Everything PocketFlock-related is now at blog.itdunn.com

Questions, Concerns, Criticism, etc... that's moved

Flock'd is no longer being maintained at this site (but might be revived in the future)

Everything PocketFlock related has been moved to blog.itdunn.com.
(Including a new version based on 1.0!)
All Comments, Posts, and just about everything here on oa have been disabled!

and to the spammers making my life miserable, a great big FUCK YOU!

--much love,
Ferrite

My blog is in the process of being relocated... due to increased spamming, I'm switching platforms and domains... more details soon.

Both PocketFlock Win and PocketFlock Mac have been updated (without extensions yet) to the latest (as of this posting) Sulfur builds.

It seemed the Flock folks finally fixed some of the portability issues, but not everything is picture-perfect yet.

The 0.4 branch of PocketFlock is dead and the current versioning scheme will be abandoned after Sulfur becomes the current replacement.

So I present to you PocketFlock Sulfur for Windows and Mac weighing in at 12 and 22 Megs respectively.

--and I hate to jump on the doom and gloom bandwagon for you Vista users out there, but PocketFlock requires admin privileges (for no apparent reason)--

Blogged with Flock

Tags: pocketflock, flock,

but more is to come

Blogged with Flock

How 'bout testing my first Mac App?

Even if it's an unstable PocketFlock Mac release?

I've been hard at work at this and have pretty much wracked my brain to get it to work half as bad as it does.

But it (kinda) works!

powered by performancing firefox

It seems more and more that I'm here posting to say that I'm still here posting.

I'm tightening Flock'd up to better recognize patterns in the install.rdf files so that it doesn't FUBAR things when it comes time to reassemble them (this is only needed since some authors don't write their installation files to Mozilla's spec).

Pollux is getting a complete overhaul, and I'm in the process of rewriting it to be very strict to both established formats (Podcast and iTunes Podcast).

PocketFlock for Mac is being rewritten again... moved from C++ to ruby, and now to Python, in the hopes that tools like Platypus will help ease my issues at dealing with Apple's packaging format.

Oh... and I've picked up another bug for Christmas... so I'm spending my non-coding time hovering over the toilet at my parents house... Fun.

powered by performancing firefox

Coming from a Windows and Linux world, I've found the Mac to be a hard platform to develop for.

Sure, I can do shell scripts, and X11 programs (and maybe a few quick QT apps), but I've found all these subtle quirks about applications.  It's no secret that Mac programs are quite different than a windows .exe or most other *nix binaries, in that the .app file is just a folder or package that stores the actual binary and most (if not all) of its resources.  The problem arises when executing the program that you're designing, executing it directly from the shell causes the program to behave (what I consider to be) normal, while when using the .app, the programs local directory is now where the .app is stored and not where the binary is stored within it.

Still following me?

This has been causing quite a few issues that I don't like... I still want to release PocketFlock as a single .app, but everything is pushing me to just create a seperate launcher (similar to the one I adopted from John Haller).  Development on the Windows branch is stagnating as I don't want to release anything until the Flock folks decide which direction they're going in (also Parallels totally hosed my XP install and made it impossible for me to boot into Windows until I can find my CD and key)  The only major desicion I've come to is to eventually completely disable Flock's built-in blogging tool since it leaves traces of your activity on the root of the drive in Windows and Mac OSX (they don't think that this is a privacy issue and won't fix) and replace it with the faster, easier, and less messy Performancing for Firefox.  This adds some redundancy, and I'll attempt to overcome this by theming Performancing to match the rest of PocketFlock.

I've decided to skip a few version numbers since the final release will incorporate so many other changes (Mac release, new theme, Performancing) and when I can release it, I've decided to label it 0.6

So given the massive amount of work to be done, and the pain in the ass OSX is being, I'm starting from scratch...  It'll be a while before it's released but I promise I am working on it.

powered by performancing firefox

I've been putting some serious work into the Mac version of PocketFlock, and have met with mixed success and failure.

Here's a progress report

Sofar I can launch a Flock instance with the PocketFlock profile... but I'll override the Flock installation on the local computer (I've just recently managed to overcome that).

I've been working on distributing PocketFlock as a single .app (I could have just used/modified, the Portable Firefox Applescript, but I'd really like to use a single simple package).

OSX has issues with commands issued from within .app files...
Something like this

./flock-bin -profile "../PocketFlock"

Should start the actual Flock binary loaded with the "PocketFlock" profile in the upper directory.
Instead, it creates a new profile in the root directory '/' and then crashes because Flock doesn't properly support creating profiles from the commandline.

It works fine enough when either executed directly from the commandline, or even when the ruby script is executed from the terminal, but not when done from within the .app file.

Another missed deadline, but I'm making some progress.

powered by performancing firefox

Major changes include the addition of Performancing (with the eventual goal of replacing the Flock blog editor and it's nasty security/privacy bug that they have no intention of fixing)

The prototype OSX release will definately be out next week.

powered by performancing firefox