lies, lies and
One of the programming projects I both love and dread is refactoring. I dread it because some of the code I have to refactor is amazingly old, dense, uncommented, undocumented and really hairy. But it's also the most satisfying feeling in the world to take code like that and turn it into something much better. For the past few weeks, most of my work life has consisted of refactoring in some way, shape, or form. I have one major refactoring project that I am working on, as well as some smaller "clean up" jobs. As I get burnt out with
