Why does it have to be so hard to work with!!!

Web development using a Mac, in my opinion, is better from a standards point of view. I build and test on Firefox primarily, using the web developer tools (and other great add-ons). Then when I’m generally happy with the templates and CSS I try them out in IE and keep a separate style sheet to ‘fix’ what IE broke.

This week I’ve been plagued with an ongoing issue of IE freezing on printing. I’ve built an application form module for a client website (all PHP) and through the CMS they can view all completed application forms using a print stylesheet so they can print it out. For some strange reason IE would hang when processing this page, but not always.

Well I’ve discovered what was causing it (at least in my CSS). Here it is:

#dform textarea {
    font-size:12px;
    }

Take that font definition out and all is well. But WHY??

Prompted by an email from a BRF user, asking what’s happened to the new version, I’m reporting that not too much has happened in the last few months. Life has got in the way of my Cocoa coding, and I also seem to be doing a lot of ‘on the side’ web work for friends in the ministry, my church, and family members, who all seem to need websites these days!

Not too much else to say at this point, other than I’m still thinking about the development of Bible Reader. Shame my thoughts can’t produce actual code…

Seeing as Bible Reader Free was started before OS X was much in use, I had been using Stuffit to compress all of the downloads. For some strange reason (call it habit) I continued this up until today. I’ve had a few people contact me to say they downloaded BRF but don’t know how to open the program. Seems the new generation of users don’t know what Stuffit is! And to be honest, why use a method of compression that requires a third-party expander when OS X is well furnished with its own built-in zip compression method?

So from now on, all downloads will be created as .zip files, which automatically expand when double-clicked. This will result in a folder containing all of the files necessary to run Bible Reader Free.

In fact, initial tests were made over a year ago, but I was not able to commit the time to continue development. Now, I’m back on to it, with renewed energy to see it through.

Bible Reader Free, up to release 0.99, has been developed in REALBasic, which is a very good rapid application development environment. Unfortunately, the version that was avialable at the time did not make it easy to provide some of the more standard Mac OS X features that people have come to expect. A lot of jumping through hoops went on to try to mimic standard OS X operability. In the end, I tired of fighting and had been thinking for a long time of moving to Cocoa, using Objective-C, along with Xcode, to continue the development.

Starting up in Cocoa meant a reasonably steep learning curve, though I am familiar with C. I guess it was the thought of having to dig in and start again. But I knew the benefits would be much greater once I passed that first set of hurdles.

Right now, I have an early version of Bible Reader running in Cocoa, using the same Books folder that 0.99 uses. Providing this application is placed in the same folder as 0.99, it picks up the available translations and provides them within the program.

Straight off, it’s much quicker navigating between chapters. Clicking the next button at the bottom brings up the next chapter almost instantly. This is probably a combination of Cocoa and some better coding techniques used since 0.99 was written

Other than general browsing of the bible texts, there are no other features currently working. Except for a live word match feature, where a word is typed into a field and it’s highlighted wherever it occurs in the text. That’s quite useful, but really only a test feature for better things to come!

I’m studying the documentation for SearchKit, which is a Carbon framework for searching documents and text. This works with indexes, which is how any good search mechanism should operate. Once I’ve deciphered the code, this should give Bible Reader a search that can find disparate words, a la Google et al. Now that would be a useful search system!