HMK Design Blog

HTML Dialect 0.0.5

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-08-03T15:53:38+02:00

Just a slight bugfix in the form select tag to allow it to use values for inputs. ...:-) So I consider this to be the first real release, though still in the alpha stage, because the design of the dialect is not 100% set in stone. There are many improvements since 0.0.3, but I’m sure there are many more that can be made. If you have suggestions, or bug reports, please don’t hesitate to sound off in the comments or in AltME. The HTML dialect can be found in the Downloads area.

HTML Dialect 0.0.4

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-08-02T19:18:48+02:00

I’m releasing version 0.0.4 now, as I feel there will be a need for many more changes, but I won’t keep the current changes under wraps any longer. ...I thought at first this was a good idea to include, but it has deeper ramifications than I first calculated and in fact can be a small project in itself. ...Documenting a dialect can be a surprisingly comprehensive thing, despite only being 350 lines of code, so this has taken a few days to complete, and I’m not entirely done yet. ...The forum is currently driven by version 0.0.4 of the dialect and so far it runs fine. Notice also I’ve rearranged the HTML dialect directory so each version is stored under its own directory, so if you are loading the dialect directly from my site, you should use:

HTML Dialect 0.0.3

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-07-22T17:59:39+02:00

I’ve made a new version of the HTML dialect, this time version 0.0.3 with some improvements: ...- Recognizes tags that have no end tag and render them correctly. ...You might want to know that in case you want to use it. ...There is no documentation available yet, so you’ll have to see if you can figure the dialect out with the parser in the source code. ...Version 0.0.3 is available in the download section.

More about VID3.4

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-07-22T09:04:36+02:00

A Frequently Asked Question right now about VID3.4 is what is meant by having a stronger link between networking and VID, because it would seem that we can already do that. ...Carl wants something equally powerful and simple as hyperlinks in VID3.4 for basic communication, where you must currently work with ports and do some programming and make complex decisions, and you usually also need to understand what’s at the other end. That level of detail must not be sacrificed of course, but there is a simplifying element that's missing, and that is to use buttons directly as a kind of hyperlink that perform scripts or network oriented actions, like doing a call to a REBOL/Services server without needing to get your hands dirty in protocols and schemes and handling the response. ...For further evidence, I asked this: “I've often thought about how to make ad-hoc connections between computers in the same way as you write a VID GUI for simple use in minutes, just to transfer a file or two. ...He talked about this more than about VID itself, so I guess it’s very important for him to get it right the first time, which is why it takes a little time to do.

Another REBOL 3 Status

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-07-21T22:02:00+02:00

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. ... That has been the focus on the development of this new user interface system in the past few weeks for REBOL Technologies. ...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. ... 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!

New REBOL Book

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-07-05T13:49:28+02:00
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.

When you can't blog

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-07-02T16:46:21+02:00
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. ...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. ...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. ...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?

REBOL 3 status

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-05-29T20:07:32+02:00
There's a big discussion going on about VID3's design and how the current style design model is a little too complex for style designers to make new styles for. ... It makes no sense for me to do that, if I have to throw it out again later, or if Gabriele Santilli, the designer and creator of VID3, will have to waste time rewriting my style designs. There's also another big discussion about what VID3 is supposed to be usable for and there has been some confusion about whether it will be usable for heavy application building or whether it's more for media applications like MythTV. ...This makes a few things a little more elaborate to code (READ is always binary, for example), but other things are much simpler as a result of moving certain natives to working only on binary!. ...The HTTP scheme will be included and when the VID3 discussion is complete, Gabriele can continue working on the style system, and work can resume work on the test vector system.

REBOL/View 2.7.6 Intel for MacOSX progress

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-05-05T08:05:39+02:00
The color and blitting bugs in the Intel version of REBOL 2 for MacOSX have finally been fixed, but it has a price to pay in that R2 for MacOSX Intel is slower at displaying graphics than the first Intel version. As we already know, Apple are in the process of kicking QuickDraw out the door, so Quartz can have full reign in the world of MacOSX and that means REBOL must follow suit, so the new version is based on Quartz. ...The first problem is partly due to the move to Intel, which uses a different bit ordering for blitting and not being able to feed Quartz with the correct color format. ...It has been worked on for some time, but has proven to being troublesome because Carl has had trouble figuring out the correct coordinate system to use. ...Due to time constraints and a strong desire to continue the development of REBOL 3, the blitting routine was changed to blit the whole window instead.

HTML Dialect Release

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-04-15T13:40:01+02:00
I'm now releasing the first alpha version of the HTML dialect that I intend to use for REBOL/Forum. I hope this will grow into a solid and extensive dialect later, but for now I feel the need to get it out among you, so you can study it and perhaps improve on it. The dialect is meant to allow you to write HTML code without ever leaving the beloved REBOL syntax. ...
html-parse [page "My page" css style.css [div title "My webpage"]]
...
My webpage

REBOL/Forum Progress

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-05-14T14:39:43+02:00
It's possible to navigate the forum pages like you should be able to on the finished version, i.e. there shouldn't be any dead links. It works this way, because it links to a mock up database that contains information on how to display forum lists, threads, messages, etc. ...I'm still going to keep the URL to myself for now, until a bit more of the work has been done, so we can get the specs done for the database. ...I was also approached with the suggestion to add better search engine friendly URLs, but this capability depends on whether Cheyenne can rewrite URLs. ...An interesting side effect of this stage of development is that the only thing keeping the forum running is the very small mock database (i.e. a few small block of objects and strings), which means the UI and the back end database are well separated.

A Web Forum is Born

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-04-14T00:49:28+02:00
There's been a lot of debate on how to build one and why we want to build one and why the heck we aren't just using phpBB or some such, like everyone else. ...So I came up with a range of ideas for this web forum to make it a little different from every one else's web forums and all this came together to a plan: ...I also want to blog about the development of this forum solution as we want to see how long it takes to build it and how development progresses among community members. ... I will only be working on it occasionally from now on, but as it's a group effort, by fellow members of the REBOL3 AltME world, I hope and expect it to progress, at the times where I'm only a spectator. ...There is work under way to make DevBase server friendly to install on anyone's PC, so we can finally see it operating outside of the confines of REBOL Technologies.

REBOL 3 on MacOSX

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-03-31T20:41:53+02:00
Well, it's here now, sort of. There's still no View (i.e. no graphics or GUI) and no networking, as this release is only for Unicode testing. The Linux version also came out. Both look like they share similar alpha bugs (no cursor operations, trouble with line feeds), so updates may be synced between both versions, coming close to simultaneously, at least until graphics goes back in. Oh, the Linux version looks just the same as in the above screenshot, although the window border is not nearly as pretty.

PAN-IMAGE in Downloads section

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-03-26T23:08:13+01:00
After carefully inspecting the downloads section, I couldn't find the source for the PAN-IMAGE VID style. I'm very sorry for this blunder. It's available there now.

REBOL Video Tutorials

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-03-26T22:15:13+01:00
I can't believe I missed these tutorials! But between the frantic 12-14 hour a day coding sessions I have these days to meet strict deadlines, I miss a lot of things, including the piece and quiet to think properly about some code to do it correctly. I haven't run through them yet, but if you are a beginner and want to hear and see your tutorials about REBOL rather than reading about them, well, here's a good start. Many thanks to Nick Antonaccio for creating them. Enjoy!

REBOL on MacOSX Leopard

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-03-17T18:02:27+01:00
It just doesn't let you in easily if you are not using Cocoa, and practically all the Apple APIs used in the current versions of REBOL/VIew are deprecated. ...It has also been stated on the R3 development AltME world that future versions of REBOL will have to rely on Cocoa, for a safer means of survival in future versions of MacOSX. REBOL Technologies are not experts on Cocoa and the suite of Apple's developer tools and there is a desire to get as much out of the Mac platform as possible for R3, to make it a truly respectable citizen in the MacOSX community of programs. Many Mac users cringe of badly ported programs that don't have that "Mac feel", so the chances for R3 to make it generally on Macs has to be improved by utilizing Cocoa and modern APIs. So it's not official yet as the REBOL 3 development team has not reached the point of porting to other platforms yet, but there will be a demand for MacOSX experts, particularly those who are skilled at Cocoa and Quartz for making a great port of R3 to MacOSX.

Some tips on REBOL/Services

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-03-18T11:05:22+01:00
Using R/S requires a bit more code (particularly in the connectivity area) than Rugby does and is therefore not nearly as easy to get running in 2 minutes, but it offers many more high level features like user management, roles and authentication. R/S forces a service structure on you, so you can't directly compare the code structure to Rugby, which is more free form, in that you "publish" a function for network usage. ...I'm not going to post the whole thing, because I don't want it to be used anywhere yet as it's very far from finished and it also might be too confusing to read as it is a prototype. ...I did not make a file that corresponds to the server part, as I've not yet encapped a server, but you should be able to do that using the same method with the load-server.r file. ...If you get all this: 1. a loading server, 2. a loading client, 3. a loading service on the server, and 4. you can connect with the test line as mentioned above, you should be able to use R/S.

VID3 Skins

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-03-06T18:26:41+01:00
For a test three different skins were made by Gabriele Santilli, where the last two are derivatives of the first. ...What we're demonstrating is not actual resolution independence, but merely derivatives of the original skin from the top and each skin is just scaled differently. ... Well, like in VID, we can copy and override an original style. In VID3 we can take an entire skin-set and change certain globals in it, such as font size, padding and various other global aspects, to change the size of everything in the skin. ...and you can change as much or as little as you want to for the skin.

REBOL/Core Intel build for Mac

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-03-04T11:03:13+01:00
Here are some cheap benchmarks on MacOSX Leopard on a 2 Ghz Santa Rosa Macbook with 4 GB RAM and Leopard on a 1.25 Ghz G4 PPC Mac Mini with 1 GB RAM: ...I ran the test twice to make sure it wasn't erratic or that the machine was swapping, causing the test to slow down, but I got 0:06:11.605227 on the second run. ...I knew the terminal under MacOSX Leopard was never going to be a speed demon with a G4 mini, but 14 times slower console output than Intel native? ...Now the console might be off here, since it's Intel native, which makes it gets an automatic speed boost here, so the comparison in that respect might not be fair. ...I'm impressed, both that the Intel version is much faster, but Rosetta, the PPC emulation is not too bad either, as it easily outruns my trusty old G4, sometimes by up to 50 times.

6502 assembly anyone?

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-02-05T21:17:12+01:00
John Niclasen (Geomol) of NicomDoc fame has released a 6502 assembler, all made in REBOL using PARSE and released it under GPL. It can be found here.

Steven's Place

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-01-16T18:26:05+01:00
I'd like to point out Steven's space. He's a beginner in REBOL and has only been working with it for a week, but he's doing tremendous progress, already building a To-do application with VID. And oh, hey, he's using my LIST-VIEW as well. He says it's faster and easier to use than the list views that can be found in Java Swing and what's possible with Visual Basic. It's a nice think to know that VID isn't all bad.

An Important Message

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-01-08T22:05:00+01:00
Ladies and Gentlemen, Carl Sassenrath of REBOL Technologies would like to announce that all R3 development has been cancelled and that you should all go home and play with Perl instead. ...http://www.rebol.net/builds/rebol3/alpha/rebol29904031.zip Carl has made a blog entry about it here: ...Please note that this is alpha software and represents a work in progress! ... There's no support for you yet, but it will come later.

LIST-VIEW 0.0.52 released

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-01-03T15:03:03+01:00
After 6 months of laziness LIST-VIEW 0.0.52 is finally out with numerous bug fixes and additions. You can check it out in the Downloads area.

More MacOSX Trouble

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2008-01-01T12:20:31+01:00
And now for something more serious: As it turned out, turning off the spinning terminal indicator is not only important in the console. It's also important, if you are launching your process as a service using Launchd, the standard way to handle background services under MacOSX, because Launchd logs all output from a process in /var/log/system.log. ...
Jan 1 11:01:43 Macintosh com.rebol.cheyenne[60072]: / ...Jan 1 11:01:45 Macintosh com.rebol.cheyenne[60072]: /
...You can do this during call, or if you are starting REBOL from the command line directly with a script, like so:

AltME? AltWHAT?

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-12-28T18:50:01+01:00
All sorts of discussions happen here and given the persistency (you don't loose a message, even if you're logged out), it provides a nice and simple way to carry conversations across many days in IRC or instant messaging style, plus it's very stable. ... The downside to it (some consider it an advantage), is it's darknet nature; It's closed off and invite only, but you can read some of the groups from the REBOL3 world here. Being a darknet helps keeps the noise down and the spam level is zero, but makes it a bit harder to access initially, if you don't know how. ...Simple as that.
Either post this information on my contact page, and I will forward your request to the administrators. If I don't receive it (this is email you know), post it again in a few days.
Or post this information on the mailing list mentioned above and someone there will do the same.
Expect a waiting time of 24-48 hours, as this is done manually.
When it's done you should receive an invite email with username and password.

MacOSX Terminal Trouble

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-12-27T15:09:55+01:00
MacOSX Tiger doesn't have the best terminal implementation: It consumes a lot of CPU just by outputting text on screen on slower Macs. While it has since been upgraded significantly for Leopard (still CPU intensive, but not nearly as much), you may still be using Tiger on a slower, older Mac. My MacMini PPC G4 1.25 Ghz is therefore eating a considerable amount of CPU, about 10-20%, when REBOL is doing nothing but displaying the network wait indicator in the terminal window! This is for example the case, when you are using Rugby as a server, or when REBOL/Services is running. ...This also eliminates network access output to the console, if you want to control better what is displayed when a network resource is accessed from REBOL.

R3 on Linux

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-12-19T13:19:11+01:00
In the first porting effort, R3 is now running on Syllable Server, which is based on the Linux kernel. No graphics on the Linux version yet. The same goes for the OSX version, which is also not yet running graphics, but things are moving quietly along. The process will of course be documented for future porting efforts to other OS'es.

LIST-VIEW for RebGUI and VID3?

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-12-12T20:21:41+01:00
I know only little about RebGUI and so it would take even longer for me to figure out the inner workings of RebGUI to do a port. ...So if I make some changes for the VID version, they can get in the RebGUI version as well without too much fuss. Perhaps this can be done by building LIST-VIEW for each GUI system with a simple build script, but we'll get to that. ...Furthermore the graphics system in VID3 is quite different from that used in VID and the mechanisms of drawing the list can't be done without a rewrite. ...Instead, the VID3 team will work on a very capable list view style that won't do everything that LIST-VIEW can, but instead have essential features, be faster, smaller and be easy to expand with more features.

System/Words

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-12-02T08:14:24+01:00
Ever needed to create a function that has a refinement with the same name as an existing word or function in REBOL? All words are stored in SYSTEM/WORDS, so if you need to, you can access every function or data using that path:
>> system/words/now ...So if you have a function with a refinement called FALSE, the normal FALSE word inside the function will be overridden with the state of the refinement. ...
test: func [a b /false] [

The future of Rugby

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-11-07T20:48:52+01:00
With R3 storming ahead and REBOL/Services proving itself worthy through DevBase, I'm not sure what place Rugby has at this time. Furthermore Rugby will definitely not be compatible with R3 as the entire port handling system has changed and HTTP scheme has been rewritten from scratch. ...Some annoying bugs still remain, and one of these bugs is a deep one that occurs in R2 ports which causes R2 to hang on sending information from the Rugby client to the Rugby server in very specific cases. ... There are also problems with sending words and objects across a Rugby connection and I've not managed to fix those properly either. ...Rugby is very nice for quick RPC systems, but it scales only so much, so use it if you want some simple single-threaded RPC stuff.

The Awakening of DevBase

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-10-31T19:56:03+01:00
It shows great promise as one of the main tools that we will be using for managing source code submissions around REBOL3, but also of the DevBase code itself and REBOL/Services. In fact the REBOL/Services code was not there in the beginning, but was uploaded in a couple of minutes, ready for the world to scrutinize. ...Almost immediately, people could start working with it, even though it has still as of this writing a few bugs that need to be ironed out. ...It grew a little.), it takes about 15 seconds to download and connect to the DevBase service at RT headquarters and download the source code overview, just straight from a fresh REBOL/View console. ...Some things are still missing, such as connecting to a bug tracker and displaying differences in source code files, but opposite of what we usually see, we can submit those changes ourself immediately as we think of them, instead of trying to get RT's attention through RAMBO.

A small R3 FAQ

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-10-26T12:32:59+02:00
I don't work for RT and don't have full access to the juicy details of RT's source code for R3 and all the future plans, but I have some insight that many people don't have. ...Dropping R3 on the floor now would be an absolutely crazy thing to do, I would have wasted my time blogging about it, and I'd have to find another job, because all the things I develop is technology based on REBOL. You have to remember also that RT is AFAIK not financed by a large company that have the desire to reap RT of it's technology after R3 is finished or to drive R3 in a particularly narrow direction and away from the public. ...Since you can't have R3 in your hands yet, there's no reason to twiddle your thumbs and if you don't want to work with R2 (which you should, to make it easier to learn R3), there are always other languages to explore, to make you appreciate R3 even more, when you get your hands on it. ...DevBase is a community tool to allow you, the user of R3, to find a bug and submit it along with a fix, test case and documentation to RT for much quicker insertion into the official source tree.

REBOL3 Syntax

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-10-25T19:55:08+02:00
It's easy to find many examples of this and it's done by observing general patterns of code in R2 that can be simplified. ...This can be used to flatten blocks very quickly or to collect columns of data and format it for a new block. ...Knowing FOREACH from R2, you can assign a word to each of those 3 elements and get the element you need from the block quickly inside your loop. ...This means that the index where C is at in the block is placed at D, which allows you to change the block directly using D using the known block manipulation functions.
>> a: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9]

REBOL3 DocBase

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-10-23T15:20:43+02:00
While the documentation there is, is OK, it's very sparse and some existing features that are greatly lusted for, by the REBOL community, are simply not documented, so we can't use them. ...There was no time to build one and MediaWiki has shown itself to be reliable enough for the task (webbased editing and tracking of changes), even if it's a little heavy to use. ...The tool is still very basic and console only, but once REBOL3 gets better text editing facilities, it should be possible to build a simple DocBase page editing tool on top of it, so we can edit pages without actually having to visit DocBase. ...With DocBase, a special Cookbooks area has been designated particularly for REBOLers, who want to contribute an article (recipe) about a specific subject that can be hard to explain in a few words, is a lengthy, difficult procedure, or is a tutorial in how to use a product created with REBOL3. ...Here's another job that needs to be done: Take the current R2 cookbook recipes and convert them to R3 for use in this cookbook list.

VID3 Design Process

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-10-10T09:53:57+02:00
It's a layout engine that is optimized for placing graphics on screen in a way that you don't normally do, when creating a typical computer application: You can put elements anywhere and directly style them on the spot inside the layout dialect. ...This gives an illusion of control, of power to change the appearance of any part of your application, but in reality you lose a lot of control over uniformity and styling, if your application contains many windows or if you're building many applications. ...You can talk about VID's freedom in two ways: Either it's a blessing for the UI experimenter and hacker who wants to see interesting, colorful and unique results or it's a big responsibility hog for the person who just wants to create an application that behaves in a standardized way in a short amount of time. ...More is done to make up for that face hacking is no longer possible: SET-FACE and GET-FACE will now function properly on all faces thanks to a much cleaner way of handling these function in style code. ...If VID3 is done this way, you can provide programmability on the patterns of a user interface in this (still hypothetical) scenario: Where's the OK button in a window?

TOOLBAR Updated

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-09-26T15:19:59+02:00
TOOLBAR has been updated to version 0.0.10. This one fixes a serious bug in the FEEL code, described in this post, so it's highly recommended to replace your current version with this one. TOOLBAR can be found in the Download section.

Tester Updated

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-09-26T22:07:23+02:00
I've fixed a few bugs in my personal timesaver Tester as well, and I thought it would be a good idea to publish them. ...
Results are no longer trimmed of quotes and are clipped to 25 kb in length for very large results.
...
I've removed non-functioning buttons to reduce confusion on what works and what doesn't work.
...(But it's still a huge time saver for me, and perhaps can be that for you.) ...Simply 'do the link at the top of this blog post from a Rebol/View console and you're set to go.

FIELD update

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-09-03T14:55:16+02:00
My replacement for FIELD for REBOL 1.3 VID has been updated with some bug fixes and it now supports decimals and negative numbers in numeric mode. The new FIELD now also handles passwords properly using SET-FACE and GET-FACE. As well as FIELD, there is now also NAME-FIELD, which is appropriate for entering names, where the first letter of the word should be capitalized. One note: I've removed the +/- key functionality from the default numeric mode, so it's possible to enter negative numbers. ...You can get it from the download section and it's called vid-field.r.

New skin again

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-08-25T23:58:11+02:00
This time, code segments should appear correctly! I hope you will like this skin better, because I think it's cooler than the others, so I'm sticking with it. Happy blogging! :-)

More REBOL 3 Hype

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-08-26T00:55:35+02:00
If you've worked with VID under REBOL 2, you know it takes quite a bit of code to, say, attach a scroller to a text area. VID under REBOL 2 knows nothing about the relationship between a text area and a scroller, and so you have to construct the mechanics to translate the scroller position to a y-position in the text-area and update it correctly. The way VID is constructed under REBOL 3 allows the output value from one face to be attached to another face in a startlingly simple fashion. A new feature of each face is to process events from other faces and act on these data in any way that suits the face. ...(The LAYOUT function has been built into VIEW, so you don't have to type that anymore either.)

Natives vs. Actions vs. Mezzanines

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-07-28T11:23:34+02:00
If you're a bit curious to learn some deeper aspects to how REBOL is built, it's practical to know the difference between native functions and mezzanine functions. When you use the SOURCE function on another function, sometimes, you'll get the source code for that function and other times, you won't. ...They are written in C, and therefore you can't see its source code in the console, because the function is part of the very core of REBOL and can't be altered directly. ...In the case of the native function INSERT, it's used to build other functions, like APPEND. ...also exists, which is similar to natives, except that they are internally implemented differently as methods, where natives are more like normal C functions.

LIST-VIEW 0.0.51 released

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-07-26T18:51:16+02:00
A few critical bugfixes are fixed in the latest 0.0.51, particularly with regards to SET-FACE and CLEAR-FACE. It can be downloaded, as always, from the downloads section.

REBOL 3 progress

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-07-25T10:49:33+02:00
People are working very hard on various parts of REBOL 3. One of these things is the prototype for the next version of VID, which already now can do some things easily, which are difficult to do in the old VID. Two of these things are: - Resizing of window will make the elements adapt to the new window size automatically. - The look of the UI will be separate from the feel code, so it's much simpler to redesign the skin.

Loading Configuration Data

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-07-20T21:18:28+02:00
I’m always pleased at how REBOL allows you to skip work that you’d normally have to do in other languages, such as loading configuration data and making use of this data in your programs. ...- Decide on a method to load and parse configuration data and use it in the program. or if you are a former XML fan, you’d find a bigarse library to parse XML files, written out with an XML generator. ...Now what REBOL does here is more than just reading the data off disk; It creates a block of valid REBOL elements of the correct datatypes. You now actually have a valid piece of data that is ready to be further processed or run.

New LIST-VIEW Demo Section

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-07-13T01:24:24+02:00
The old Demo lab is gone now, since it was not useful since version 0.0.15, which is quite a long time ago. This has now been replaced with a demo section, which can be seen here.

LIST-VIEW 0.0.50 released

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-07-12T18:12:27+02:00
It's been a long time, but LIST-VIEW 0.0.50 is available now! There's a ton of fixes and a few new features. Check the downloads section to see more.

Checking block structures

kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-07-06T18:43:48+02:00
Do you have a large block of data that you want to check the structure of? PARSE is a good way to do that, since it returns TRUE if it can parse the entire block properly. ...Our data should be a block of blocks: ...So you can simply check that each entry is a block: >> parse data-block [any block!]
Busy! kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-06-23T11:20:54+02:00 Fortunately, the work is largely REBOL related, but perhaps not as much beneficial to the community as I would have wanted it to be and the time table is so tight, there's no time to polish anything, so there won't be any releases for a while. ...Moreover REBOL 3 closed alpha is out in testing among a few developers and I've been working with it a bit. I can't say anything about it other than this is a whole new REBOL, as you may already know from Carl Sassenrath's presentations at the 2007 Devcon back in May. There are so many new things in it, I would fail the project deadlines for the rest of this month, trying to list them all. You will be able to get a closer look when the open beta is out and meanwhile, I suggest you take a look at the videos from the devcon and Carl's R3 blog for any updates. Video Tutorials kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-05-24T15:01:33+02:00 Some are discussing doing video tutorials for REBOL and putting them on video sites like youtube or google video or delivering them as podcasts via iTunes. I'm a big advocate of video tutorials, as it's the closest thing to having a professional sitting next to you, showing you all the cool stuff that you might otherwise have had to dig through for hours yourself. ...In the meantime, a bit of experimenting with iShowU and Quicktime Pro yielded this little video in OSX. ...OSX is great for this kind of stuff, since most of the video features required are already built in. Sorry for the low framerate, but my 1.25 Ghz PPC apparently doesn't leave room for a better framerate. Carl Sassenrath Interview kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-05-06T12:12:25+02:00 Carl Sassenrath has been interviewed at the Obligement magazine website, and what an interesting interview it is! Furthermore, the interview has been mentioned on OSNews and AmigaWorld, spawing a debate on REBOL with a few bits of advocacy thrown in. I'm handing out a few beginner's pointers to the features of REBOL on the AmigaWorld thread. Come join the debate and ask some questions! Even More Rugby Fixes kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-04-08T13:43:42+02:00 The fix made it possible to evaluate Rugby shared functions where the first argument is a word. Let's say that we have a Rugby shared function test-func in a net context and it returns the first argument: ...But having multiple arguments where just one of them is a word, caused the same bug to appear again. test-func2 here accepts two arguments: ...The new fix, fixes this bug by asking whether the argument is of type any-word and converts it to a lit-word! ...I'm still troubled that this is not a truly elegant solution to the problem, treating the symptoms like this rather than going for the cause. More Rugby Fixes kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-04-03T18:15:33+02:00 I finally found the "mirror" of a bug to an older MOLD bug, which prevented sending objects unharmed (e.g. properly MOLD'ed) from the server to the client. The mirror of that bug would not let objects go through from the client to the server, but that works now by changing the MOLD to MOLD/ALL in COMPOSE-MSG on both server and client. CHECK-MSG in both the client and the server part of Rugby were broken and did not calculate the checksum of the message according to how the checksum is built in COMPOSE-MSG. ...You can get the latest rugby.r here. To compare, the older version without this fix is here. SUPERFIELD is a stupid name kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-03-24T18:22:45+01:00 So I settled for FIELD. It makes it much easier to simply 'do the source and use the field directly in your existing layouts. Version 0.0.2 offers using the +/- buttons and the scroll-wheel to adjust the numbers in numeric fields as well as restricting the length of the field. Source, docs and version history. Improving the VID field kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-03-23T16:20:20+01:00 It's not hard to get your needs quickly beyond the capabilities of the ordinary VID field, so I made SUPERFIELD (good name there) to allow a bit more flexibility. Not much, but enough to give you more to use fields for without resorting to messing around with the FEEL object. I'm basically rewriting some old code I used for custom fields, so there'll be more to come. I've uploaded the first little version to the downloads section. Returning any-word! with Rugby kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-03-20T13:44:58+01:00 I discovered that Rugby evaluates anything before it's returned, so if you are returning any-word! ...I believe this to be incorrect, because this breaks the paradigm of having Rugby be able to serve any REBOL function unchanged. I've not had this behavior verified as correct by Maarten Koopmans, but I made a patch to the to-result that passes any-word! ... If you are using code, that relies on the word to be evaluated before being returned by Rugby, your code will break. ...An improved fix checks for set values in a returned word, so if your word has a value, it will be evaluated. Using or not using ATTEMPT kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-03-15T14:07:08+01:00 This is good if you don't really care about a math error, it's pretty obvious what goes wrong and just want to keep going. ...Therefore if you are building a larger script for a customer, and don't want the console output pop up suddenly in his/her face with strange error outputs, it can be quite tempting to just say: ...Your application will not only not crash, by not responding to a user action, but you won't know at all what goes wrong. ... candybars and/or children might not be set or are the wrong type ...It really is much better to do proper handling of errors than just to ignore them in the long run, It leads to unpredictable behavior and frustrating all-night debugging sessions. Special Effects by REBOL kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-03-15T13:39:55+01:00 So you want to play with the effects attribute of a face, but find it difficult to get the right look? ... There's nothing like near real time feedback from the code you are currently writing, as it can shave many seconds and trivial debugging off your code refinement cycle. ...For processing the effect attribute, you could build a small tool that presents a face of a comfortable size to view your effect in and a text area for you to write code in: ...You can now type in your effects code and the face in the left side will update, when you unfocus the text area. When you are happy with the effect code, you can copy the code and paste it inside your source code. Rugby Optimizations Update kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-02-15T20:49:16+01:00 Now I've had a little time to do some testing and built a set of test cases for server and client. These will be uploaded soon, because I want to test for some more bugs in Rugby. It turns out that when the server reads 4096 bytes at a time from the buffer, it still hangs after 8680 bytes and then every 16 bytes above that. ...It's nearly as fast, but more importantly, it seems to be stable so far up to sending 50000 bytes from the client to the server. A bug that causes a hang and 100% cpu on the server when sending exactly 3810 bytes to the server has been fixed. Rugby Optimizations kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-02-15T14:23:59+01:00 After a bit of digging, it turns out that Rugby reads data from the client port 16 bytes at a time, once the data has been transferred into the buffer from the client. This gives horrendous performance on even small files at 10-50 kb in size, taking several seconds for Rugby to finish reading from the port. ...Then I also use adaptive resizing of how much data is read from the port, starting out at 4096 bytes from after reading Content-Length: (apparently the maximum allowed size) and then scaling down to 16 bytes when nearing the end. A small test which took 14 seconds to complete on about 170 kb of data on the original rugby.r, now clocks in at 0.2 to 0.3 seconds! But there is a small catch: The 16 byte alignment seems to be necessary to read, when getting near the end of data in the buffer. Rebollious Blogging kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-02-05T10:24:53+01:00 It's a nice program which is very easy to use and set up a page with, so I can recommend it for beginners. ...Early tests show that it's ridiculously fast at generating about 10 pages in 2-3 seconds and you can generate entire websites in 10-20 lines of code. ...Grab plain text documents from various directories, catalog them by directory, process them with a modified Makedoc2 and integrate them into the website, completely skinned and with page navigation. ...These are all static pages, and it works beautifully, but I'm not happy with the functionality of the code generator, as I like to have tools to be as easy to pipeline as possible and flexible enough to fit in most development pipelines. ...If someone is making small REBOL scripts to generate web page contents (BSD License only, please), I'd like to know, because, the goal of this project is to create an easy to use complete package for creating rich websites with REBOL. Image panning VID face kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-02-04T20:54:05+01:00 A while ago, I made a small face which puts an image inside an face and allows you to pan it around with the mouse or the cursor keys if it's too big. I've just uploaded it to the Downloads section. ...PAN-IMAGE is now available as a style for layout and you can write something like: ...Now move the image by dragging it with the mouse. The face takes arguments the same way as an ordinary image face. Words in VID kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-02-01T17:31:47+01:00 Ever wondered how to make your own VID style and how to make those dialect words work for your own style? Anton Rolls has written a very nice and straight forward document regarding this. Be sure to bookmark it. Whoa, what's BUTTON-BAR? kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-02-01T10:52:26+01:00 This is not a new feature, but it has not been considered tested until a few months ago (where I probably should have mentioned it :-)). If you are using Tester, you'll see it in a few places in the sub windows, such as in the Test List Window. ...The dialect largely works the same, but the access to creating the buttons is a little easier, and there are 5 predefined buttons with predefined actions in the DATA-STORE block that work similarly to what you see in ALERT and REQUEST. ...Just like TOOLBAR, the button bar will stretch itself according to the width of your window or wherever you need it, but by default, it grows to the size of what the buttons require. BUTTON-BAR is still not mentioned in the docs, but you can study the details of BUTTON-BAR in the source code at the bottom, along with the OK-BAR and OK-CANCEL-BAR styles. Toolbar update kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-02-01T10:12:37+01:00 I've uploaded a new version 0.0.9 of TOOLBAR. This one has a feature that will grow the toolbar size if you set the width of the toolbar initially to 0 -1. So now you can make TOOLBAR decide the size of your window, rather than only the other way around. The default for TOOLBAR is still 100x50, but BUTTON-BAR is now set to 0x50 -1x50, so it will grow in size as it should. You can find TOOLBAR in the Downloads section. Toolbar Issues kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-02-01T10:20:09+01:00 Having used Toolbar for a long time in my programs, I find it to be very useful, so I thought I'd use a blog post to highlight it a bit again. However there is also a single issue that causes Rebol/View 1.3.2 to crash and I've backtracked it to be a part of some FEEL code that uses DETECT to detect when the icon should be highlighted according to mouse position. ...It's rare, but the more complex your layout it, the more often it happens. ...I haven't yet found a solution; TOOLBAR mimics the toolbars used in MacOSX rather closely, including mouse over behaviour and the current solution using DETECT, is the only one, I've been able to find. If you want to help, I can post a more technical note on how the FEEL code works. Hosting Rugby Sources kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-01-19T05:36:58+01:00 I have been allowed, after agreement with Mr. Maarten Koopmans, to host the sources to Rugby, the very excellent RPC system for REBOL. Information on how to use Rugby is too scattered and old, so I want to change that! There will hopefully be brand new documentation available soon. You can find the sources to the latest version, called Rugby-X, in the Downloads area. Does Tester do unit testing? kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-01-12T19:51:22+01:00 In computer programming, unit testing is a procedure used to validate that individual modules or units of source code are working properly. For Tester this means that a single unit would be a code entry in the test list, but you can define the size of a code entry to be whatever you want. ...The latest version of Tester will check against an intended result, and report back whether the result is as intended, which of course is part of unit testing. But real unit testing should offer totally independent tests, and this is where Tester is different, since Tester focuses on testing many parts sequentially and keeping track of results during the test. Furthermore, Tester is not yet able to completely separate each test run, since the tests are done in the same REBOL session as Tester exists in. Whoopsie, the sequel kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2007-01-11T12:09:05+01:00 More dead links fixed. Whoopsie! kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-10-31T22:50:11+01:00 Lots of dead links on the download page, and I didn't even notice it! Sorry about that. I'm guessing that this could have been monitored with a tiny REBOL script, but I didn't bother to write one. :-) Technorati kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-10-10T00:18:40+02:00 I've created an account on Technorati. They say I should put a link on the blog to let their web search engine be able to search my page. So here it is: Technorati Profile Some news kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-10-09T23:45:28+02:00 I'm not going to make a blog post on that, as you can read the history file on it here as always. I'm working on a pretty big application now that I hope I can begin selling sometime in 2007 or perhaps 2008, so this is taking up my full time now. ...Well, the thing is I want it done right and that will make things take a long time, designing the GUI, getting details right and thinking up features requires even more time. ...I can't afford it right now, so I'm going to start selling the application to a few locals, who have shown great interest it. ...I'm not going to say yet, but it'll help making certain difficult things very easy, and it's inspired by the Mac platform, although it's primarily going to be a Windows XP program. LIST-VIEW 0.0.47 released kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-08-23T14:49:56+02:00 I've focused on the things that happen when you click on an empty row, that is, a row that is not represented in it's block data. Out of that came the three new EMPTY-ACTION, ALT-EMPTY-ACTION and DOUBLECLICK-EMPTY-ACTION, which mirror their LIST-ACTION counterparts, except they are only used on empty rows. No more playing around... kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-07-30T08:38:20+02:00 The theme unfortunately had some layout problems, causing text to flow outside the window, which looks not-so-good, so I'm reverting to the old theme again. Just playing around... kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-07-25T08:43:57+02:00 I finally got around to download RapidWeaver 3.5 Beta today and what a piece of software it is... RapidWeaver has grown to become a very nice blogging tool, although there are still some things missing for me. I'll be celebrating that by replacing the theme with a new one. I hope you like it. LIST-VIEW 0.0.44 is out kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-07-25T06:51:48+02:00 Sorry for skipping the announcements of a few versions, but many smaller changes are under way, and it's a bit tiring to just report on them when the History does that so well. ...There's a bit of work done already for drag'n'drop columns, but there is still a large amount of stuff left for doing this fast enough. Speed is essential and I want this feature to be done so you can see clearly what's happening when you try to drag a column away from its original position. ...This is because I'm implementing a Cursor mode, which will allow you to use a cell cursor, similar to what is used in a spreadsheet to navigate the list view regardless of which selection mode is used. When this is done, you will have a very large amount of freedom in what can be done with the keyboard. Toolbars Galore kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-07-07T07:32:21+02:00 Finally being done with the Big June Project, I've been able to spend a few days on a pet project of mine: TOOLBAR. TOOLBAR is a VID widget which resembles a typical MacOSX toolbar. While it's not as flexible, it adds some oomph to making toolbars with Rebol. Yes, it's the part at the top of the window you are supposed to notice! It can be found on the download page. Nothing much happening? kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-06-15T16:40:26+02:00 A quiet period indeed! There is a lot going on, that unfortunately is not related very much to LIST-VIEW, Tester or other blog related subjects, but are still at least REBOL related. I expect that the rest of June will go with this side project. It's intense and there are many milestones left to reach. That's all for now... LIST-VIEW 0.0.41 is out kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-05-20T07:51:51+02:00 In short, there's been a lot of work done in the area of the new selection system and I think it's moving very well towards stability. ...I'm going to take a few days "off" to work on some commercial stuff which takes advantage of LIST-VIEW, while I think through some of the upcoming features. ...I hope this happens, but there is a need for studying how this should be done, because I know nothing about RebGUI at this stage. I hope this will be a simple matter of providing a build script that provides a few changes to LIST-VIEW. I expect to do a lot more work on LIST-VIEW and porting should take a minimum amount of time every time there is a new release of LIST-VIEW. Tester Update kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-05-08T02:13:10+02:00 Stages are a simple scheme for dividing your tests in specific colors. That's basically it, but for longer tests, it's very helpful to separate one process from another. ...By entering a test entry, you can choose the color for the entry. This section is still a little buggy, so when you call up the Test List window, you need to click an entry before it shows as colors. ...I can't guarantee much stability right now and the docs are not updated yet, but I've uploaded the latest version to the Download area as tester002.r. More ramblings kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-05-01T15:37:30+02:00 I'm afraid it will be a while before LIST-VIEW 0.0.39 comes out. The new select system is giving me a big amount of issues with most functions in the list. Two new select modes have been added so there are a total of 7 different select modes. Basically I haven't tested for anything but the original SINGLE-ROW select mode type yet, so there's a long way to go. Many bugs have been squashed, but many still remain and I want some degree of stability before I can unleash it to avoid having your applications break. LIST-VIEW 0.0.38 is out + ramblings kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-04-08T23:35:57+02:00 This really speeds certain things up, and by example, building all the images for the documentation is about twice as fast now. The more I work with LIST-VIEW, the more I can tell how much there really is left before I'm satisfied and can call it the big 1.0. ...I don't know how much longer it'll take to work the remaining issues out, but I expect development to carry on at varying intensity for the next 4-6 months. It's not really that I want to include the kitchen sink with LIST-VIEW, because there are some things I don't think it'll ever be able to do, such as making it work completely like a spreadsheet. ...There are a few cell oriented operations, but they aren't flexible enough for use in a spreadsheet or at least in a data cell view that treats s and columns equally. LIST-VIEW 0.0.36 is out kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-03-27T20:07:04+02:00 Sometimes it's hard to tell the changes in a new version of a piece of software unless you use it for a while. With 17 changes in LIST-VIEW 0.0.36, I think it's one such release: Much better working sort buttons, eliminated some excessive redrawing, bugfixes and row actions. I think it's working out pretty well now with the most basics in place, still missing some fancy things like drag'n'drop reordering of columns and horizontal scrolling. If I don't get too many bug reports back, I might take a short break from it to give it a workout in my other apps such as Tester and other apps that highly depend on it. ...I can't stress enough how much of a benefit LIST-VIEW has become for me over these past three months. LIST-VIEW 0.0.35 is out kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-03-24T20:59:24+01:00 Finally with updated docs. Get the stuff from the download page. I hope column specific filtering will turn out useful. :-) I have not mentioned it yet on the demo page, but the demo from the screenshot in the previous entry is available here. Advanced filtering kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-03-24T06:51:38+01:00 LIST-VIEW will contain more advanced filtering from version 0.0.35. ...What does it all mean? It means that you can do column specific filtering, filter on whole words and use multiple filter simultaneously. I hope 0.0.35 will complete testing over the course of the next 1-2 days along with the docs on this particular topic, so it can get released. Stay tuned. VID additions kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-03-09T22:43:05+01:00 While I like VID very much, some things are just not present in VID that I usually need often. One of these things is a proper tab panel which, when clicked, will do some kind of action, say, change the layout in a pane. I think this is a very common operation and should be simplified as opposed to be cookbook material. Therefore I've created TAB-VIEW, which is a segmented button style with a few tricks up the sleeve to shave off the tedious implementation of layout switching in panes and let you create a complex layout control in a few lines of code. ...A test demo can be downloaded from here. LIST-VIEW 0.0.32 is out kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-03-09T02:08:25+01:00 This one provides a minor update with a GET-RANGE function to let you get the data of multiple selected cells or rows and is useful. ...If you have a list-view LI with a few bits of data selected as a multi-cell block: You can get the data returned as a block of blocks: ...This works on any size and shape of block. ...There are a few quirks with programmatically selecting multiple cells, which I may fix for 0.0.33. LIST-VIEW 0.0.31 is out kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-03-05T02:55:24+01:00 This is mainly a bugfix release, again focusing on inline editing, but also a few other areas. I have opened up a demo page which I hope will grow over time with educational examples of using LIST-VIEW. This deprecates the current demo to a test suite. I don't plan to update it anymore as it's growing too big and complex for general use. Soo busy kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-03-02T11:07:51+01:00 Making money and then see them all being taken away again by the glorious government in the form of taxes, makes it seem a little futile and depressing. Money is unimportant to me, but unfortunately necessary for luxury consumer things like food and shelter and possibly later on a Macbook Pro. ...There are still too many bugs in it before I can call it "beta", and I'd be a lying A-hole, if I called it "stable". I was even attempting to build a new range of examples of LIST-VIEW for introductory purposes, but I had to stop, simply because I kept running into bugs. ...The examples should provide much simpler and clearer insight to how to use LIST-VIEW than the List Demo program and that program will be phased out when enough examples have been made. LIST-VIEW 0.0.30 is out kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-02-21T02:58:40+01:00 This is the biggest release yet, with 17 entries in the history list! I've emphasized on inline editing and added a lot of features and fixed bugs related to that. Get it from the Download area. User Manual for Tester kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-02-15T13:12:20+01:00 I've made a simple user manual for Tester which can be seen here. Double-clicking kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-02-13T13:21:55+01:00 In Tester, if you double-click on a function mark entry, you'll see a new window with a better view of the marked and probed variable. The same happens if you click on a watched variable. If you double-click on an entry in the result list, the Tests window, if not already opened, will open and jump to the entry, so you can quickly change it. Note that since the OSX version of REBOL still doesn't support double-clicking, you're screwed for now. :-) I'll make it respond to alt-click at some point. What is a Function Mark? kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-02-13T11:31:56+01:00 Tester has a very powerful feature (at least I think it is, plus I'm now forcing you to read the rest of this blog entry) called Function Marks. ...It's used in almost the same way, except that data is channeled into a list view inside Tester, rather than blurped to the console to be easily missed, forgotten, etc. ...MARK requires an argument, which can be a number, a word or anything that can be used as a label. ...You can use it directly when entering test cases or in the program code of your external program (Tester is still very buggy and you may see odd requesters and sometimes the Function Marks list view display trashes). ...Because all marks are stored for each test entry, so you can study program flow for different inputs to a function. LIST-VIEW 0.0.29 is out kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-02-11T19:40:19+01:00 Riddled with both bugfixes and a few new features! It can be downloaded from the download page. The history of changes is there too. This is required for Tester, which also can be downloaded in a very early prototype from the download page. The point of Tester kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-02-12T12:58:50+01:00 Tester does things in the background to store variables, that you can probe within your code, using a function called MARK. ...It doesn't exist in its own context, so if you overwrite a Tester variable, it's likely to crash or go haywire. ...Tester will be able to divide test sequences in stages, so you won't have to sift through 1500 lines of test code when editing very large cases. ... Allow you to import projects from other developers to set up a specific test suite in a snap. ...Exist in its own context, so it won't crash when the wind blows outside. Some Tools just unexpectedly kick Ass kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-02-08T13:48:06+01:00 Brain capacity and a long attention span is a Good Thing (TM) if you intend to debug your application over an afternoon session and with the intent of having it debugged by the evening. I had to admit my bad short term memory problem and write a little tool to manage this for me, that goes under the amazing name of Tester. ... Anyway, this has been a much greater boon than I first thought it would be, when I realized how much data it can juggle for me, so I can focus much harder on spotting the bugs and fixing them, rather than setting up elaborate tests to trigger a specific bug. ...I actually hate those step-by-step debuggers, because they take a lot of time to rig, set break points and step-step-step-step through that code very slowly and repeatedly. ...Thanks to LIST-VIEW version 0.0.29 (not yet released), it took about 8-10 hours to write and debug over the weekend, so it works kind of OK now, but I want to put more in, such as an ATTACK function, that will attack functions with random or semi-random argument to test them. Relations Engine released kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-01-31T14:47:20+01:00 In order to do some custom database work, I did a relations engine (don't know what else to call it, but I think it's a stupid name), that'll help making relations between words and values. ...This is fine if you don't need anything more than this, but the fine part about this engine is that it works on a tree structure and you can have an infinite amount of levels of one-to-one and/or one-to-many relations. ...You can relate a customer to a specific invoice and relate that invoice to the articles that are stored in the invoice. You can then further more relate the articles to where they are stored in your storage rooms, to how many this customer has purchased in total and so on. In short, you can relate any kind of existing data to each other as long as the values used for indexing are not blocks, words or objects. Using LIST-VIEW as an editor kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-01-29T02:29:12+01:00 LIST-VIEW has been growing fast these past three weeks, but there is way more to come to make it really cool. You see, it's nice to use as an element in your own GUI, but it also has the ability to function as a stand alone data editor similar to the already built in text editor. ...With a few more modifications, you can add and delete columns in the list dynamically. This isn't possible directly in DATA yet, as it will only add columns to a single row, but I plan to add functions to let you do this to all rows in DATA. This will make it a fully fledged block editor with a few lines of code. Testing out RapidWeaver kontakt@hmkdesign.dk — 2006-01-27T01:13:02+01:00 I want a simple tool to publish information regarding REBOL for the tools and libraries I expect to develop during the course of this year. ...Granted, it has very little of the lightweight programmable approach that REBOL has, but for me that's OK, as long as the job is done with excellence. If I can keep this up, I may actually end up paying for it to exceed the 3 page limit. ...Anyway, one excellent thing could be a method to integrate MakeDoc2 documents directly in RapidWeaver. ...That would probably require it to be able to grab the HTML code from elsewhere and dress it with its own template code.