Carl returned briefly to discuss a few things regarding VID3 and I’m quickly going to mention that here.

VID3 as we know it has been dropped and development of it has been suspended for now. Now before you spontaneously jump out of the window in despair: It is replaced by a user interface system that is yet to be named, but has internally been known as VID3.4 for some time. We’ve been waiting for more details on it for about two months now, but only very few details have emerged. A few other names were thrown around, particularly because it’s different from VID, but the details are very scarce on what exactly it does. It’s not so much about its graphical capabilities as it is about how it’s used in relation to networking. Carl has only mentioned briefly that it would be roughly as capable as VID3, but would emphasize on simplicity combined with networking. It’s a bit like how HTML (presentation) relates to HTTP (networking). That has been the focus on the development of this new user interface system in the past few weeks for REBOL Technologies.

Oh, here’s a very, very small code sample. You can create links as simply as:

button "Go there" goto http://....

And, for internal links:

button "Go here" goto 'page2

It doesn’t tell us much, except it will in some cases behave more like HTML.

VID3 development might continue depending on how many features overlap with the new user interface system. If too many features are overlapping, there’s no point in continuing.

The REBOL Desktop, also known as Viewtop will be dropped as well. It will be replaced by a webbrowser form factor. This is an important step towards making REBOL more recognizable for what it can do, as the Viewtop has been proven to be more confusing than simplifying. The webbrowser of today is becoming a primary way to run applications. REBOL Technologies believes that having this form factor makes it easier to relate to REBOL applications. I think of course nothing will change with regards to being able to create and run REBOL applications in separate windows. But having this browser-like facility to run tools, view interactive documents and entire applications in a more recognizable user interface sounds very cool to me.

In fact I proposed that very idea of replacing the Viewtop with a browser a few seconds before Carl turned up to mention that it was exactly what he intended!

It also fits nicely with how the new user interface system might be geared more towards documents with VID like interactivity. Whether this browser will be capable of showing HTML documents, time will tell.

Imagine a REBOL based GMail client starting up in 0.2 seconds. Cool, huh? That will give those damn webbrowsers a run for the money.

That’s basically it for now.

I just wanted to point out a new English REBOL programming E-book that has been written by Peter W. A. Wood and Olivier Auverlot.

You can buy it here.

Thanks to RapidWeaver for deleting my custom template again during an update I did not have time to post during June, sorry for that. In fact, I’m not sure which one is at fault here: MacOSX or RapidWeaver. During the initial creation of this blog, I made a custom template from an existing template called Interslice to add support for Google Adsense and to clean it up a bit to my personal taste.
The pain here is that RapidWeaver stores the templates inside its own application bundle, rather than in a separate folder. (For those not in the know, application bundles are just folders with a very specific structure, an “.app” extension and a custom icon).

Furthermore, when updating RapidWeaver, it downloads a new application bundle as a dmg file, automounts it and opens the folder, just like when you want to install a new program. Many apps update the existing bundle in the Applications folder instead and let the application automatically restart.
So when you update, you perform the same procedure as during normal installation. This would be fine if MacOSX didn’t completely replace the original application bundle, removing my templates in an unrecoverable fashion; The original bundle is not put in the trashcan, but is unconditionally erased from the harddisk!

This is an old design flaw in MacOS Finder that goes all the way back to MacOS1.0, but Apple has decided to keep this functionality of having the move operation being unrecoverable and atomic. This is the single-most stupid part of MacOSX!
If you are a pure mac user, not having used other platforms much, you will find the behavior quite logical. For the rest of us, it’s highly annoying and a dangerous operation to have in an operating system that normally shines on security and usability, because move means folder merging to us. It also makes it a complete nightmare to merge nested folders, something I do often, so I have to resort to the Terminal or muCommander to do that.

But still, even if a folder is replaced, why doesn’t MacOSX Finder just move the older folder to the trashcan instead of completely deleting it?

Wordpress

I was briefly looking at Wordpress to see if a web based blogging solution would fit me. Indeed Wordpress has a lot of momentum, a lot of plugins, themes and users. There are even applications like MarsEdit that plug in to Wordpress, so you can write posts offline and have them posted when you go online.

But after looking through about a hundred different themes I came to a simple conclusion: They suck. They are pretty to look at, but none of them are practical and the simple ones are too simple (i.e. no plugins allowed). So I went back to RapidWeaver.